Tag: recording

New Music on Vinyl: Everybody Loves It, But It Doesn’t Make Much Sense

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Lee Gardner - Analysis, Articles

The vinyl resurgence should be great for new music, right? After all, who buys records in 2015? Nerds. Curious, acquisitive types. People with a thing for the timeless artifact. Those who are willing to seek out sounds beyond those that the streaming services are ready to deliver right to their earbuds. And the very fact that some music lovers are spending their money on physical editions of music after more than a decade of gorging on ones and zeros has to be good news for people who sell music, doesn’t it?

As so often in life, the answer is complex, but not encouraging. Everybody loves vinyl, but it doesn’t really make financial sense.

It’s an agonizing problem, because vinyl is booming. In 2014, sales of new LPs jumped 52 percent from the year before, and sales in the first quarter of 2015 spiked 53 percent from the same period last year. Sales of new vinyl still only make up about 7 percent of album sales overall, but it’s the only format where album sales are still growing, as streaming continues to shred the market for physical music.

There is a cadre of record buyers for whom new music titles constitute sweet finds—or at least older new music does. Just four or five years ago, used albums by composers from the 20th-century avant-garde might have gone straight into the dollar bin, according to Cory Feierman, manager of Academy Records Annex in Brooklyn. * Now they can fetch big bucks. Robert Ashley albums, for example, sell well, and quickly, Feierman says. New vinyl reissues of mid-century electro-acoustic figures such as Pierre Schaeffer dot bins, and then disappear.

And new music labels are releasing new vinyl, too. Founded in 1982, Innova Records has been around long enough to have issued its first releases on LP and then watched as vinyl gave way to the compact disc. “There was a long gap in time before our next vinyl project was produced,” says Chris Campbell, operations director at Innova. “Over 20 years, in fact.” New Amsterdam Records started out in 2008 as a label offering CDs and digital downloads, but it started doing LPs for certain titles in 2013. “We started printing vinyl because we had fans requesting it regularly, and our musicians wanted to see their albums on vinyl,” says label manager Michael Hammond. (Both Campbell and Hammond are composers, and both have issued their own music on vinyl.)

But of Innova’s more than 500 releases to date, only nine are currently available on LP. New Amsterdam has released 73 recordings in less than a decade of operation, but it has only released 10 of those on LP so far.

Uncool as CDs may be to a swath of music consumers these days, they retain certain advantages over vinyl. Analog purists can talk about ineffable “warmth” all they like, but CDs reproduce perfect digital sound every time across a far wider frequency range. (Despite all the clucking about the inevitable decay of the compact disc, the majority of CDs produced in the ‘80s, near the dawn of the format, still play just fine.) They also can offer up to 80 minutes of uninterrupted playing time—about double what the two sides of an LP will hold with reasonable audio fidelity—and obviate the need to break up a longer piece of music across more than one side, or more than one record.

And as quiet as it’s kept, CDs still sell, as do digital downloads. And when they do sell, they’re profitable.

Vinyl, on the other hand, is a finicky, expensive boondoggle from a practical standpoint. The grooves that give vinyl its sound, and its soul, must be physically produced and replicated, and “it’s a bit fussy in terms of how it’s made, how it’s cut,” Campbell says. From mastering the recording to creating a stamper to pressing copies, “there are myriad places along the way where it can go wrong,” he adds, and all those steps add up in time and cost, even if they all go right. The boom in vinyl has meant that the few working pressing plants—literal relics in a digital age—are forever backed up, leading to long lead times and unpredictable delays.

All of which contributes to a ratio of cost to benefit that vinyl loses to CDs or downloads “hands down,” according to Hammond. Producing a CD costs maybe $1.50 per unit. Producing an LP in a typical small-label 500-copy run can cost $6 or more per LP. Vinyl weighs more, and is thus more expensive to ship, and it gets damaged in shipment more easily than CDs. “And if it doesn’t sell, then you have giant boxes of records sitting around your warehouse!” Hammond says.

Every small label feels these pains right now. Innova operates as a nonprofit, but jazz label Pi Recordings does not. Pi co-founders Seth Rosner and Yulun Wang have only pressed two titles on vinyl to date, strictly because of concerns over cost versus profit. “Our wholesale profit margin is over $6 on CD sales, and maybe $2 at best for vinyl,” Wang says. “After you pay the artists their royalties, there is literally no profit left.” Since most artists still create albums with CD length in mind, issuing an LP version that sounds decent means making a double album, which makes the pressing far more likely to lose money than make any.

There is one bright spot to selling LPs, according to Rosner. Stores can return CDs that don’t sell for credit with their distributor, and those unsold copies eventually find their way back to labels, but “stores cannot return vinyl,” Rosner says. If LPs can be sold to distributors or stores, no big boxes of records will find their way home again to haunt the label’s warehouse.

But first labels have to sell their LPs, and niche music on a niche format tends to move slowly. Academy Records in Manhattan still stocks mostly CDs with only a handful of new titles on LP. Asked about top-selling new music titles on new vinyl, manager Frank Vogl cites a recent recording of Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus released by Austrian vinyl-only label God Records. It sold four copies in a month.

Mode Records still has LP copies of the first recordings it released in 1984. The label embraced CDs when they came along, and it continues to release titles on digital formats to this day, but it has yet to take up vinyl again. Founder Brian Brandt says he loves vinyl, personally, and doesn’t rule out releasing LPs again in the future, but it’s hard to get around the fact that “it doesn’t actually make financial sense.”

