Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 106

Two Book Reviews in The Wire

I’ve got two book reviews in the current issue of The Wire, the one with Dave Lombardo of the band Slayer on the cover. I think this is the first time I’ve had two different articles in the same issue of the magazine.

The lead book review in the issue is of Spectral Sounds: Unquiet Tales of Acoustic Weird, published by the British Library and edited by Manon Burz-Labrande. It collects over a dozen old stories that have sound as their raw material, all unseen voices, eerie noises, and demonic instruments. There’s some Edgar Allan Poe in here, and Edith Wharton, but most of the old names were new to me. The primary observation I didn’t have room for in the review is that sound is so prevalent in horror that several of the other books in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, of which Spectral Sounds is part, employ it in the examples shown at the back of the book in the catalogue, and also on the publisher’s website. What distinguishes the stories in Spectral Sounds is that sound is central to each tale’s narrative, rather than just a colorful element of the mood-setting.

Also in the issue, my review of Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks – And What It Can Teach Us, written by Kim Haines-Eitzen and published by Princeton University Press. Major thanks to my old friend Erik Davis for having tipped me off to this.

The issue came out today. I’ll post the full text of the reviews on Disquiet.com when the next issue comes out.

The Bank Manager’s Ear

This is the ear of actor Nobuo Kaneko. The image appears prominently early on in the 1960 Japanese film noir Intimidation (ある脅迫), directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara. What’s shown here is what fills the entire screen. The moment at which this frame appears is a dream sequence. A senior bank employee named Takita, played by Kaneko, has fallen asleep at home after a boozy farewell party. His dream is, in fact, Takita thinking through a heist he intends to perpetrate — a robbery of his own bank. The anxious close-up of the ear occurs as the robbery sequence reaches its climax, and just as the dream is interrupted. 

In the dream, Takita hears an alarm followed by sirens — and then the audio transitions to a phone ringing. (According to the Criterion Channel, which is how I watched Intimidation, this occurs precisely 18 minutes into the film, which is just under one hour and six minutes long.) Takita is frantically trying to open the bank’s door to escape. He awakens only to realize it’s been a dream all along. The audience realizes at the exact same moment that he does that he hasn’t been pulling off the desired heist, but merely dreaming about it, subconsciously enacting an imaginary trial run. Narratively, this is an ingenious way to perform the classic heist story technique, in which we experience the crime twice: first as a blueprint for the operation, then as the actual event, one that almost always goes wrong. 

In the Intimidation dream sequence, we don’t actually see Takita’s face. His identity is hidden from us. Perhaps if Takita had seen his own face in the dream, he’d have woken up. Perhaps the anonymity in the dream simply reflects his underlying desire for the incident to take place without any blunders. Either way, the focus on the ear — and that sweaty brow — just as the sound of reality (the phone) seeps into the dream state (as an alarm) is an indelible moment. In effect, the alarm is an alarm, one that alerts Takita’s sleeping brain to the fact that the phone is ringing. Later on in the film when Takita actually robs the bank, a sonic alert does go off, but it is neither a phone nor the sort of alarms he heard in his dream. It’s simply an alarm clock.

Junto Profile: Mark Rushton

This Junto Profile is part of a new series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.

What’s your name? Mark Rushton.

Where are you located? As of early 2023, I live in the Des Moines, Iowa, metro area — where I grew up. I moved back in the summer of 2022. Working backwards, I’ve lived in Iowa City, Iowa; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Houston, Texas; and Kansas City, Missouri.

I started making music on the computer after a work colleague in Cedar Rapids showed me a loop-based program during the night of Y2K. Also during my time in Cedar Rapids, in 2005, I started a “live ambient improvisational” collective called Ambient Matyk.

What is your musical activity? Starting in the early 2000s, I’ve created and independently published a lot of electronic music, mainly ambient. I also publish downtempo, beats, drones, cut-up technique / spoken word things, and environmental field recordings. These are released under about 20 different names. My catalog contains over 2800 titles.

In the past decade, most of my music has arrived from iOS apps. I started adding effects boxes a few years ago, and I usually live-mix the final recording. Every now and then I’ll put some loops and beats together on the computer, for old time’s sake. I don’t really play an instrument. I avoid MIDI and deep menus.

What is one good musical habit? In a 2011 interview in The Believer magazine, later reprinted in Salon, Brian Eno was asked about what advice he’d give if he could email himself when he was 20 years old. Eno replied, “Put out as much as you can. It doesn’t do anything sitting on a shelf.”

