Author: Suss Müsik

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

December, 2010. Suss Müsik is walking the streets of Barcelona at night. It’s Christmastime, so the city is illuminated in celebration of the upcoming holiday.

Suss Müsik notices a pattern in the decorations. One cobblestone street is lined with circular disks of white light; another has rainbow-colored rectangles hanging from the lampposts. The two streets meet at a public square just a few blocks from La Rambla. Suss Müsik determines this intersection to be the Chromogenic Nexus.

A man is photographing the holiday lights around the square. Suss Müsik watches the man from a distance as he stows his tripod and camera equipment and revs up his motorbike. Suss Müsik mentally assigns this gentleman the job title Keeper of the Chomogenic Nexus. It’s a big responsibility.

The Chromogenic Nexus is the metaphorical congruence that personifies this beautiful, fantastic city. It’s a place where new and old worlds mesh perfectly, where a tour of Casa Batlló concludes with a 3D hologram of Antoni Gaudí waving you goodbye.

The Barcelona Sound Machine embraces this city’s Medieval origins, its Nouveau and Gothic architecture, its love of competitive sport, its cultural fluctuations, its nautical cuisine, its Catalonian nationalism.

It’s an audio landscape inspired by multiple generations of artists. If it were a gallery, it would display the surrealistic paintings of Joan Miró alongside prototypes built by Universitat Autònoma students, the two separated by 100 years and a mere 26 kilometers.

It’s a late-night ride on the FGC, where on the station wall a numeric display counts down incoming arrivals to within a microsecond of accuracy.

It’s the bronzed foam topping on a strong cup of coffee, enjoyed outside while gazing at a store mannequin that seems just a bit too realistic. Next door is a shop that sells nothing but scissors.

To Suss Müsik, ultimately, the Barcelona Sound Machine is a glitchy, multilayered, counterpoint homage to the Keeper of the Chromogenic Nexus. Godspeed to the Keeper, he who balances our understanding of what has taken place and what yet may happen.

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

Gradients are all around us in the form of airflow. As we move about at different speeds, refractive variations caused by density gradients distort our sense of light and sound. Higher velocity means more distortion, or at least a more visualized shift among images that remain in focus.

(Refraction is also why many of us have trouble seeing as we get older. Next time you stub your toe squinting to locate your eyeglasses, blame the gradients. Shaking your fist in the air at fandom fluid densities is entirely optional).

In 1864, German physicist Augst Toepler invented Schlieren photography as a way to visualize airflow current. Putting it simply, rays of light change when patches of air at varying densities are forced to pass through each other. Placing a concave mirror with a long focal distance helps to illuminate these shifts, which can be photographed using a knife edge or razor blade in front of a camera lens.

For this strange piece, Suss Müsik attempted to recreate a Z-type Schlieren setup with a guitar, two looping pedals, and a pitch-shifting delay pad. The original concept was to cut off one set of loops (the “lamp”) while “refracting” another set of loops (the “mirror”) with various sawtooth/reverb effects. The results didn’t quite hit that mark, but there remains some auditory evidence of densities splitting in motion and later converging.

The piece is titled Schlieren and was recorded live to 8-track. The image is a Schlieren photograph of shock waves produced by an in-flight T-38 Talon, the world’s first supersonic jet trainer.

Image credit = NASA & US Air Force: J.T. Heineck / Ed Schairer / Maj. Jonathan Orso / Maj. Jeremy Vanderhal, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

“What distinguishes a particular engineering discipline from another is only the palette of things to be put together,” says structural engineer Mark. E. Eberhart in his book Why Things Break. The same might be said for how things are broken apart.

Human beings are compelled to be destructive; otherwise, we simply don’t evolve. Our survival quite literally depends upon our capacity to wreck stuff. Destruction is a fundamental component of construction, for without the ability to sculpt raw matter into tools we have no means by which to build. Destruction is evidence that we have successfully moved forward as a species.

For this exercise, Suss Müsik approached the concept of destruction as both starting point and continuum. A simple counterpoint sequence for fake strings and piano was duplicated and distressed, using heavy distortion filters and run aggressively through a pitch-shift modulator.

The resulting artifacts form what you hear at the beginning of the piece. From there it was simply a matter of reversing the “destruction,” which seemed weirdly self-referential: could the act of destroying the destroyer be considered, by reverse logic, a form of construction? Suss Müsik will leave that for you to ponder.

The piece is titled Entropy and was recorded live to 8-track. The image is refracted sunlight dissipating through a glass of water on a white table.

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

According to art historian Lawrence Alloway, Agnes Martin was one of the principal pioneers of the “Hard-Edge” 1950’s painting movement. “Even where forms are not purely represented,” he wrote, “[Hard-Edge] abstract artists have tended toward a compilation of separable elements, treated as discrete entities. Forms are few and the surface immaculate … the whole picture becomes the unit. The result of this sparseness is that the spatial effect of figures on a field is avoided.”

Martin’s work evokes not only austere minimalism but also a cerebral airiness, perhaps gained from when Martin lived in New Mexico while attending university. Her work appears to vibrate off the canvas, the rigor of her craft subtly transformed into a sort of trembly dissonance. Even a simple line appears to breathe; a series of seemingly identical shapes reveal hidden nuances on close inspection.

For this piece written for fake violins, Suss Müsik interpreted Martin’s lovely 1961 work entitled Words (ink and graphic on paper, mounted on canvas) as a graphical score. The parallel lines are represented by sustained, repetitious phrases playing a single note. The triangles are conveyed through a simple 3-note counterpoint performed in consecutive sets of four, four, six, six, six, six, four and four.

The piece is titled Words and was recorded live with one overdub for piano embellishment.