#archival recordings

[dustedmagazine]

Nathan Salsburg — Landwerk No. 3 (No Quarter)

Landwerk No. 3 by Nathan Salsburg

For the third volume of his Landwerk series, guitarist and archivist Nathan Salsburg again isolates fragments of archival recordings to form loops over which he layers minimalist electric guitar and, less prominently, resonator guitar, piano, and/or organ. The staticky groan of an organ or bleat of a clarinet along with the static itself thus serve as half of a conversation across more than a century of sound technology. The effect is akin to drone, with the spare, skeletal guitar lines usually acknowledging the repetition of the loops without themselves necessarily repeating.

As on the first two volumes of the series, the tracks run around ten minutes each and are titled only with sequential Roman numerals that reflect the continuity of the (so far, at least) three-part work, these being numbered X-XIV. Sometimes, as on “X,” the guitar melody takes a cue from the sample, in this case, joining it in a festive march. On other tracks, such as “XII,” the whirling of the 78 disc perhaps suggests a rhythm. 

Comparison with the original recordings is revealing. Thus, on “XI,” a repeated cluster of seven lilting notes from the piano playing of Sylvia Schwartz, accompanying her father Abe’s klezmer fiddling on a 1920 recording, and the static in which they are embedded provide a matrix for hesitant clusters of reverby guitar notes into which single, elongated fiddle tones occasionally intrude. The result, like the traditional tune, feels neither quite minor nor major; the pace is glacial, but the ten minutes nevertheless pass swiftly in the trance-like state that the track induces. 

There are numerous little details that give the compositions a sense of forward motion. Spare, isolated piano chords surface around 3:00 to share space with the guitar on “XI,” for instance, while on “XIV” an organ takes over for the guitar from around 4:00 to 6:00 before retreating into the background. On “XIII,” driven by a sample from a klezmer orchestra, the guitar begins with chords, shifts to single-note runs, picks up the tempo briefly in the closing minutes, and returns to the chords at the end. 

The use of sonic artifacts in guitar music is shared with, for instance, Daniel Bachman (as I observed in a recent review of his Almanac Behind for Dusted) and traces back at least to John Fahey’s fourth album. In Salsburg’s case, the noise plays more of an elemental than a narrative role, creating along with the loops the architecture of the sound. Landwerk No. 3 is, like its predecessors, a work of craggy beauty that does homage to a world—that of pre-war European Jews—destroyed in the same wave of technology and social change that made possible the preservation of its traces in the archival recordings and, in turn, rendered the recordings obsolete. It is easy to imagine that Sylvia and Abe Schwartz, if somehow able to hear “XI,” would marvel and approve. 

Jim Marks

#nathan salsburg #landwerk no. 3 #no quarter #jim marks #albumreview #dusted magazine #guitar #archival recordings

[mangozic]

my dead goth son and his friendly neighborhood personified concept of insanity

#really happy with how michael turned out :] i might stick to this design #rapunzel ah glowy hair <3 #i do need to workshop gerry though orz #have been working on this during breaks from my other projects and god it took way too long to finish #fun fact the final file for this is over 2gb 👍 forgot i was recording the timelapse #i could post it if anyone would be interested #the magnus archives #tma #michael distortion #michael shelley #tma michael #tma distortion #gerard keay #gerry keay #tma gerry #gerrymichael #doorkeay #technically? i’m not one to draw ship art usually but this one’s close enough i think #tma fanart #fanart #my art #digital art #illustration #magpod

[edensbackyard]

Tape recorder click sound my beloved

#when i tell you i screamed #tmagp #the magnus archives #the magnus protocol #magpod #tmagp 10 #tmagp fanart #art #artists on tumblr #digital art #tma fanart #hello jon apologies for the deception #tape recorder click sound how did i miss you #cant wait for the horrors it will bring #also this episode was like a shovel to the face also my god #tmagp spoilers

[najicicada]

Statement ends

#the magnus archives #jonathan sims #tma fanart #tma podcast #artists on tumblr #I forgot tape recorder the first time