Brandt adds that the rise of streaming and the erosion of paid downloads and physical media sales represent a far bigger dilemma than to press or not to press. “Something has to give soon, because at the rate things are going, many independent labels will not survive this economic downturn in music sales,” he says. “And, unlike other depressions in the music business that I’ve experienced over 30-plus years of doing this, I don’t see any light at the end of this economic tunnel. Vinyl is unlikely to be the answer to that problem.”

Still, there are ways in which it appears vinyl does make sense for new music, if you squint. After all, the LP has returned at this late date in part because it’s a somewhat unwieldy physical product—larger and heavier than a CD, more fragile and particular, more of an objet d’art than a mere unit sold. In a world of data steams, “vinyl is a way to frame up the value of music,” says Campbell.

An LP still has a collectible, almost fetishistic value that a CD just doesn’t for many at this point. It carries a particularly strong appeal at the merch table, according to Hammond. A number of variables go into the decision to press vinyl, he says, and one of them is “whether or not the artist will be playing a lot of shows—vinyl sells at concerts.”

Rrose performing James Tenney’s Having Never Written a Note for Percussion in New York, and the cover of his recording of the work.

Contemporary composition can sell pretty well in certain circumstances. Earlier this year, Further Records released an LP of two recordings (studio and live) of James Tenney’s piece Having Never Written a Note for Percussion and sold out of its 500-copy run within months. The label specializes in electronic music, and sales were fueled no doubt by label followers and by fans of the performer, a techno producer/DJ known as Rrose, a.k.a. Seth Horvitz, who earned an MFA in electronic music from Mills College. In addition to distributing copies to record stores through the usual channels, the label took orders, and pre-orders, through Bandcamp, the current standard for one-to-one music sales. On a more bootstrapping front, crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and the rest could also offer the potential for composers to solicit presales for, and fund production of, vinyl releases.

While selling records is important, it can’t be the only consideration for composers, performers, or even the labels themselves—especially since new music has never been a huge seller in any format. “My experience is that, from a business perspective, running a record label in 2015 in general doesn’t make sense, no matter what format you’re selling,” Hammond jokes.

CDs and downloads may make more money, but “vinyl as a format has an undeniable and lasting appeal,” he continues. “The historicity, the charm, the ritual of removing a record from the sleeve, flipping it over, looking at the artwork.”

And in the end, composers don’t do what they do for short-term gain. They’re making art, ideally, music meant to outlast listening formats, and even lifespans. At Innova, composers themselves pay for vinyl pressings, and the reasons they do so vary. “Some of it is marketplace-driven,” Campbell says. “Some artists know that their audience would love to sit and listen to a needle go through grooves. Some of it is purely for the joy of creating a kind of art object. How beautiful! Motivations and driving factors can be more than just the bottom line.”

* At the writer’s request, this sentence has been updated. See discussion here.

***

Lee Gardner has been writing about music and film for more than 25 years. He is the former editor of Baltimore City Paper, and is currently a senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Digital to Analog: Plug and Play

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Matthew Guerrieri - Articles, Commentary

The Boston Daily Globe surveys the frozen scene, March 13, 1888.

Our latest blizzard in these parts hit New England while I was out of town for a wedding. The result was a lot of time on the phone: arranging new flights, arranging extended hotel reservations, and (having arrived back in Boston to a non-functioning car) arranging a tow through a somewhat overextended AAA. Did I mention the roof? The roof started leaking; start calling roofers.

What this means is that my wife and I have listened to a lot of telephone hold music over this past month: Muzak, soft rock, the allegedly calming strains of the most mainstream classical-lite repertoire imaginable. And it made me think of something that might be worth writing down, which is this: right now, in 2015, when technology is more amazing than it’s ever been, when what we call a “telephone” is, for most of us, actually a pocket-sized computer of sufficient power and capability that, twenty years ago, it would have been considered in the realm of science fiction—in spite of all this, telephone hold music is still defiantly and even hilariously low fidelity. It is still rendered back to the ear in the most tinny possible timbre.

Oddly, and surprisingly, that just might say something fairly deep and intricate about the history of music.

* * *

There’s one common feature to the way music has been made and experienced over the past century or so, a feature that cuts across genre and style, a feature so ubiquitous we don’t really have to think about it anymore. And it came into music by way of the telephone. It’s this:

This is, of course, a quarter-inch phone plug. It’s what’s at the end of most patch cords. If you’ve ever worked with an electric guitar, or bass, or keyboard, or a modular synthesizer, or a mixing board—and so on—you’ve used this plug. If you’ve ever listened to music through headphones, you’ve used it as well—or its smaller, eighth-inch sibling. It’s a linchpin of amplification, recording—any musical activity that uses electricity.

It’s actually older than you might think—it’s certainly older than I thought it was. The familiar form of it dates from at least 1880: that’s when Charles E. Scribner applied for a patent for a “certain new and useful Improvement in Spring-Jack Switches” that included a diagram of a plug nearly identical to the one still used today.

The idea, though, goes back at least another couple of decades, to “plug-switches”: a metal contact and a metal spring—completing an electric circuit—and a metal wedge that one could insert between the two. Plug-switches came into common use with telegraphy; Scribner adapted them into the plug-and-jack arrays of telephone switchboards. (The etymology here preserves some technological history: the first telephone switchboards were just that, boards of manual switches that had to be flipped one by one; Scribner’s first try at a suitable plug-switch looked like a jack-knife, which is why we still call the connection a jack.)

