Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 110

Disquiet Junto Project 0584: Generations

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, March 13, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 9, 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 0584: Generations

The Assignment: Bridge a gap in your musical taste.

Step 1: Think of a sort of music you enjoy now that a much younger you might not have.

Step 2: Think of a sort of music that younger you enjoyed that you no longer are as fond of.

Step 3: Compose a piece of music that bridges the gap or otherwise finds common ground between the two types of music from Step 1 and Step 2.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0584” (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 “disquiet0584” (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-0584-generations/

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.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 13, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 9, 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 584th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Generations (The Assignment: Bridge a gap in your musical taste), at: https://disquiet.com/0584/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0584-generations/

Corridor Take

No matter how many photos I take in the same spot, the first one is almost always my favorite, and the last one is never my favorite. There may be a lesson in that, huh?

Ideal Computing Environment

Junto Profile: Aethyr

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? I prefer to just go by Aethyr, rather than my legal name. I’ve released music solo under a variety of names in the past (Care of Machine, Anechoic Frame, Schrödinger’s Dog, probably others I’m forgetting) but use Aethyr for everything now. Within the last few years I’ve tried to unify all my creative work under the same name, and used that for social media and other points of contact as well; much as I hate to say it, I suppose this is “building a brand.”

I feel more comfortable using this alias, not out of any intention to be deceptive, but because it enables me to be more truly myself. Using my legal name feels more like something that’s a bureaucratic obligation rather than something that really identifies me.

I’ve only worked with others on music on a few occasions, and mostly that’s been in the form of remixing or otherwise reworking something they’ve made. This is not out of selfishness or egotism but just lack of opportunity; I would not be opposed to being in a musical group, but the chance has never arisen, so the great majority of my work has been solo.

Where are you located? I live in Sheffield in the UK, and have been here for nearly 25 years now. I originally moved here for university (which didn’t pan out) and didn’t expect to stay here for too long, but evidently plans changed. It’s where I’ve done all my “serious” music making, and I’m fond of the city; I’ve made a lot of connections here. It wasn’t a factor in my initial decision to move here, but Sheffield has some important musical heritage that has certainly been an influence on my own work; among other things, synthpop acts like the Human League and Heaven 17 are from here, along with industrial groups such as Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA. The “bleep techno” genre arguably originated in Sheffield, and Warp Records had their HQ here for many years. Of course, some of these were around before I lived here, but I feel connected to that history.

I was born in Greater London and lived there for some years, until we moved to Leeds for my father’s work. It was there that I made my first forays into making music; I first started trying to learn guitar (which I’m still no good at), and I used some rather primitive music software on our home computer, an Atari ST. Later, as a teenager, I found great enjoyment in using the Music series of games for the PlayStation — also known as MTV Music Generator — and I suppose those are my first real tracks. I recently discovered that there is still a small but thriving community using this software, which I’m hoping to explore further.

Aethyr‘s online avatar

What is your musical activity? As mentioned in the last question, I’ve been working on music in some capacity since my teens. I’ve never had any formal musical education, so everything I’ve done has been self-taught; at times I wonder if this means I can sometimes approach things from an angle that someone who knows the “right” way wouldn’t think of, but at others I think it just means I make more mistakes.

After using those PlayStation titles, I moved on to eJay (which was largely the same thing but for computers), then used ACID for many years, with much of my music being based around arrangements of samples, until I branched out into more fully-fledged DAWs. In the last 12 months or so I’ve started using Bitwig Studio as my main software. In terms of the kind of music I make, I don’t like to confine myself to any particular genre, though I hope each piece has a little of my own style to it. I’ve tried making many different kinds of tracks, though I’ve had probably the most success with more experimental and ambient works, and least enjoyed my attempts at anything adhering too strictly to genre conventions, particularly when I’ve tried to make commercial/mainstream EDM (largely to see if I could). I’ve recently been trying to prove (to myself, if no one else) that it’s possible to make good metal music using a DAW, and have had some success in that regard. I’m also very excited about the possibilities of AI in terms of music creation, and have already made numerous experiments using those kinds of tools — but there’s still much to learn.

What is one good musical habit? I think the best piece of advice I can give is “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” Which is to say, it’s better to have a piece of music “good enough” and finished rather than endlessly chasing perfection. The Junto has been helpful to me in this regard, because the limited time for each project naturally imposes a restriction on how much each track can be polished. Indeed, I often challenge myself to complete Junto projects as rapidly as possible.

