Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 11

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.

On Repeat: Three Live Performances

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening (and, per below, viewing) 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.

▰ Marcus Fischer documented a live solo set with electric guitar and dual reel-to-reel machines circulating a single, extended strand of recording tape. He uses the amps, and the space, and the unique qualities of his equipment to shape sound in real time. Pay particular attention to how he keeps the feedback under control.

▰  An ambient jazz performance by electric guitarist Eivind Aarset’s stellar double-drum band, recorded during their set on May 23, 2025, at Vilnius Mama Jazz Festival. The group features Audun Erlien, bass; Wetle Holte, percussion; and Erland Dahlen, percussion. I’ve found in recent years that I’m listening to fewer studio audio recordings and more live performance videos (which is the primary reason I pay for YouTube’s advertisement-free tier). In chamber music and in jazz especially, watching musicians who’ve played together for a long time is especially appealing and informative.

▰ I know next to nothing about choreography. The extent to which I’ve engaged with the topic is that I interviewed and researched several choreographers for my 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. This performance for two dancers caught my attention because the track they’re dancing to is “The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits” off The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint, by the great trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. The dancers are Sierra Drayton and Kaden Golding, performing a work by Ricky Ubeda, whom I believe to be the same person of that name who apparently won season 11 of So You Think You Can Dance in 2014, the same year the Akinmusire album came out. I don’t know how recent the piece of choreography itself is.

Stigmatic Ambient Music, Update

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Per the above screenshot, if I currently ask Google what “stigmatic ambient music” is, the top link (on the right) listed as a source is a previous blog post of my own, from April 28. In that post, I detailed the absurdity of the idea of this non-genre, which Google’s AI mechanically divined gibberish to justify the existence of when I first inquired. Its broad-strokes response registered like a student who hadn’t studied for finals, let alone read a book all semester.

What is now even more remarkable to me is that the AI actively interprets my negative as a generally applicable positive — a statement documenting certain falsehood becomes, simply due to its presence on the internet, evidence of truth.

When I wrote that original post back in April, there were literally zero search results for “stigmatic ambient music” (with the quotation marks around it) on Google, which was the point of my initial experiment. As of this moment, a little over a month later, Google only returns four (yes, four) non-redundant results in the search return. There will now, as of this follow-up blog post, be a fifth result, and yet Google will likely persist in providing an encyclopedia-like description of something that doesn’t exist — caveat usor, and all that.

Scratch Pad: Frahm, Franklin, Mingus

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.

▰ I thought I’d make a helpful playlist of music I tend to play in the background while working — less listen to than surrender to — and then I realized it’s pretty much just Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon and Nils Frahm’s Music for Animals.

▰ Occasional reminder to myself that 2027 will mark the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s original Junto club, as well as the mere 15th of the Disquiet Junto (and also its 800th consecutive weekly project).

▰ I don’t understand how anyone can enjoy Monopoly. Here’s a game called Cholera, for three or more players. Whoever rolls first dies first. Whoever rolls second dies second. Continue until final player. Final player rolls five times in a row, slowly, and on the fifth roll also dies. The game ends.

▰ I dug the Succession main theme music, even as it reminded me of things I couldn’t quite place. Just yesterday I was listening to a 1956 Charles Mingus album, and one of those things suddenly became apparent: “All The Things You Can C#” (off Mingus at the Bohemia). 

▰ Kind of amazed to wake up to news of a massive fire in the neighborhood, and I hadn’t woken earlier to the resulting sirens

▰ This week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Thorsten Sideboard posted on Bluesky news that the next AAAssembly — that is, the Algorithmic Art Assembly — will happen March 26-28, 2026, back at Gray Area in San Francisco. Stay tuned at aaassembly.org. ▰ Ethan Hein’s been in Memphis for a conference and he’s posting photos on Instagram of culturally charged relics, like the Hammond M3 organ that Booker T. Jones played on “Green Onions.” ▰ Bruce Levenstein posted on Bluesky an advertisement for 1980s computer camps sponsored by Atari that, for an OG TRS-80 owner like myself, provided a nice reminder me that the concept of a “digital native” may date back earlier than the term’s general application suggests. ▰ The DNA Lounge in San Francisco is owned by Jamie Zawinski, a former Netscape coder; he posted on Mastodon about an upcoming performer requiring a half dozen CDJs.

