As 2011 wound down, I was fortunate enough to participate in an exciting new project commissioned by Disquiet’s own Marc Weidenbaum. I’ll let Marc describe it here:
“Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?
Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards. They are pieces of music whose relative brevity—all are between one and three minutes in length—is designed to correlate with the economical, ephemeral nature of an Instagram photo.
The result of the 25 musicians’ collective efforts is an investigation into the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. What parallels exist, for example, between the visual filters that Instagram provides users to transform their photos and the sound-processing tools employed by electronic musicians?
In many cases here, the musicians employ sonic field recordings as source material for their music. In the case of both their photos and their compositions (photography in one case, phonography in the other), documents are altered to emphasize their atmospheric qualities: to eke a modest art out of the everyday.”
-Marc Wedenbaum, Disquiet.com.
I contributed a short piece titled “You’re Trying to Focus, but it’s Too Far Away” which featured various field-recordings and my Harvestman modular synthesizer.
In “You’re Trying to Focus, but it’s Too Far Away”, I depict the blurred portion of the image through a “musical” theme that never quite resolves. Like the image, this piece is also framed by field (street, in this case) recordings. Raindrops, footsteps, creaky doors and wind are easy to pick out, yet the brunt of the track highlights the inferred. A mental picture that is never quite clear.
The full album is available to download (free) at archive.org, both individually and as a Zip file. Be sure to grab the 58-page PDF with full-page reproductions of the images and additional information on all the participating musicians.
00:02:00 Shipwreck