[syrren]

“The artist becomes the canvas!” - TMAGP 002: Making Adjustments

#tma #the magnus protocol #tmagp #the magnus archives #fanart #the magnus protocol spoilers #tw: body horror #kinda??? #this is the most vague fanart i could possibly post im so sorry #i swear i've also started drawing the actual. yaknow. characters? #but for personal reasons episode two hit so close to home for a second I thought Alex j newall had acquired access to my medical records #so I had to get this out of my system LOL #myart

[spiral-man]

There is some so insanely heartbreaking to me about Jonathan Sims and the way the statements were recorded. They were all originally handwritten which is such a very human thing, using your own flesh and blood write something down, just the amount of effort and emotion that goes into that. And then Jon had to digitize them using a tape recorder, definitely a lot less human as it’s now batteries and tape but still human enough since it’s using his voice. And now he’s fully inhuman, robotic, stuck in a computer, where there used to be blood and skin and bone there is now plastic and wires and a screen.

I’m currently studying funeral services and in my embalming textbook it talks about how one woman phrased it like “a dead body is an object, but it is an object unlike any other object, cannot be like any other object, because this object used to be alive” and I really like that, it feels comforting, it feels human. Jon doesn’t get this though, he was terrified of being inhuman and he doesn’t even get to be human in this “somewhere else” he doesn’t get to be an object that used to be alive, he is just an object, like a pencil that wrote down the original statements, or the tape recorder that used to record them, and now the computer.

#the magnus archives #tma #the magnus protocol #tmagp #jonathan sims #the magnus pod #tape recorder #writing #humanity #somewhere else #mag 200 #jon sims

[daiwild]

changing room mishap

Kons a lil confused but he will ALWAYS get pissed at bad guys hurting his friends

#tim: surgery scars kon: oh like ur spleen removal #tim: well the spleen thing was unintentional #could work w bart aswell #kon: tf is a mastectomy im 5 yrs old #i kept laughing at the last panel so i decided to not delete these doodles #hopefully im not the only one who finds this amusing but knowing my track record... #tim drake #conner kent #superboy #dc red robin #dc fanart #timkon #tw stab mention #archiving eeblydeebly #daiwild

[y3llow-hoodie]

#Tim I was about to start a statement what is it #*puts glasses on* #… #also don’t mind Martin in the background #it actually happened I was the tape recorder #tma fanart #tma podcast #the magnus archives #tma #the magnus institute #tma shitpost #tma jon #the magnus archive fanart #tma martin #the magnus archive #tma jonathan sims #tma jonmartin #tma headcanons #tma john #tma tim #tma tim stoker

[bagofdo-ritos]

jon: save me statement… statement save me

#the magnus archives #tma #jon sims #jonathan sims #tma fanart #i like to think the tape recorders dont manifest away #and instead they just pile up #following jon like hes a mother duck #doritosart

[magicaltimelady44]

so like. if anyone else, like me, still has the occasional fanfic they follow on fanfiction.net, and hasn't been getting the update emails for the longest time and was wondering if ti meant the site is on its last legs

no

no they've done something stupid as fuck

you have to opt back in to getting the emails/notifications of new chapters every six months, because they automatically assume you don't want to know when the fics you followed for the updates have updated

#for fucks saaaaaaake #now i have to go back thorugh all the fics i follow to see if they've updated in the last like year #ffn why are you doing this #this is the shit that drives ppl to ao3 #and for the record i don't like ao3 purely because somehow ffn still has the better accessible reading options on its base site #without requiring you to log in and find [or code your own] site skin. it's just on the base site. #dark/light mode and increasing text size on a fanfic archive should not be a logged-in members-only coding-required thing

[ascendingconures]

spooky reminder that i made a VR map of the Magnus Institute you can go explore on vrchat. Its interactable. Its unhinged. its buggy. its full off references. dont take it too seriously.