The key part of the modern phone plug is the ring of insulation between the tip and the sleeve. It’s what lets both signal and ground flow through a single plug—the tip conducts the signal, the sleeve conducts the ground. (Add more rings of insulation and more interspersed metal rings and the plug can carry more conductors. A stereo plug, for instance, adds an extra ring between the tip and the sleeve.) The insulation—the gap—keeps everything separated, preventing short circuits, ensuring the flow of current.

The signal fidelity of the phone plug is pretty robust. But the drive behind the development of the phone plug wasn’t signal fidelity; it was efficiency. The phone plug—and the spring-jack—let more telephone connection points be packed into a smaller space, and let switchboard operators make (and break) those connections with a single physical gesture. And it let those connections be made again and again and again. The connection embodied in the phone plug, is, in fact, at odds with the communicative connection of music. A connection made with a phone plug is reliable; a connection made via music is not.

* * *

"Hello! Telephones provide communication." From Gaston Serpette's "La demoiselle du téléphone," 1891.

“Hello! We are calling and giving the gift of communication.” From Gaston Serpette’s “La demoiselle du téléphone” (1891).

There have always been and always will be composers who adopt technology as a subject matter head on. Gabrieli. Berlioz. Stockhausen. Tristan Perich has put the physical nature of computer technology front and center; Mikel Rouse has turned our 24/7 interaction with media technology into opera. It’s a rich, rich area of exploration.

But I find it most interesting when technology turns up in the music of composers who aren’t necessarily thought of as being particularly technologically minded, at least thematically speaking. Consider three examples, one older, two more recent:

Francis Poulenc’s 1958 La voix humaine, to a libretto by Jean Cocteau, is perhaps the most famous operatic telephone call in the repertoire, a one-woman tour de force presenting a love affair’s entire history and dissolution through a single, one-sided, technologically mediated (and, occasionally, sabotaged) conversation. Nico Muhly’s 2011 opera Two Boys (libretto by Craig Lucas) might be its descendent, a traditionally operatic tale of obsession and violence that instead swirls through the internet. Gabriel Kahane’s Craigslistlieder, a 2006 song cycle setting texts drawn from online personal ads, is precisely breezy, miniatures that capture something of the fleeting yet permanently preserved nature of online interactions.

In La voix humaine, Poulenc displays all his usual hallmarks of musical surrealism: the abrupt shifts, the use of pop music tropes to produce immediate but sometimes alienatingly oblique emotional beats, the cold comfort of standard progressions. The music of the internet in Two Boys is—at a slight but fascinating stylistic variance to the rest of the opera—the driving, rhythmically tiled common-tone harmony shifts of second-wave minimalism, ingeniously yoked to another style, plainchant: online rituals of communication as reenactments of perennial patterns. Craigslistlieder goes back further, to the aphoristic expressiveness of Romantic-era song, leveraging its touchstones of yearning and loneliness.

In other words, all three composers are not inventing new styles to illustrate their given technological connectivities, but adapting an older style that best encompasses what it is about each technology that they want to highlight. The interesting thing is that all those older styles can be heard as having their own, divergent technological antecedents. The technological precursor of Poulenc’s style was cinema, with its ability to disjoint space and time through framing and montage. (Poulenc and Cocteau’s transference of that disjointedness to their subject is casually echoed in the fact that the quintessential surrealist party game—the Exquisite Corpse—would be refracted into the more prosaic game of Telephone.) Both plainchant and minimalism have musical technologies in their genomes: notation for the former, recording and studio techniques in the latter. And Romanticism? I’ve always thought of Romanticism as reflecting the technology of the letter and the democratization of postal services: self-expression and the expressive fragment united into a potent, concentrated compound. All three works, then, as different from each other as they are, do for technology what classical music has always done: reinterpret the new in terms of the old, make the connection with the tradition.

This new/old relationship between music and technology has been around for a long time, often to the point that today we don’t even hear it anymore. Those Romantic letters, for instance: in Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, Ian Bostridge’s new book on Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, he makes a compelling point about the lied “Die Post,” of how the jaunty horn calls implied in the piano part could, in Schubert’s time, have been heard as deeply ironic, the Romantic nostalgia traditionally attached to the sound of the horn here signaling the arrival of a disruptive new connective technology—the horse-drawn mail coach.

The paradox is that, at the same time, it’s the failure to connect that has been the characteristic expressive trope of classical music, from the entreaties of troubadours to the Byronic suffering-in-isolation of the Romantic era (epitomized by Winterreise) to the alienation of modernism. In La voix humaine, the signal is constantly being dropped or interrupted. The connections in Two Boys explain everything and nothing—the drama is in misunderstanding, not understanding. (The fact that the opera’s audience stand-in character, the police investigator Anne Strawson, is not more fluent or perceptive about the internet—something that came in for criticism in reviews of the piece—is actually one of the most operatic things about it, channeling an entire lineage of figures who can’t complete or decipher a communicative connection.) The ads Kahane set for his cycle are, literally, “Missed Connections.” This is the history of opera—all the way back to Orpheus, a signal acquired, then lost.

Not just opera: it is the history of music, forever communicating—what, exactly? But forever communicating, nonetheless, even as the message gets hopelessly lost in the translation to music. And it’s not a bug; it’s a feature. Music keeps a ring of insulation between eloquence and meaning. It’s what keeps the current, the power, flowing. It’s what makes the connection so immediate.

