Marc Weidenbaum's Blog

On Repeat: Algorithmic, Aphex, EMF

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ A video of textural synthesis, as a preview of a forthcoming “Procedural Ecosystem” for algorithmic composition, courtesy of Emiliano Pennisi.

▰ Aphex Twin posted a pair of versions of a new track, “Zahl am1,” to his SoundCloud account. Longtime listeners will appreciate familiar sounds.

▰ An album from Steve Hamman of EMF (electromagnetic field) sonic explorations, We Are Bodies of Light, walks cautiously between the poles of gentle and caustic.

Scratch Pad: Ends, Browsers, ‘Hamnet’

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

Right now, though, I’m on a more extended social media (and adjacent) break, through the start of January 2026. Which raises the question: when I’m on such a hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since it is by definition a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week. Apparently it’s random notes I made to myself that I would have posted online. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts. I’m nearly done with a full week off work, but my time off social media — my time with fewer threads of conversations to track — has a full month to go.

▰ At a concert recently, the music was deep and sinuous, and the interplay of the musicians was exactly what one might hope for. I closed my eyes and I didn’t drift off, not in the slightest; if anything, I was more present. And something occurred to me in my presentness, which was: You know, at some point we all have to go, and there would be worse ways to go. (I mean I hope way down the road, of course.)

▰ I’ve found that the Safari browser and the Zen browser have been working very slowly on my M1 MacBook Pro (I know the M5s are coming out, but I’m trying to hold out until the M6), so I’m testing the Vivaldi browser, which has been working well on my laptop and my iPhone, but when I pull up the settings on my iPad (M5 iPad Pro, running current iPadOS) to sync, I get … a blank screen. There is never a day when nothing doesn’t work.

▰ I’m playing the video game Split Fiction currently (on PS5), and it’s split between fantasy mode and science fiction mode. A pair of characters represent the two storytelling types, and they have to learn to work together (as in It Takes Two — from the same company, Hazelight Studios — which I’ve also played). It’s a lot of fun, and tropes have reinforced for me that I’m very much a science fiction mode person, though I do have plans to try to re-read The Lord of the Rings this coming year.

▰ There is a certain type of movie that brings out people who go to the movies so infrequently that they can’t navigate movie theaters, and I can confirm from recent personal experience that Hamnet is just such a movie. And it differs from the novel on which it is based — and which I did enjoy quite a bit — in various ways, including the absence of the great flea/plague chapter, on screen tidily summarized with shadow puppets. It may fit into the category of films in which “screaming is acting.” There is a powerful depiction of how Hamlet expresses Shakespeare’s grief at the loss of a child, and how by having to be a ghost visiting the still alive Hamlet, Shakespeare-the-actor can address his own personal trauma and make it something that his audience can, in turn, experience — which, to bring things full circle, keeps his son present, if not alive; not a ghost, but a memory. There’s a moment at the end, when the play is staged, that is clearly intended to evoke something that happens early in the movie, and I kept thinking, “Please don’t show us a flashback. We remember. It’s only been two hours.” And I’m relieved to say, there was no flashback to this particular thing. There are other flashbacks, but at least not that one. And Max Richter’s score is quite beautiful, even if they do reuse an old piece of his music.

▰ You can tell it’s a long holiday weekend because there are far fewer than usual software updates.

▰ Perhaps the iPad has been this way for a while, but I noticed that now the up/down volume functions differently in profile and landscape modes. In portfolio mode, the “top” button (aka “left” in landscape) raises the volume, and likewise in landscape mode the “right” button (aka “bottom” in profile) lowers the volume. This is as it should be.

▰ Word I learned from Moby Dick this week: “hist.” And now I’m wondering if the shushers in the final scene in (the film version of) Hamnet are saying “hist.” And whether this bled into the “ssst” that people now say when shushing people.

▰ Finished reading one book this week, Mick Herron’s Clown Town. It’s quite good. Almost done with several others, among them Blood Meridian, Moby Dick, and Laurie Colwin’s excellent Goodbye Without Leaving (which was recommended to me by N+1’s annual bookmatch).

A Message from “Rudy”

I have a few pieces in the works for the awesome hilobrow.com website. The latest to see publication is for Skank Your Enthusiasm, a collection of 25 people writing about our favorite ska records. Contributors include Lucy Sante, Douglas Wolk, Carl Wilson, Annie Zaleski, Heather Quinlan, and the series’ editor, Josh Glenn — and me. I wrote about “Rudy, a Message to You” originally by Dandy Livingstone (aka Robert Livingstone Thompson). The first section appears below. The full piece is at hilobrow.com.