#i forgot i deleted my old account and this post got yeeted #i wanna make the tunnels beneath it eventually #also finish elias' office and fill artefact storage with more stuff #you can go in the coffin btw. you do get stuck if you do #tma #the magnus archives #jonathan sims #i am so proud of jons office in this it is.. beautiful #martin blackwood #tim stoker #michael distortion #trying to remember other characters i have reffed in this map #sasha james #the michael door is on the michael avatar and not part of the map sadly #im not good at vr photography/video recording. can you tell

[vickozone]

For the TMA fandom.

(I have the whole episode on that tape)

It was very worth it for how mUCH IT COST ME

#tma #the magnus archives #the magnus institute #magpod #tma spoilers #magnus pod #magnus archives #tma tim #timothy stoker #tim stoker #tim tma #tma sasha #sasha james #tma podcast #mag 39 #tape recorder #tape #vhs tapes #Okay. I don’t actually have the whole episode. I need to re-record it-

[muffinlance]

Other child: *reaches for legos at the library’s play table*

Toddler: NO DO NOT DESTROY MY PANOPTICON

#I mean he found a inexplicable round eye lego for the top of his tower #what was I supposed to do #NOT teach him the word panopticon? #other parent's slow blink as they processed that statement: 10/10 #and then I had to re-iterate the lesson on sharing #...sharing the panopticon #this post brought to you by The Magnus Archives #statement recorded live June 6th 2023 #statement ends

[thebonesofhoudini]

Buy physical media. Buy CDs. Buy records. Buy tapes. Buy books. Buy physical artwork or prints. Take photos of yourself and get them developed at a photo processing booth. Write your thoughts down in a journal. Why? Because as this world get more digital, what's physical will slowly but surely disappear. There will be less things you can touch and feel, and more things that you can see and not touch. You can post all the digital pics you want on social media...nothing is assured and those pics and those platforms could be gone in an instant. An album on streaming platforms will never be the same as the original album in your hand with the liner notes, as versions of that album can get removed, and/or replaced with re-recorded material (since the artist doesn't own their masters). Books go out of print. And staring at a jpeg (no matter how much you paid for it *cough cough* NFTs) of an artwork will never be the same as owning the actual artwork or a print of it.

Preserve these things. If not for yourself, then for future generations.

#archiving #archives #physical media #records #cds #music cds #vhs tapes #vhs #dvd #dvd collection #photographs #photos #photography #books #books & libraries #literature #digital media #art #painting #art prints

[izzys-trying]

I haven’t Seen Fionna and Cake yet but my partner said that Simon looked like Jonathan Sims and this screen shot did not disappoint

#THE TAPE RECORDER AND EVERYTHING 😭😭 #he’s even kidnapped #tma #the magnus archives #Jonathan sims #simon petrikov #fionna and cake #adventure time

[holeodemony]

I know I've casually mentioned that I use a tape recorder in a previous post about how much TMA has effected my life but. I was not exaggerating.

Just yesterday night I was having a mental breakdown talking to myself about stuffs and then I went, oh shit, I gotta record this.

I fucking paused my disassociated panic attack to run across the house, sit down with my tape recorder, turn the recorder on, say that I was in a shit mental state, and then continue on with my breakdown.

I shit you not I just *paused* the breakdown in order to grab my tape recorder. It shouldn't be funny that no matter what I do I need my recorder, but it kinda is.

I mean, I don't go anywhere without my SONY microcassette-corder M-560V. I don't leave the house with it. I usually keep it with my phone. Hell, I've even left it in my bed because of the recordings I do in order to end the day.

I get anxious whenever I don't have my tape recorder on me. I used to feel that way with my mp3 player, despite the fact that my phone was always more efficent with music, but yeah. I need my tape recorder to *function.*

This is probably unhealthy.

I'm blaming The Magnus Archives.

And myself.

But mostly The Magnus Archives.

#tma #the magnus archives #magnus archives #weird shit my brain does #does this count as the weird brain series(?) I'm doing? #I think this counts. #anyways. yeah #my brain is kinda fucked #but that's okay #tape recorders #audio journaling #weird obsessions #i have no clue what else to put here