Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 10

Samson Young at SFMOMA

A friend some time back shared a photo of an object in the current installation by artist Samson Young, Intentness and song, that is on view at SFMOMA (December 21, 2024 – June 22, 2025). I first encountered Young’s work when I reviewed Seeing Sound, an exhibit curated by Barbara London at the Kadist gallery here in San Francisco back in mid-2021. This new Young exhibit is a sizable space filled with ephemera, notably small gadgets that emit little bits of light and sound, much of it on tight loops, all of which resists easy mental collation. I was touched to find old familiar gadgets, like an Apple Newton and a Sony MiniDisc player, in the mix, as well as this book by the late sound artist Steve Roden, i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces. Young seemed to have excavated his own memory palace and created a vaguely Lego-like zone of contemplation.

Ruth Asawa at SFMOMA

The Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA is a dozen shades of fantastic. I fear it’s becoming cliché to note it, but with the sculptures, the physical objects are only part of the story. The shadows carry a lot of the weight, so to speak. And it’s really the interplay where things happen. It’s like the sculptures are the guitar solo, and the shadows are the result of delay and reverb pedals.

On Repeat: Cimini, Tasselmyer, Frisell

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.

▰ Amy Cimini has been recording since the early 2000s, and yet See You When I Get There — its title suggesting a certain amount of belatedness — is her first solo album, and it’s a solo viola record, to boot, exploring a range of timbre, textures, and techniques, with an emphasis on noise and and electronic mediation. Cimini is also the author of Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life.

▰ I don’t focus enough on iPad music-making here, though I listen to a bunch, and many musicians I pay attention to include it prominently in their set-ups. This is Andrew Tasselmyer at work sampling and looping, as he puts it, in real time. Watch as it proceeds.

▰ This is a new-to-me (and newly uploaded) streaming bootleg of Bill Frisell playing solo at the Jazz Standard in Manhattan on November 21, 2019, just pre-pandemic:

Scratch Pad: Neighbor Band, Hate-Shazaming

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.

▰ Kudos to whoever on the Poker Face team ran the episode 7, season 2, credits in the typeface from the movie Heat

▰ It appears a drummer now lives near the tiny office I rent. I think I can work with this, as traffic noise and distance muffle much of it. Headphones can manage the remainder. I mean, someone can’t practice drums all day. Right? Right??

▰ So much of my favorite music is glitch. Thelonious Monk is piano glitch. Kid Koala is turntable glitch. Gregorian chant and early polyphony are architectural glitch. Janis Joplin is vocal glitch. I love when the fragility of engineering is put to purposeful use.

▰ The recent documentary (really more like a commissioned group memoir) Becoming Led Zeppelin was very enjoyable, and it was fun to be reminded of Jimmy Page having, in his early work as a session musician, done work on Muzak. I’d love if some superfan had managed to track down the specific material he contributed to.

▰ Keeping an eye on my Mac Mini via Screen Sharing on an iPad connected to my MacBook via Sidecar is my mundane version of Inception

▰ My Shazam is 90% music I disliked so much I had to find out what it was (maybe call this habit “hate-Shazaming”), and 10% stuff I loved but couldn’t identify, half of that originating from the inside of taco trucks

▰ I am far more up for this Superman movie than I expected to be. The trailer roll-out is doing its job. I mean, the teeth making a sound when they hit the camera after being knocked out by a punch (at 1:15)? Bonus points for major Frank Quitely vibes. Sign me up.

▰ Update: the drummer who moved near (but not too near!) the little office I rent appears to have made a bassist friend. They dig Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath.

▰ This hold music is like a weaponized lullaby

▰ Update: The drummer near my little rental office skipped a day of practice, but filling the void was someone a few buildings away screaming on a phone for so long and so intensely that someone in a neighboring office started laughing.

▰ Finished reading one book this week: The Mushroom at the End of the World by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Well into several others, including the second Bosch and Stephen King’s The Long Walk, and probably too many others to count.

▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Tom Gauld posted, on Instagram, a four-panel comic involving the sound of a fountain pen, and I won’t give away the ending. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!) ▰  Robin Fox, on Instagram, posted the internal organs of a 1939 instrument, the Hammond Novachord, that contains no fewer than 163 (!) vacuum tubes. ▰ The account that goes by c1t1zen had a funny response, on Threads, to my latest doorbell post.

Clicking with Neal Stephenson (1994)

Every few years I re-read “Spew,” the Neal Stephenson story published in the magazine Wired in 1994. It’s still online, as are we all.