$upporting The Wire

The great music magazine The Wire, fast approaching its 500th issue, due out this October, is suffering financial difficulties. The publication, for which I write on occasion, has set up a donation page, available at a PayPal address, which is also accessible via this QR code. A recent call they put out for donations has put them on better financial standing than they had been, and this new round of donations is to give them a stronger overall foundation. Alternately or additionally, you might subscribe.

And visit The Wire at thewire.co.uk.

Disquiet Junto Project 0701: Gap Ear

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 0701: Gap Ear
The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces.

Step 1: Choose a piece of music (whether your own or something in the public domain) and break it into sequential pieces. You might do this to a recording, or you might place gaps between parts of a notated melody (just to provide two different ways this instruction might be interpreted).

Step 2: Now, fill the various gaps, however many there may be, resulting from Step 1.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0701” (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-0701-gap-ear/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. The finished track will likely be maybe 50% larger than the source material.

Deadline: Monday, June 9, 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 701st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Gap Ear — The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces — at https://disquiet.com/0701/

Chaos and Precision

Half of an upcoming glitch/beats album by MTCH, hkyrbnnpkmdtvovgjr (if something is encoded in that letter slurry, please lemme know), is up now for streaming, and it’s a fantastic set of frazzled IDM, full of heady echoes of Autechre and Monolake, with a vibrant arrhythmia that suggests live coding at work. Here and there are ominous drones, from which snatches of whirling effects, bounding percussion, and cybernetic beats emerge. It’s sound-design techno, breaking noises into fragments and moving them around with the subgenre’s trademark mix of chaos and precision — artisanal pick-up sticks tossed into a cyclone. Tracks like “kjbg” and “5_bstrckt” resemble a sonification of a subroutine attempting to take matters into its own hands (or lack thereof). The full album comes out Friday, June 6, on the label EVEL, which — at least based on its social media and Bandcamp pages — maintains a geographic ambiguity.

Junto Profile: Ángel Luis Martínez

This Junto Profile is part of an ongoing 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? My name is Ángel Luis Martínez.

Spirit Turnpike is my project that I’d like to see perform as a full band someday. I use Professor MTZ (first word is derived from my “day” job) on recordings where my main contribution is mixing other artists’ work.

My first band, and which exists to this day, is The Arawax. It’s where I gained deep confidence and understanding of the bass guitar through folk, punk, and many other influences. We have done concerts together that were fun and well-received.

Currently, I also collaborate with New Haven Improvisers Collective.

Where are you located? I grew up in Brooklyn — specifically in Williamsburg and the adjoining areas in Bed-Stuy. While I played a little guitar, tape recorders and a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard were at the center of my sonic adventures. The sampler also has a synthesizer function to make more sounds. This was the 1980s, so I made mixtapes from radio and TV programs, my own voice, and occasional noodlings on instruments, enjoying especially sampled weirdness from loops. I still have many of those cassettes, so now I sometimes think what, if anything, I can make from them.

What is your musical activity? I have played bass guitar and bass ukulele and sang with The Arawax since 2016, mashing up folk, rock, punk, funk, etc. We have performed in Queens and Philadelphia. I learned a lot about bass playing, especially the high notes so I could hear myself when we practiced.

In 2022, I began to attend the monthly free improvisation workshop series of the New Haven Improvisers Collective (NHIC) at the legendary Never Ending Books in that city. Its openness and dedication to making new music was welcoming and intriguing. In 2023, we began doing monthly showcases as well, many of which have been turned into live recordings. Each month there’s a new one on Bandcamp, except in June & July.