I first read this in 2015. Eno’s advice was a siren call for me. It gave me permission to release under pseudonyms and experiment with different genres, effects boxes, distribution companies, and see how my recordings are discovered on the numerous streaming services. It also inspired me to release the Disquiet Junto recordings I made entirely on my own.

After 20 years, my fun hobby that made no money for a long time turned into an incorporated business. Today, I can support my family with the income. I wouldn’t be where I am today without applying Eno’s advice as a general work philosophy. I don’t think Eno really practices it. Robert Pollard and Chihei Hatakeyama do something similar.

What are your online locations? Most evenings, I’m creating visual art and drinking kefir on my YouTube channel, youtube.com/markrushton. Those live videos are rebroadcast on my Facebook page, Twitch, and other video services that are tied to YouTube. I often talk about music and quote lyrics while working on paintings.

It’s difficult for me to hang out with most musicians, so I don’t do it anymore. I’m enthusiastically pro-streaming, and many aren’t. As far as I’m concerned, distribution is everything, or at least a starting point. It’s a grind to find listeners, especially in the genres I work in, but they’re out there.

What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? I really like 0393, where I made a new composition out of my favorite parts of three previous recordings.

Most of the music I create is original, but every now and then I like to combine past recordings to make something new. It’s like that William S. Burroughs quote, “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.” I’ve been a big fan of Burroughs’ “cut-up technique” since first hearing it around 1986.

Do you think cut-up technique is even more trenchant today than it was in Burroughs’ time? Cut-up, when applied to musical passages and beats, rather than strictly words, became the total basis for turntable-based hip-hop music and then sampling.

Did it take effort, after reading that Eno quote, for you to change your attitude about releasing music, or was it more like a light switch being flipped? The Brian Eno quote arrived to me in 2015 when distribution to streaming services was becoming cheaper and quicker for independent artists. When I started releasing music in 2004, it took forever to get on every digital download service. It’s not like today where you upload your tracks and they’re on Spotify tomorrow and Resso in a few days. Back then, Pandora’s process was curated, you got approved, and then you had to mail them a CD which took months to get digitized and into their system. It was like a 6 month wait.

For Eno to say this in 2011, when the interview was conducted, seems very prescient. Spotify only arrived in the US in the summer of 2011, but it really wasn’t until about 2017 or 2018 when subscription-based streaming services seemed like they were here to stay.

Even though I released more music and sounds after 2015, it took a while to get traction. There were a lot of frustrating hurdles along the way. Looking back, I think the music industry is way better for independent recording artists today in 2023 than even five years ago. People might disagree with me, but I don’t care. I’ve been through the fire.

You also sell your paintings online. Is working in painting commercially similar to doing so with music, or is it quite different? Visual art is like that AC/DC song, “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Want to Rock ‘n’ Roll),” because there’s no wide distribution network. And I wouldn’t say a website that hosts artists or their artworks is a distributor because discovery is a pain. Most visual artists are terrible at marketing online. It’s a hard road. I put things online, but my main focus for this year will be pop-up shows at local events. A lot of my paintings get used as cover art for my sound recordings.

Organ Failure

On Repeat: Synth, Oliveros, Khosla

Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:

▰ Beautiful ambient track from the England-based musician Oscillator Sink, a solo piece on the Lyra-8 synthesizer: droning, slow-motion, grainy atmospherics.

▰ The ensemble Apartment House, founded by the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, has recorded a full album of works by Pauline Oliveros, Sound Pieces, for the Another Timbre record label. Four of its 13 tracks are available to preview on its Bandcamp page. Deeply felt performances, played with admirable patience with patient listeners in mind.

https://anothertimbre.bandcamp.com/album/sound-pieces

▰ Tightrope is a characteristically beautiful and intriguing, in equal parts, album from Michel Banabila, the Rotterdam-based musician. The “rope” in question might be the strings of a violin, given the textured ambient orchestral quality of the music. It begins with tension somewhere between the work of film composers Carter Burwell and Bernard Herrmann, and then unfurls into something graceful and glorious.

https://banabila.bandcamp.com/track/tightrope

▰ Also, Siddhartha Khosla’s music for the new TV show Rabbit Hole (a conspiracy-fueled thriller starring Kiefer Sutherland) is fantastic. It has some of the most unusual instrumentation, glitchiness, and sampling I’ve heard in a major TV production in a long time. I don’t think the score itself has been released yet. I’ve heard and enjoyed his music in Only Murders in the Building and The Mysterious Benedict Society, but this is next level.