“Spew” is a prescient if purposefully exaggerated consideration of what was already called the “social graph” but wouldn’t achieve poisonous fruition until Facebook and its ilk took off a decade-plus later. Here, in a story of hyper-focused advertising, Stephenson gets close, with the term “social web.” Gmail, which scanned people’s emails to produce targeted ads (as may Yahoo and other email providers to this day, apparently), wouldn’t launch for another 10 years. Stephenson in “Spew” took early note of what we today term surveillance capitalism.

He also paid attention to the ability to turn the tools of internet-connected observance on oneself. YouTube, foreseen here in some technology-intensive live-streaming, debuted the year after Gmail, in 2005. Back in 1994, this idea was, one might recall, still a stretch: “You have turned your room — my room — into a broadcast station,” the narrator exclaims believably. Twitch didn’t surface until 2011.

The subjects of Stephenson’s premonitions include his own future work. He calls the troubling sludge that is the foreseen horrible Internet (capitalized back then) the Spew, not unlike the Miasma, as it would be labeled decades later in his novel Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (2019).

I recently re-read Stephenson’s novel Cryptonomicon, so my eyes were primed to notice, this time around, Stephenson’s use in “Spew” of the word “gomer” to mean someone old, embarrassing, and ultimately disposable. In Cryptonomicon, that word is half the name of a furniture company, Gomer Bolstrood, which later appears (earlier chronologically) in his Baroque Cycle. So, while the tone of “gomer” is different, the usage in “Spew” is very much this story’s narrator’s perspective of something out of date.

There are some great lines throughout, such as this one, echoing the Rolling Stones’ classic anti-advertising/consumerist rant, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”: “I can tell you’re cool because your water costs more than your beer.”

I mention “Spew” now because this following section of the story stood out to me in a way it hadn’t on previous reads. Note how the fetishized fine-tuning of sound design provides a tactile quality and utility in an increasingly frictionless media landscape:

Click. Course, it never really clicks anymore, no one has used mechanical switches since like the ’50s, but some Spew terminals emit a synthesized click — they wired up a 1955 Sylvania in a digital sound lab somewhere and had some old gomer in a tank-top stagger up to it and change back and forth between Channel 4 and Channel 5 a few times, paid him off and fired him, then compressed the sound and inseminated it into the terminals’ fundamental ROMs so that we’d get that reassuring click when we jumped from one Feed to another. Which is what happens now; except I haven’t touched a remote, don’t even have a remote, that being the whole point of the Polysurf. Now it’s some fucker picking a banjo, ouch it is an actual Hee Haw rerun, digitally remastered, frozen in pure binary until the collapse of the Universe.

You can read the full story at wired.com/1994/10/spew, though that may be behind a paywall.

Disquiet Junto Project 0702: Chain of Applications

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 0702: Chain of Applications
The Assignment: Make music by misusing a piece of music software.

This project is the second of three that are being done by the Disquiet Junto in collaboration with the 2025 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 3 through 7. The festival topic this year is « Kette » — which translates, as the organization explains, to “Chain”: “Chains connect but they also bind. They create relationships but also restrictions. As a gift they look nice, feared when used in vice, and yet they can span bridges across fire and ice.” All three Junto projects will engage with the work of Svetlana Maraš, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 festival.

We are working again at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the seventh year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

There is only one step in this project:

Select a piece of software, preferably one you use regularly, and misuse it in the service of recording a piece of music.

Note: If you don’t generally use software, then misuse something else you regularly use when making music.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0702” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0702-chain-of-applications

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, June 16, 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 702nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Applications — The Assignment: Make music by misusing a piece of music software — at https://disquiet.com/0702/

David Lynch’s Objects & Aura

There’s an auction for personal items from the life and work of the late filmmaker David Lynch. I’m relieved to not harbor much of an attachment to objects that are accompanied by what Walter Benjamin might have described as the aura of previous ownership — all the more so given the apparent uptick in price such an aura can incur.

However, given Lynch’s extended interest both in sound and in music-making, I was intrigued by what may be for sale, so I scrolled through the auction listings. In addition to lots of guitars (including a four-in-one combo) and guitar pedals, and even a Stylophone and a hybrid Indian instrument called a Swar Sangam, a few things did stand out:

A solid-state Moviola 1027C Tape Reader:

A 1930s Western Electric RA-1142 transmitter ribbon microphone, in a quite awesome sound department case:

A Theremin by Tony Bassett of No.1 Electronics. Note the “Space Trip Passport” on the rear further below:

The auction begins June 18, 2025, at 10am Pacific Time in Los Angeles at juliensauctions.com.