* * *

Advertisement ca. 1899 (via the Library of Congress).

“I Can Hear You,” the penultimate track on They Might Be Giants’ 1996 album Factory Showroom, was recorded on a wax cylinder, in the same manner that such recordings would have been made in the late 1800s. (The recording was made on a visit to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey.) Song and technology combine into a crafty joke:

http://youtu.be/IZIUAhGbCcM

Like all the other music I’ve been discussing, the song is about communication technology—but, in this case, it’s a tribute to every such technology that privileged efficiency over fidelity. Sure, drive-through intercom systems have terrible sound quality, but they get the job done.

Telephone hold music is where this calculus between efficiency and fidelity breaks down: you can’t stop listening to how bad the reproduction is. But, then again, it gets the job done. The hold music for AAA of Southern New England, for instance, was a series of Mozart piano concerti—which I easily recognized, even though the piano sounded like an underwater glockenspiel, even though the strings groaned in and out of the mix like a squeaky hinge, even though the bass was practically non-existent.

It was, in other words, privileging structure and syntax over color and sensuality—or, at least, substituting a version of color and sensuality that was an awful lot more circumscribed and compressed than normal. Which, it turns out, is still a perfectly valid musical experience. I’ll be honest: I kind of got into it. I started to appreciate its weird, alien pings and pops. I started to hear just how little signal information you need to establish baselines for harmonic tension and resolution. I started wondering how you might go about writing a piece that would emulate these exact sounds and qualities. And I realized: people already have.

A fairly wide swath of the history of recorded and broadcasted music was limited to something approaching a hold-music level of fidelity. Wax cylinders; acoustic recordings; early 78s; primitive radio—to our ears, they sound impoverished. But to contemporary ears (judging from contemporary accounts), they sounded amazing. And no wonder: the quantum leap from a completely ephemeral art form to one that could be fixed and reproduced ad infinitum is something we can’t really comprehend. What did it matter that the sound was brittle, stark, pointillistic?

Maybe a lot—because, around the same time, musical styles in those places where recordings and radio played began a turn toward brittle, stark, and pointillistic. Jazz, with its cranked, intricately syncopated drive, its characteristic rhythm-section foundation plucked, hammered, and struck. Neoclassicism, Romantic stock boiled back down to lean harmonies, bracing clarity, and bone-dry wit. Serialism, structure and syntax schematized into the spotlight, pitch and rhythm as points on a grid. It’s almost as if musicians listened to those early recordings and began to hear music from another angle, one stripped of sonic plushness but alive with the give-and-take of musical grammar, and realized that such give-and-take in itself could be a playground for expression.

Which means that another obsolete technology gets preserved in the repertoire and the toolbox: a style to be channeled, or adapted, or rejected, but holding at its core the substance of a long-ago technological advance, alongside Schubert’s postal delivery, Poulenc’s telephone, and—in future times—Muhly and Kahane’s internet. We don’t think we’re writing and playing and hearing an archeology of technology, but we are.

Sounds Heard: Mary Ellen Childs—Wreck

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

Would I have been able to smell the sea salt in the air quite so powerfully while listening to a recording of Mary Ellen Childs’s Wreck if I hadn’t already seen the image of a man face down in the water that graces its cover? Possibly not, but knowing that at the outset, I swear I could feel the waves crashing against the boat and a brisk ocean breeze hitting my face as the small ensemble of clarinet, violin, cellos, and percussion cut a sonic path forward through the piece’s opening measures.

That’s not to say that the work, originally commissioned to accompany an evening-length piece by Carl Flink’s Black Label Movement dance company, paints a strictly narrative portrait. While a recording of waves and instrumental lines that mimic gull cries quite evocatively accents the nearly hour-long score, its overall character extends well beyond these nautical touches.

Set inside the last watertight compartment of a recently sunk ore boat resting at the bottom of Lake Superior, Wreck explores the depths of physical and psychological endurance and human fortitude in the face of impending and inevitable loss. Wreck expresses cooperation and violence, compassion and obsession, and the ultimate question of how we face death. —Wreck liner notes

Based on the photos and teaser video alone, I wish I had had the opportunity to see the full production. With the music now available as a stand-alone recording, I can at least appreciate Childs’s contribution: an original score for which she was recognized with a 2008 Minnesota SAGE Dance Award.

Childs is no stranger to the integration of movement and images within the frame of her music. The percussion ensemble she founded—CRASH—is a poster child for this approach (further examples here) and the work she wrote for the string quartet ETHEL incorporates the drama of a visual element—video projections in this case, rather than the more directly physical player interaction that CRASH involves. As a glance down her projects page confirms, what the eye consumes plays a significant roll in her artistic outlook.

When all that is taken away, however, I found it fascinating to hear how much of that sense of movement and visual character is carried strictly within the notes and rhythms of her musical language. Divorced from the dancers on the stage, the music captured on the recording still knits its own gripping connections though its movement-conjuring phrases—from moments of graceful swaying to heart-pounding drive and shrieking terror. According to information provided by Innova, Childs wrote the score after much of the choreography was complete, fitting her work to the movement like a film score. On the disc, it is presented as 18 aural “scenes” featuring excellent performances by Pat O’Keefe (clarinets), Laura Harada (violin), Michelle Kinney (cello), Jacqueline Ultan (cello), and Peter O’Gorman (percussion). I would be hard-pressed to point out any one portion that stands above the rest, as the real power of the work is in the overarching sum of the parts. Still, sections such as the brightly ringing clamor of the percussion-driven “Spirit Duet” definitely make a lasting impression.