Scratch Pad: Jordan, Molvær, Fiction

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means @disquiet@post.lurk.org (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.

▰ You almost have to admire how when DuckDuckGo doesn’t have a useful response it just shoves a bunch of unrelated stuff at you at random.

▰ The laptop keeps changing “mapo tofu” to “mayo tofu” and, well, ick

▰ RIP, saxophonist Kidd Jordan (1935-2023), one of the greats. I think the first time I saw his name may have been as part of the title of the last track (“Kidd Jordan’s Second Line”) on a Dirty Dozen Brass Band record, The New Orleans Album (1990), but I soon grew to learn about how much further out his music went, thanks to his work with Hamiet Bluiett, William Parker, and many others. Here he is live with drummer Andrew Cyrille just four years ago at the Vision Festival in Brooklyn, in June of 2019. Aim to be this vibrant at 84 — or, heck, at any age:

▰ It’s called The New York Times Spelling Bee but it should be called The New York Times Teaches You Random Words for Fish and Plants.

▰ Watching a new Nils Petter Molvær performance means keeping the video open in one tab while tracking down details in another on whoever else is in the band, because the trumpeter has always got great colleagues, here percussionist Erland Dahlen and bassist Berger Myhre.

▰ I read a bunch in March. I finished three novels and a long book of short stories in the process. The novels were Chemistry by Weike Wang, The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz, and Box 88 by Charles Cumming. (I reviewed the short story collection for a magazine, so I’ll wait until it’s out before mentioning the book here.)

Homeland Intelligence

“It is humbling to have your social fluency, your sense of yourself as a competent, independent person, upended by a foreign city.”

That is the narrator of American Spy, a 2019 novel by Lauren Wilkinson, talking not to the reader so much as to her children. The framing device of the book is that it is a tale told by her (a Black American FBI agent who may or may not have once moonlighted for the CIA) to them while she is evading an unseen enemy — as well as interrogating, through flashbacks, what got her family into this troubling situation in the first place. While the stakes in the book are highly personal, much of it hinging on the circumstances surrounding the death, years earlier, of the narrator’s older sister, the scope of the story is international, its second half occurring largely in West Africa.

Her observation about “social fluency” occurs as a response to an earlier situation, back in Manhattan, when the narrator, named Marie Mitchell, was guiding a head of state around the city (that character, Thomas Sankara, is an actual former president of Burkina Faso). The dignitary was flummoxed at the time by the enormity of the city’s noise.

Now the tables have been turned, and Marie is in his country’s capital city, Ouagadougou, finding herself dependent on the kindness of strangers to navigate a place where no sensory input is familiar. “I thought of the afternoon in New York I’d spent with Thomas, the way he’d been surprised when we were in the park and those kids on bikes had whizzed around us,” she reminisces. “He’d sounded embarrassed when he’d said he’d been unable to pick out the bikes from the ambient city noise, and now with a teenager practically leading me through Ouaga by the hand, I thought I understood why.”

As always, writers of fiction about spies need to be good listeners in order for their characters to be. You can fake an NGO. You can fake a counterintelligence operation. You can’t fake paying attention.

Disquiet Junto Project 0588: Swell Time

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, April 10, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 6, 2023.

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

These following instructions went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).

Disquiet Junto Project 0588: Swell Time

The Assignment: Make some surf music

Step 1: We’re going to make some surf music. Thing about the word “surf” separate from the word “music.”

Step 2: Make some surf music inspired by the thoughts that arose in Step 1.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0588” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0588” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0588-swell-time/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long until the tide changes?

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, April 10, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 6, 2023.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 588th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Swell Time (The Assignment: Make some surf music), at: https://disquiet.com/0588/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0588-swell-time/ 

Monochromatic Palimpsest

Much urban doorbell activity speaks of the need for quick fixes — and the results of uninformed, poorly planned ones. The situation here could very well be evidence of casual vandalism. It could also be a quiet moment in the midst of just the sort of jury-rigged, duct-taped upgrades that pedestrians become either inured to or, in my case, fascinated by. Perhaps the tenant or owner is currently at the local hardware store, sorting out a selection. Given the haphazard angle of the board and the monochromatic palimpsest of prior attempts, it’s more likely this will look the same, if not worse, on my next stroll.

New Noise

Sidewalk drain cover, and I support this message