Read the full piece at is at hilobrow.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0726: Chord of Omnis

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0726: Chord of Omnis
The Assignment: Make music with a browser-based Omnichord as your sole sound source.

Step 1: In the early 1980s, an instrument called the Omnichord was introduced by Suzuki. There is now a browser-based version at onlineomnichord.com.

Step 2: Make some music using only the online Omnichord as your sound source.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0726” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0726-chord-of-omnis/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, December 1, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 726th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chord of Omnis — The Assignment: Make music with a browser-based Omnichord as your sole sound source — at https://disquiet.com/0726/.

Italy Glitch

A nice little slice of glitchy atmospheric IDM, all done up in the visual audio programming language Pure Data. Watch (and listen) along as text and graphic elements are navigated in service of this sci-fi–tinged excursion, in which the pace is ever-shifting. The piece is by Artiom Constantinov, who’s based in Italy. More at artiomconstantinov.bandcamp.com and artiomconstantinov.wordpress.com.

Close to the Edge

Walked to the edge of the world and back. Hibernation mode is real.

5 Albums to Work To (Ambient Zone)

I’m not much of a list-maker, especially lists with “best” in the name. I do submit lists, at the end of the year, to The Wire and to Pitchfork, but I don’t take a lot of pleasure in compiling them. For each record I name, there are a dozen I could slot in, and a hundred I haven’t heard. I participate because it’s nice to be asked, and because I do want to root for albums that might not otherwise be noticed, and to add my voice in favor of those that have been, especially those only by a few other people. I find end-of-year lists are all the more interesting years later, when I might look back and spot things I no longer listen to, and gaps that seem canonical in retrospect but hadn’t, to me, at the time. In other words, they’re especially interesting in the ways I find them lacking, not necessarily for what they include.

Also, lists are also a cornerstone of all kinds of online activity. When in Listville, it can help to learn how to talk lists. By way of example I’ve been peeking around, lately, both Amaya Lim’s Turntable (see: turntable.amayalim.com; her newsletter is recordstore.substack.com) and record.club (which I mentioned this past weekend), two means of reinvigorating the social media aspect of listening to recorded music. I’m @disquiet on both, and both are focused on lists. To that end, I put a little list together of music that habitually have playing during daylight hours — what I described, at record.club/disquiet, as “five albums to work to when you need music that can create the sonic equivalent of a wool-lined space in which to get stuff done.”

First and foremost on this list is Nils Frahm’s Music for Animals, which benefits from a combination of consistency and length, and how its ambient quality has a rhythmic pulse. Then comes Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, which used to be my headphones-during-work go-to, until it became too familiar, and thus a little distracting. Considering that Thursday Afternoon came out in 1985 (and was one of the first CDs, if not the first, I ever bought), the thing took decades for me to penetrate it to the point where I could consider it familiar, let alone knowable. The three others on my work-listening list are Max Richter’s Sleep, which despite the title need not be thought of as somnolent, Éliane Radigue’s glacial Trilogie de la Mort, and that proto-ambient-jazz classic, Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way.

On Repeat: Jakobsons, Reider, Stars of the Lid

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Marielle V Jakobsons has a new album due out on Thrill Jockey. The record, The Patterns Lost to Air, doesn’t arrive until late February 2026, but a first track, the opener, “Warm Spring,” is up now. It was made with, primarily, violin, Fender Rhodes, and Moog Matriarch, and it is a fully formed exploration of slowly evolving melodies and broken reflections.

▰ Autechre’s music is sometimes described as the sound of things breaking down, so it is somewhat ironic that C. Reider, who opened for Autechre on their October 1 Denver tour date, found afterward that “the recording of the performance was ruined by a bad cable.” Unruffled, he set about re-recording the set, now titled New Impossibilities, and then uploaded it to his Bandcamp account. It’s a half hour of rhapsodic noise table activities: buzzing whirs, churning substrata, crunching irritants. Good stuff.

▰ There is a new Stars of the Lid fan site at starsofthelidforever.com that documents, to date, nearly 20 live shows by the ambient duo, which consisted of Adam Wiltzie and the now deceased Brian McBride. Definitely check out the 2008 set from Echoplex in Los Angeles, for which they performed, along with other pieces, Arvo Pärt’s “Frartes” and some of Alexandre Desplat’s score for the film Syriana. (Thanks, Paul Ashby, for letting me know about it.)