Knowing the fictional setting of the dance piece, I felt a clear connection to the depth of emotion—the fear, the anger, the questioning, the resignation—that a group of people facing death together might experience. Of course this was my own listener’s fiction, but especially as the work proceeds through later moments of suffocating delirium only to conclude in a space of haunting emptiness, Childs’s presentation of these ideas in sound became an ever more powerful listening experience.

Sounds Heard: Gabriel Kahane—February House

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

One of the particular gems on Gabriel Kahane’s self-titled 2008 release was a track called “7 Middagh,” the lyrics of which teased out the story of the residents of 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn. At this address, such cultural icons as George Davis, Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, and Gypsy Rose Lee cohabitated as a kind of unconventional family in the 1940s. Additional research on my part revealed more of the tale underlying this artsy commune and, a little later, the news that Kahane would be creating a full-scale musical based on the story in order to fulfill the first commission of The Public Theater’s Music Theater Initiative.

While the above-mentioned track does not appear in Kahane’s eventual full-evening musical February House (a show he wrote with Seth Bockley), its echoes are easy to trace. Within the first few moments of the production, as captured on the cast recording released on the StorySound label* in October, a brief lyrical reference calls to mind that earlier track. Yet in a broader sense, Kahane has once again crafted a collection of songs that navigate complex, sometimes bittersweet emotion across a music bed that floats and, importantly, propels the characters through the text before they drown under the sentiment.

Not to imply that every song carries such weighty seriousness. February House is, at its core, the story of people who are trying to make a home for themselves, and all the silly complications that can entail—arranging the personalities and the furniture into the available rooms (“A Room Comes Together”). Nine voices and the six-musician ensemble take the stage for an intimate tour of lives and love, the quick and witty sung repartee showing off the colorful personalities lashing themselves together within this Brooklyn outpost. That it is a place for the homosexual residents in the group to live more openly is a strong surface statement, but an undercurrent of feeling strange and alone runs deeply and more generally throughout the show and its characters.

These relationships are well complimented by the chamber ensemble, which provides color and context but generally keeps out of the spotlight. A fiddle line adds to a story, an elegantly sober piano empathizes. The song that held me most transfixed was actually a delicate solo outing that features McCullers (sung by Kristen Sieh), accompanied by only a plucked banjo line, during which she meditates on feeling weird and lonely in the midst of a freak show: “There’s a secret part of me gets so silent,/My communion at Coney Island, oh…” Kahane immediately follows that up with an intricate full-cast hug of a song (“Shall We Live Here”); the struggles of writing a line or paying the rent (“Discontent/Talk of the Town”) play out against a world that is marred by the horror of World War Two (“You Sit In Your Chair”). The house fights against bed bugs; the house fights for love.

But the center cannot, or at least does not, hold. McCullers and her husband decide to return to “Georgia.” Britten and Pears make plans to head to “California.” And George Davis, the godfather of the house, sings adieu to this fantasy in heartbreakingly revised/reprised versions of “Light Upon the Hill” and “Goodnight to the Boardinghouse.”

I’ve long been a fan of Kahane’s songwriting. His Craigslistlieder was as clever and quirky as its subject matter, and his first full-length disc provided a photo album of stories that proved a compulsive listen. With February House, he has taken the strengths of those previous projects—smart lyrics, even smarter compositional choices—and played them out across a larger storyboard, creating distinct voices for his characters that still solidly carry the attractive marks of his own.

*An earlier version of this review misidentified the StorySound label as the house label of the Public Theater. It is its own unaffiliated entity.

Sounds Heard: John Bischoff—Audio Combine

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

John Bischoff is a composer celebrated for his work at the cutting edge of live computer music, explorations that can be traced back all the way to the late 1970s and his experiments with his first KIM-1. Audio Combine, the recent New World Records release of Bischoff pieces spanning 2004-2011, is an undeniable reminder that, though his roots run deep, his music hasn’t been anchored.

As a recorded document, Audio Combine is one of those discs well suited to the “dark room/good headphones” listening experience, each track representing an opportunity to get lost inside a foreign landscape. Bischoff’s live performance of the music was recorded at The Mills College Concert Hall and mixed by Philip Perkins, in collaboration with the composer. Due to the unique way Perkins staged the recording—via three microphones placed around the hall in addition to Bischoff’s direct feed—there is much to feel aurally compelled to “look” at in the sonic field.

To begin with, the title track plays a teasing game of Whac-A-Mole using a host of delicate sounds—most memorably the plucked pitches of a music box—which slide into view with a gauzy grace before slipping quickly around the next corner and out of earshot. Sidewalk Chatter is a bit more glitch and crackle, while Local Color is built around the ring of struck metallic tones and the wavering and decay of pitches. In all of the aforementioned cases, the music is careful in its development; never overcrowded with sound or a blurry chaos of ideas. Bischoff remains patient, not afraid to punctuate with silence. There is air left in the room for reflection and exploration. It’s a framework taken to its sparest extreme (and, frankly, most Lynchian eeriness) in Decay Trace. Perhaps because of that, it also proved to be a personal favorite. This restraint is then somewhat shrugged off for the final track, Surface Effect, when the combine goes into hyperdrive, all breakers thrown, and luxuriates in the sum of the sounds that have been generated in the course of the hour-long disc.