Also, if you can, I think it’s smart to keep everything you make, no matter how rough or sketchy it might be — you never know when it might come in useful. Of course, this can be easier said than done, with storage media always prone to failure, but I wish I’d been more careful about preserving my early work.

What are your online locations? I use Twitter (@Aethyrulf) but that’s about the only social media I’m active on. For my music, I use Soundcloud (soundcloud.com/aethyrulf) regularly, and I have a Bandcamp (aethyrulf.bandcamp.com) with far too many completed records that I’m too anxious to set to go live. I maintain a presence on a few art sites, as I’m also a 3D artist and occasional photographer, and besides that I regularly find myself as a viewer on Twitch and YouTube.

What Was a Particularly Meaningful Junto Project? One that sticks in my memory was the 20th project, “Nodebeat,” perhaps because it took an inordinate amount of work — the prompt required the use of a smartphone app, and at the time I didn’t own such a device, so I had to use the web version and figure out a way to extract the audio from that. I had to jump through a lot more hoops to get that track working, which at the time felt like more trouble than it was worth (and would be too lengthy to describe here), but in retrospect it’s probably among my favourite pieces now.

Pleasingly, quite recently, I was able to make a companion piece/follow-up to that track, in project 0562. I feel like the two complement each other very nicely, even if they came a decade apart.

You mention the idea of making metal with a DAW. Given your interest in exploring numerous genres, what are your thoughts on the way specific technologies, tools, or instruments lend themselves to specific genres? This is actually something I like to play around with. I find there can often be an interesting result if I use an instrument, effect, or what have you, that doesn’t “fit” or “belong” with the genre of the piece. Sometimes, of course, it sounds absolutely terrible and I have to abandon that idea, but there’s a certain satisfaction in deliberately using the “wrong” things and still having the track come out well. In the same vein, I enjoy mixing otherwise conventional elements of very disparate genres, which has been the subject of at least a couple of Junto projects.

Although a certain sound or instrument or whatever might lend itself to a particular genre, nothing says that it can’t be turned to a completely different one. The measure of success, to my mind at least, is whether the end result sounds good, not what went into creating it.

I remember reading something from John Cage that there is nothing actually different about a “musical” sound versus a “non-musical” sound; sounds are just sounds. I like to bear this in mind when making music, because it means any sound at all might be useful in any given piece. In a way it’s intimidating, because you have the choice from anything in the world, but at the same time it’s also liberating for the same reason.

I’m also interested in software recreations of particularly unusual and/or rare instruments; I’d collect physical ones too if money (and space!) were no object. This is not being obscure for its own sake, but I’ve found a lot of these kinds of instruments have unique characteristics that can’t be found elsewhere.

On Repeat: Husebø, Necks, Danger Mouse

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

▰ Years of Ambiguity from keyboardist Kjetil Husebø teams the musician with electronically enhanced guitarist Eivind Aarset and equally post-human trumpeter Arve Henriksen. Seven tracks deep in the territory first homesteaded by Miles Davis and Jon Hassell.

▰ It’s sort of amazing when one of your favorite bands puts out a new album and it becomes of your favorites. Such is the gift that is the Necks‘ ambient jazz set Travel, which manages to be blissful and funky, soulful and ethereal, often all at the same time.

https://thenecksau.bandcamp.com/album/travel

▰ I’ve been really digging Cheat Codes, the team-up of Danger Mouse and Black Thought, especially “Strangers,” the full version of which adds rappers A&AP Rocky and the duo Run the Jewels to the mix — and which, in its locked-groove minimalism, is also the source of one of the most intense instrumental tracks from the album.

Scratch Pad: Lightning, Lucier, Reaping

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 post.lurk.org (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.

▰ My childhood: the delay between lightning and then the thunder

My adulthood: the delay between lighting and then the app on my phone that tells me there was lighting nearby and then the thunder

▰ The rain is so intense it sounds like I’m inside a dishwasher

▰ I love that there’s an app called Lightning Pro because it suggests a presumption of amateur lightning

▰ Honk if you’re listening to the new Necks album, Travel

▰ Long day. TV doing it thing from another room. Dryer droning intently in what must be Ridley Scott cycle. In the back, so no cars passing. The rain is on pause, so none of nature’s white noise. Bliss.