This Way or That

Two options per apartment

Lost in the Clouds

It’s been nearly three years since the excellent synthesizer musician r beny posted a video on his YouTube channel, and he returned on June 9 with an exploration of a specific approach, using a popular module to simulate low-fidelity tape delay. The result is the slowly decaying sound of what originates as a clearly plucked instrument. The plucking remains for a while, but it is eventually all but smothered by its processed aftermath. More from beny at Instagram and Bandcamp. Oh, and there’s no talking in the video. He just plays.

The Tragedy of Home Audio

I spent a chunk of Sunday afternoon getting my old, secondhand Mac Mini that I employ as a central home jukebox running properly again.

The computer hadn’t stopped working, per se. I could still listen to the music files on it remotely — both at home and away from home — on my phone, laptop, and iPad. I could — when at home — add to the computer’s hard drive new music files from albums I’ve purchased or received advance copies of from musicians, record labels, and publicists. I could also play the tracks at home from the living room television, because the software I use to keep track of my ever-growing digital library/archive/collection has an app that appears as part of the television’s interface.

However, two things had stopped working in this somewhat fragile system:

First of all, the Mac Mini’s physical audio jack was no longer sending music to the living room amplifier, which is, in turn, connected to a proper pair of speakers, which sound better than the television’s speakers.

Second of all, the secondary software service that I use to keep the library of music files backed up in the cloud had stopped working.

The existence of these two issues was ironic, because I had spent lunch the week prior with an old friend providing some advice to him about how to manage the modern hassle that is maintaining a personal audio library of digital files.

By the end of Sunday afternoon, one of those two problems had been fixed, the first of them. I made an attempt at sorting out the second issue, the cloud one, and my efforts didn’t appear to do the trick, so I’ll try again soon.

I run my Mac Mini “headless,” which means without a screen. It sits on a shelf below the television alongside the amplifier and record player and CD player, etc., just a modestly proportioned aluminum box with some cables coming out of it, including those connecting to small external hard drives.

When I do need to access the Mac to actually use it as a computer, which is infrequently, the process is a minor hassle.

First, I have to attach a small wired keyboard and a small wired mouse that connect via USB.

Second, I have to hook up my iPad to serve as a screen. An iPad can’t serve directly as a screen, and the software options for doing so are better when the iPad is serving as a secondary screen, not a primary one. To use the iPad as the sole screen for the Mini, I employ an app along with a special dongle called a “video capture card,” which attaches to the iPad via USB, and then connects to the HDMI cable coming out of the computer.

Now, the first rule of tech support is to make sure your software is up to date, and neither the Mini’s operating system nor the music library software was, which seemed odd, since I was pretty sure I had set both to update automatically. I took care of these updates immediately.

The second rule of tech support is to reboot the computer, which I did as well.

After I did steps one and two, the playback-through-audio-jack issue had been solved. The backup issue remains. And there are two additional things I want to sort out: (1) how to add files to the Mac Mini when I’m not at home, and (2) how to remotely access the full Mac Mini at home with my laptop (that’s in contrast with merely dragging files to it over the wifi network), so I don’t have to do the whole iPad/dongle routine each time I need to actually do something to the machine beyond filling up its drives.

I haven’t yet mentioned the specific software I use, because the situation is fairly generic and lots of tools do the trick. For the record, I use Plex (plex.tv) as the server and Backblaze (backblaze.com) for backup, and on the iPad I use an app simply called “HDMI” (apps.apple.com) to serve as a second screen. I have experimented with Tailscale (tailscale.com) for the remote access I mentioned, but haven’t managed to get it to work.

The moral of this story is that the music industry remains broken. While it’s the case that streaming causes lots of financial and cultural damage, the alternative scenario has its own shortcomings, which have nothing to do with streaming. The main opposite of streaming music is to own your own digital files of music you have purchased. However, there are no simple means by which everyday listeners can take the files they’ve acquired, and play them back with the ease that used to be the case with LPs and cassettes and CDs and so on. There was a brief period of time when iTunes did the job, but the era of iTunes has long since passed.

I remain hopeful that someone will try to do something to answer this ongoing problem. None of the existing solutions do so sufficiently, except perhaps for those of us who are willing to give over our Sunday afternoons to trying to fix something and who will be satisfied when only half the fixing has been completed. Listening to music shouldn’t be reserved for tinkerers.