Scratch Pad: Ho, Slip, Club

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

Right now, though, I’m on a more extended break, through the start of January 2026. Which raises the question: If I’m on a social media (and adjacent) hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since it is by definition a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week. Apparently it’s random notes I made to myself that I would have posted online. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts

▰ I just got to the point in Mick Herron’s latest Slow Horses novel, Clown Town, where Roddy Ho appears to be singing the theme song to the TV show (“losers and boozers”), and Lech, overhearing him, says, “Working on your theme song?” Fan service at its finest. I also understand from an interview I saw with the actor who plays Ho, Christopher Chung, that he is quite the vocalist. Nice touch setting him up to sing when this eventually becomes an episode.

▰ I’ve realized I’ve gotten into this habit of listening to the second track of an album first, because so many albums have the first track as a sort of intro thing, and I want to drop right into the thick of it. I eventually do hear the first track, because I tend to listen on loop, so eventually it comes back around to the first track — but often, oddly, it’s the last track I’ll hear.

▰ My lizard brain recognized that parts of the melodies of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” (1966) and the theme song to the TV show H.R. Pufnstuf (1969) are quite similar, and my current earworm is a mashup thereof.

▰ I’ve watched several review videos of these screen protectors for iPads that give it a paper-like quality. And the reviewers frequently mention how the material “sounds like paper,” as per this screenshot.

▰ There is a newsletter (Substack) from Liz Harris (aka Grouper). (Thanks, Pablo Flouret!)

▰ Something I typed yielded both “breaking“ and “healing” as options. That is verging on literary quantum superposition. Schrödinger’s dictionary.

▰ Tired: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life

Wired: This Morning Backblaze Saved My MP3 Hard Drive

▰ And speaking of social media, there is an odd void in streaming music. One of the best parts of the long defunct rdio, which lasted from my birthday in 2020 until the end of 2015, was how you could track what friends were listening to. Soundcloud, likewise, early on had a “groups” function, which the service dispensed with. There’s a new service, called record.club, which describes itself as “a social music network.” The founders seem pretty self-aware, per the FAQ: “The obvious comparison is Goodreads and Letterboxd (or for that matter, Rate Your Music).” (There’s also a This Is My Jam vibe, etc., etc.) And: “Sure, that sounds a bit vague—but that’s the point.” I’m on at record.club/disquiet. I may post some additional thoughts as I explore it. I’m somewhat list-averse, so this may not be for me, but we’ll see.

▰ According to the November 20 New York Times Mini Crossword, “skip” is a colloquial noun for a “Song on an album that you always avoid.” I didn’t know this was in common usage.

Digital Cozy

Just some thoughts about this end-of-year semi-retreat I take from digital life:

Life is inherently digital these days, so it’s not like I’ve turned off my computers, unplugged the television, or — let alone and — put my phone in a safe. I make no claims to using my devices significantly less often. In fact, just this week I upgraded my second generation iPad Pro to this year’s model, aiming to take advantage of the laptop-like benefits of iPadOS 26, aka Tahoe.

I’m not really that concerned about the extent to which I use personal technology. I already read a lot of books. I already go for walks. I go to concerts and spend time at museums. I may not spend ten minutes with a single piece of art, but I can easily do five. I have meals with friends. I spend much of my non-work hours with family. In other words, the main break that I take at the end of the year is that of digital connection to other people. Even then, I’m still checking email. I still work. I’m vaguely responding to DMs, though because I turned off social media I find many go missing for extended periods of time.

The distinction here is what I think of as “formal social media,” or “immediate social media” — by which, for my purposes, I mean the likes of Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. These are technological platforms in which much of the response cycle is short and rapid. For good measure, I also fold into this category of social media a solid number of the email lists, Discords, and BBSs (most founded on Discourse) I’m part of. I’m not a purist about just about anything, including this segment of digital activity. There are a couple book discussion groups I participate, between email and Discord, that I won’t be turning a blind eye to, simply because I want to continue those asynchronous conversations.

What I am turning down, if not off, is the number of conversations — especially the explicitly short-term ones inherent in social media — that I participate in. I’ll almost certainly re-up come January. For now, the respite is, first and foremost, cozy. Digital cozy.