In 2023, I came to Bandcamp and released my music-poem “Non Fungible Tchotchkes,” my answer to the religion of crypto, just as the NFT craze was losing steam. It was part of a 4-track EP with different mixes, including one of me just reciting the poem. Occasionally, though, I find a report that tells me some relevance remains in the piece.

Soon on Substack, I encountered the Labelabel project by Miter (Ryan Stubbs), who produced Salon du Monde, Fremont, a three-part video variety show. I created a video for “Non Fungible Tchotchkes.” It was edited to appear on Episode 2 and as a coda on Episode 3. I was amazed how well that turned out, and it featured a lot of great artists who came together because we were all on Substack.

So how did I find Disquiet Junto? Not long after joining NHIC, I did a search for experimental jazz on the Internet Archive, and learned about Orchestra Eclettica Sincretista. It was through OES maestro Marco Lucchi’s postings that I heard some of his Disquiet contributions, and joined last June.

What is one good musical habit? I make sure I am ready to record ideas that arise. Sometimes I get an idea for a rhythm, a melody, or even song lyrics. I would record these short pieces — even and often for me only seconds long — to make sure I don’t forget how the music sounded to me. Even a phone voice recorder can be useful to make sure ideas are not forgotten.

What are your online locations? Besides Substack and Bandcamp, I pay more attention now to SoundCloud largely because of the Disquiet Junto. National and International Beat Poetry Society’s social media have been great for sharing writings and music. But I have found that email is a great place to share online.

What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? I had long wanted to do a lullaby — and in Spanish — so disquiet0655, Soothing Sounds II, was definitely a meaningful treasure!

“Al Mar, Mi Piratita” (To the Sea, My Little Pirate) was a deep and amazing pleasure for me. I’ve received a lot of acclaim for the piece. And the bonus was when we continued the following week with all our remixes — lullabies for adults, dig? I wasn’t expecting the attention I got for remixing my piece, and that just added to all the memories made possible with the prompt to make soothing sounds!

Are there connections you can draw between writing poetry and making music? Poetry is musical in the sense that the sounds a poet makes is key to understanding the meaning of a poem or even a verse. Musicians and poets choose sounds (represented by words or tones (or atonal sounds) to convey a message, an idea, a feeling, or an attitude.

Both poetry and music can be and are improvised. It’s another set of exercises for poets to consider how to put one word after another, and for musicians to consider how to put one sound after another.

Can you talk a bit more about that music habit of catching ideas as they arise? For example, do the raw recordings generally get replaced with more formal recordings, or do they sometimes become part of the final piece? For the OES collaboration a soliloquy — and some conversations, I was searching for recordings for what I can rework. Instead, I found a forgotten recording of me doing harmonium sounds on a Casio SA-47 (with preset South Asian instrumental sounds) and figured that would work with his track run in reverse. I was pleased with the result.

On Disquiet, “The Tree as the Eye in the Forest” began this way and I largely kept that way, including me moving about at the end. Also, tracks like “Aquidneck” and “Loud Work in Progress” were my own field recordings done by the phone recorder and mixed into the final track.

That said, there are a lot more recordings that I believe may be inspiring for the “formal recordings” later. And I am grateful that I can have them in rough form as a beginning.

Listen to the Code

In a manner of speaking, much electronic music is made entirely in code, whether within standalone physical devices that provide tactile means to control sound digitally, or in software that runs on, say, laptops or phones. And then there are coding systems that allow one to, from the ground up, create what might be thought of as raw software, such as the work GrundTon does in Pure Data (a visual programming language), here making what he calls ambient breakcore. And for a bonus, he posts some of his code on his GitHub. Below you can see (and listen to) a slightly spruced up version of the visual system he is developing. GrundTon is an art and technology student based in Vienna, Austria.