As might be expected when dealing with such non-traditional sound creation and construction, there is a great deal of interesting background to be explored beyond the recordings themselves, information thoroughly outlined in the liner notes penned by Ed Osborn. Though his behind the curtain insights definitely provide illuminating added value, it’s also worth noting that they also aren’t strictly necessary. Bischoff’s music is not a sterile sonic experiment reporting its results, but a kind of conversation between man, machine, and the surrounding environment. The method is intriguing, but the resulting sound world is really all that matters.

NMBx FLASHBACK: The last time I caught up with John Bischoff, New World Records had just released The League of Automatic Music Composers, 1978–1983. Bischoff, a co-founding League member, stopped by to chat about what made-at-home computer music involved before the invention of the laptop. You can listen to our conversation here:

The Procedural Hows and Theoretical Whys of SoundCloud.com

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Marc Weidenbaum - Articles, Toolbox

Part A: In Good Company

The website in question is where you, right now, can go to listen to live recordings of New York’s Alarm Will Sound ensemble performing original commissions at the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, including work by composers Clint Needham and Liza White.

It is where CHROMA, the London-based chamber-music group, posted the world premiere of Rolf Hind’s piece for featured clarinet soloist, “Sit Stand Walk.”

It is where the Brooklyn-based Sō Percussion made available excerpts from its Creation series of collaborations, including pieces by Tristan Perich and Daniel Wohl.

And it’s where London’s Barbican Centre has uploaded numerous Beethoven recordings by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, under the baton of Kurt Masur.

It is not the website of a leading classical publication. It is not the online culture section of The New York Times or the London Guardian. It is not a digital offshoot of WQXR or NPR, or of big-eared KCRW for that matter.

No, it is SoundCloud.com, and it has quickly become, with good reason, the default go-to site for music hosting by all manner of musicians, not just aspiring pop stars and bedroom beatmakers, but also those involved in new and experimental composition and performance. The following overview is intended to provide an introduction to making use of SoundCloud, including some tips for maximizing one’s efforts, as well as some passing contextual and tactical thoughts on why SoundCloud has proved as popular and functional as it has.

Part B: Crash Once, Twice Shy

New music makers have numerous reasons for wariness before taking the time generally necessary to master yet another online music-hosting platform.

Why even try, when so many services have let you down before? All that fine-tuning of a personalized MySpace page, only for the user base to up and leave it like a ghost town? All that effort in uploading a project to Archive.org, only to discover that the tag processing is unwieldy? All that work getting music into iTunes, only to have track previews limited to 30 measly seconds, and to be left wondering how, other than linking, you might actually promote your music?

The issues with music-hosting platforms are cultural as much as they are technological. Viewed as a whole, the variety of barriers to having proper online representations suggest something akin to a digital-era conspiracy to keep complex music off the Internet.

Here are some of the hassles:

There is sound quality. At least since iTunes debuted and introduced a particularly low-grade format (128kbps) as an audio standard, the sonic compression of digital music has not suited the dynamic range of most music that doesn’t fall within the broadly defined realm of “pop.” Over time, the standard MP3 file sizes have, thankfully, enlarged (320kbps tends to be the norm), but online streaming is currently supplanting MP3 files, and frequently that means, indeed, a low-fidelity presentation of recorded sound.

There is categorization. Few if any online services handle the taxonomy and typology of adventurous music well. Most music websites have a field for the artist and a field for a song, and little to address the informational void. The sites are already living in a post-album world, and they do little to make nice with recordings in which things like composer and conductor and performers and soloist are important. On a particularly bright and cheerful day, one might consider the Internet a fascinating and massive experiment in New Criticism, every piece of music floating out there virtually free of context.

And there is the basic typographical matter. It’s something that so-called desktop publishing presaged, a situation in which corners are routinely cut in favor of oversimplified—and thus meaning- and pronunciation-altering—decisions regarding haceks and accent marks and umlauts.

SoundCloud.com doesn’t solve all these problems, but it does offer a solid and adaptable foundation for musicians to use to share their music.

Part C: Setting Up the Account Is Just the First Step

Here are some simple instructions on setting up and making use of a SoundCloud.com account.

Step 1: Sign up. You can do this by associating your new account with your Facebook account, or you can create an account directly on SoundCloud.com. The latter is recommended because there’s no significant benefit to the former. You can always associate the accounts later.

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Step 2: Fill out your basic profile. The fields (City, Occupation, etc.) are straightforward. Here is one suggestion, though: strongly consider using a single word, or a phrase with no spaces, as your “profile” name. The profile name serves various purposes, including being your SoundCloud account URL. To join SoundCloud isn’t simply to access virtual real estate. It’s to participate (more on which in Step 5), and having a single memorable identity is key to making your presence on SoundCloud effective.

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Step 3: Fill out your “Advanced Profile.” Keep your Description brief, maybe 200 words, tops—and consider using rudimentary HTML tags, such as <b></b> to bold key words and to structure the text. Enter URLs for essential web locations, and don’t overdo it. Your website, Twitter, and Facebook are likely sufficient. Enter too many, and your listeners won’t know where to click. You can use the <a href=”URL”></a> tag in your Description if you want to, for example, link to a record review or interview that appears on another website.

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Step 4: Upload tracks. As with the creation of your account, the uploading of a track will require you to fill in various fields. They’re pretty straightforward (Title, Image, Type). There aren’t multiple fields for participants. However, the Description field allows for simple HTML, so you can use that space not only to list participants (performer, composer, etc.) but to link to their SoundCloud accounts or websites or both. Make note of that “Show more options” button: it pulls up a whole bunch of additional useful fields, including simple ways to add commerce links so you can sell the track or related material. The easiest way to go about this all is to set the track as Private until you’re happy with all the text and other details, and only then make it public.

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Step 5: Participate. That bears repeating: Participate. Even if you’re employing SoundCloud primarily as a promotional tool, think of it as a party—you’re not going to meet anyone if you just stand there (unless you’re wearing a funny T-shirt, or blessed with remarkable cheekbones). These things take effort.

To begin with, “follow” people—follow musicians you work with; follow musicians you admire. Some will follow you back, and that will be the start of actually communicating on and through SoundCloud. You’ll find, in time, that you will look at the Following/Followed lists for people you like, and take a cue as to whose music to look at. Furthermore, the people whose music you do follow show up in your SoundCloud home page, so you will be kept abreast of their activity—not just what they post, but what they have commented on.

Also, embed your tracks elsewhere (on your blog, for example), and encourage others to do so. One of the beautiful things about SoundCloud is that it has elegant “players” that you can use to embed a track or a set of tracks into a post on another website. For example, the track below is from a project I recently completed, in which I got over 60 musicians to remix the first movement of the Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a, by Dimitri Shostakovich. The original recording was by the fine Los Angeles ensemble wild Up, who graciously provided the source audio for the project.

And, finally, be sure to comment on other musicians’ uploaded tracks—that is, see SoundCloud for what it is, not just a music-hosting platform, but a platform for communication and collaboration. Comments come in two forms: standard and “timed,” the latter of which appear at a distinct point along the chronology of the track. You’ll see the “timed” comments along the track just above.

Step 6: Dig in. There is far more you can do on SoundCloud. The coverage above is intended simply as an introduction. For example, you can create Sets of tracks that provide additional context. You can join Groups, which in addition to collating tracks by some semblance of shared cultural activity (field recordings, serialism, toy piano) provide for discussion beyond the confines of a single recording. There are Soundcloud apps that allow you to do additional things with and to your tracks. Everything described above is free, albeit with a space limit on data storage, but you can elect to pay for a premium account and access additional resources. (The limits to SoundCloud are worth noting. For one thing, this is all “fixed recordings.” If you specialize in algorithmic music, you’ll be posting finished recordings, not live generative sound. Also, SoundCloud is a business, and as such monitors what is posted; it is especially attentive to copyright violation, so if you tend toward the aggressively plunderphonic, be prepared to have your track removed—or your entire account for that matter.)

Step 7: Make it new. The structure of SoundCloud suggests itself as a neutral space. In many ways, it has defined itself as the anti-MySpace. Where MySpace became overloaded with design elements, SoundCloud keeps it simple. This simplicity suggests SoundCloud less as a place and more as a form of infrastructure—if MySpace was a city that never slept, SoundCloud is the Department of Public Works. Its elegant tool sets provide structure but don’t define or fully constrain activity. For the more adventurous participants, SoundCloud is itself a form to be played with. Some musicians have used the “timed comments,” for example, to annotate their work as it proceeds. Others have fun with the images associated with their tracks, posting sheet music or workspace images. Some create multiple accounts for different personas or projects. Others have used the limited personalization options to colorize the embeddable player and make it look seamless within their own websites and blogs.

It’s arguable that the most productive users of SoundCloud recognize the fluid nature of the service and post not only completed works, but works in progress. They upload sketches and rough drafts and rehearsals: this keeps their timeline freshly updated, helps excuse the relatively low fidelity of streaming sound, and further invites communication with listeners—many of who are fellow musicians themselves.

Ready to make some noise?
You can use platforms like SoundCloud to participate in NewMusicBox’s “Sound Ideas” challenges and easily share the music you create. Craft responses to prompts from:
—John Luther Adams
—Ken Ueno
—Sarah Kirkland Snider
—Sxip Shirey
Selections from submitted tracks will be featured in an upcoming post.

***

Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996. It focuses on the intersection of sound, art, and technology. He has written for Nature, the website of The Atlantic, Boing Boing, Down Beat, and numerous other publications. He has commissioned and curated sound/music projects that have featured original works by Kate Carr, Marcus Fischer, Marielle Jakobsons, John Kannenberg, Tom Moody, Steve Roden, Scanner, Roddy Shrock, Robert Thomas, Pedro Tudela, and Stephen Vitiello, among many others. He moderates the Disquiet Junto group at Soundcloud.com; there dozens of musicians respond to weekly Oulipo-style restrictive compositional projects. He’s a founding partner at i/olian, which develops software projects that explore opportunities to play with sound. He lives in San Francisco in a neighborhood whose soundmarks include Tuesday noon civic alarms as well as persistent seasonal fog horns from the nearby bay. He also resides at twitter.com/disquiet.

The Producer

Posted on February 17, 2012 by Rob Deemer - Columns

I remember distinctly the day—a Thursday in early May of 2005—I walked out of the last class I would ever take as a student. The German translation course that had been foisted upon me by the powers-that-were at The University of Texas at Austin had not been my favorite (far from it), but there was an electricity present as I packed up my things and left the nondescript classroom, one step closer to completing a journey that had started so many years before. We all cross that threshold at one point or another in our lives, when we are quite sure that we are done “learning” and look forward to when we can start “doing.” Of course, we could not be further from the truth; not only are we always learning—or, at least, presented with opportunities to learn—but every once in a while we find ourselves seated at the feet of a true master, from whom one cannot help but want to glean as much as possible from such a short, yet valuable, “class.”

This week I found myself seated next to one of those masters, and you better believe I was indeed schooled by her. Last year I was commissioned by Chicago’s Gaudete Brass to write a brass quintet for their concert at Symphony Space in January. To make a long story short, the work was finished before Christmas and premiered in mid-January. After the concert, the group informed me that Cedille Records had chosen to record their next CD and my work had been selected to be a part of the project. Fast-forward to this past Wednesday, where I ended up (somewhat groggily, I might add) at the recording session in Goshen, Indiana. The group seemed upbeat and excited about the whole session, since they had already put one piece to bed and had three more days of recording in front of them. When it became time to get started, I was directed to a chair in between the engineer and the producer. I had never worked with a professional classical producer before, so I was intrigued as to what the day had in store.

What I have yet to mention is that the producer for the session—hired by Cedille Records—was Judith Sherman, who had just received a Grammy Award (her third) for Classical Producer of the Year a few days before. Having looked at the list of the incredible recordings she had overseen just in 2011, I tried my best to act like this was no big thing…which lasted all of about two minutes. Luckily, my penchant for shifting into interview mode and asking questions was quashed by the clock and by her no-nonsense demeanor; we needed to record this piece of mine efficiently and effectively.

What followed was a five-hour post-graduate seminar on squeezing the absolute best out of a chamber ensemble, with topics ranging from basic session etiquette, random extraneous noise detection and removal, artist and composer negotiations, and the strategies and tactics of recording a newly composed work when working with an ensemble where the depletion of chops is a never-ending concern. She never had to remind anyone who was in charge; her confidence and leadership was so pervasive that one could not help but follow her instructions to the letter. And those instructions—she continually jotted notes down in her score or on her notebook and while I attempted to hear the work from an audience’s point of view, her ability to catch the most subtle rhythmic or articulation discrepancies and the need for better intonation on two 16th notes in the middle of an interior passage between the horn and 2nd trumpet was beyond impressive.

What this experience showed me was the value of trusting someone else’s ears, especially during something so important as a recording session. To have someone put your music through their filters, understand what it should sound like, and guide the ensemble to that sonic and artistic goal is both a luxury (especially with someone at the top of their game like Judith) and a necessity; we each only have two ears, and as a composer it’s extremely difficult to run a session all by oneself with the various distractions that come with having written the piece that’s getting recorded. As she did with the quintet, Sherman instilled a confidence in me that allowed me to not only improve the composition in several places, but feel that the work was good enough to deserve such attention from her. Having been schooled by the master, I can only imagine how this day in class will affect my own teaching in the future.

Sounds Heard: Michael Gordon—Timber

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

When the recording of Michael Gordon’s Timber dropped last fall, critics justifiably drooled a little on the impressively weighty, laser-etched, inch-thick wooden box (with magnetic closure, no less) that held the CD and its booklet inside. I’m a sucker for a pretty cover myself, but while I appreciated that the Cantaloupe label had effectively packaged the disc in a representative sample of the featured instrument (okay, not really, but I doubt I’m the first to try hammering on the case with my fingertips while listening, regardless), it was actually the recent experience of hearing Mantra Percussion play the piece live here in Baltimore that drew me more deeply inside the transfixing power of a score designed for six percussionists and lumber.

Slagwerk Den Haag, the ensemble that recorded and jointly commissioned the piece from Gordon, led the composer to the unique sound when they turned up a number of wooden simantras (a simple Greek percussion instrument) in their storage space during the work’s development. Gordon had embarked on the commission with the desire “to clear my mind of pitches and orchestration […] I thought of composing this music as being like taking a trip out into the desert. I was counting on the stark palette and the challenge of survival to clear my brain and bring on visions.” The simantras further inspired this concept.

The resulting five-movement, 55-minute piece puts the musicians in a circle of sound, literally and figuratively. In their recording of the work, Slagwerk Den Haag offers a sharp, precise delivery of the intricate rhythms and ever-undulating dynamics, haloed by the rich overtones the instruments generate. The sonic focus moves around the stereo field in a languid hula-hoop of generally dense, rapid-fire mallet-against-wood action. In live performance in a reverberant acoustic space, that constant spiral moves the sound around the room with almost spiritual power, perhaps harkening back in some ways to the whirling dervish who inhabited Bill Morison’s film for Gordon’s Decasia.

In their concert presentation, Mantra Percussion performed the work in near-darkness, with specially designed and timed lights to accent the movement of the piece. Out in the audience, the sensory deprivation added to the immersive effect and made the concert experience feel particularly intimate—even though the circular setup of the hall with the performers at the core meant everyone was staring at someone’s back. The shifting light emanating from the center of the room gave the impression of a campfire, the music as storytelling by firelight.

You might expect that nearly an hour of relentless pounding would leave your ears, if not you entire psyche, a bit bruised by the journey. In my experience of the work, however, time actually fell out of focus. It wasn’t until well after the last echoes of the piece faded from the room that the hypnosis drained away and the clock began its proper forward motion once again.

Molly Sheridan

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