▰ Yo, book peeps. Anyone out there read both Convenience Store Woman (2016) by Sayaka Murata and Chemistry (2017) by Weiki Wang? I read (and loved) the Murata, and I started the Wang this week. A lot of interesting parallels.

▰ Alvin Lucier, but from his next door neighbor’s perspective

▰ I’m trying out the terminal tool Tut as a means to post to Mastodon. This is Tut:

https://github.com/RasmusLindroth/tut.

Like a lot of terminal options, it feels more like a party trick than a useful tool, but it’s pretty nifty.

▰ How weird that the Great Expectations trailer doesn’t mention Charles Dickens

▰ I’m pretty sure someone in the neighborhood has a marimba and I’m very happy about it

▰ Whew, Wayne Shorter and David Lindley in one week. The Grim Reaper is working overtime and has impeccable taste.

Weekend Plans

Weekend plans with Wildfire Laboratories (wildfirelaboratories.com). And if someone has a used Lucy Says No (same manufacturer) module up for grabs, please let me know. Thanks. I’d appreciate it.

Disquiet Junto Project 0583: Wall to Wall

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, March 6, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 2, 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 0583: Wall to Wall

The Assignment: Use a building as a filter.

Step 1: You’re going to use a wall in a building, perhaps your workplace or residence, as a filter. Consider these instructions carefully before selecting the appropriate wall. Some trial and error may be required.

Step 2: You’re going to record a track in which the rhythmic element is heard through a wall. That is: you’ll record the rhythm track, and then play it loud from another room (or outside), and record what it sounds like as separated by a wall. Choose a wall.

Step 3: Record the rhythm, track.

Step 4: Re-record the rhythm track from Step 3 by playing it on one side of a wall and recording from the other side of that wall.

Step 5: Record a piece of music using the recording from Step 4 as the foundational rhythm track.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0583” (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 “disquiet0583” (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-0583-wall-to-wall/

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. 

Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 6, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 2, 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 583rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Wall to Wall (The Assignment: The Assignment: Use a building as a filter), at: https://disquiet.com/0583/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0583-wall-to-wall/

Listening Through Box 88

Coming off the dark intensity of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, I’m treating myself to the simple pleasures of a very John le Carré-esque spy story, the novel Box 88 by Charles Cumming. It’s the most Carré thing I’ve read by a contemporary writer. It’s not an arch character study like Mick Herron. It’s not as baroquely plotted a puzzle as Olen Steinhauer. It does, however, emphasize elements we expected from Carré: elite private schools, class warfare as cold war, a distant parent (here a demanding, widowed mother in place of Carré’s usual flamboyant, dissolute father), and personal moments that a lesser writer couldn’t pull off — and that readers of those writers likely wouldn’t tolerate. And like any solid teller of spy stories must be, Cumming is an excellent listener. There is an extended sequence about a third of the way through Box 88 when two MI5 agents are tailing a suspect primarily by listening to what’s happening with the suspect thanks to hidden microphones. We don’t just hear what they hear. Cumming helps us hear as they hear — the straining, the confusion, the headache-inducing consideration of possible inferences.

Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season

Trigger warning: everything under the sun, not that I go into any detail here, I promise. Finished reading this last night before bed, my ninth novel of 2023, after several weeks of purposefully not reading it right before bed, or when I ate, for that matter. The incessant violence of Hurricane Season isn’t what I worried might keep me up. What threatened to keep me up was trying not to imagine the effort that went into accomplishing the writing in the first place — the effort not on the part of the violence’s many perpetrators, but on the part of the author, Fernanda Melchor, or her translator, Sophie Hughes, not that authorship isn’t its own form of perpetration, or a translator a sort of accomplice, or that writing isn’t its own form of violence. Not, no — perhaps because. Hurricane Season is a Rashomon of abject poverty, written in sentences that seem to go on indefinitely but in fact largely adhere to civil society’s conception of grammar. By the end of one such sentence, you might be at an entirely other interstice along the story’s morbid timeline, or considering the world from the point of view of another dissolute character. But like the sentences, the broader chapters adhere to a certain logic, to an unwavering sense of ordinary reality, and they wend their way back to where they started, as if each life-altering incident and each fleeting association are merely byways to a sense not just of closure but of absolute, wearying, ceaseless inevitability. After about a quarter of the way through the book, I almost put it down for good. I’m not big on torture horror, less so when among the victims are the readers themselves. But when I realized that each section had a different character as its narrative avatar, I decided to stick with it. A puzzle emerged, all the better one for which a solution isn’t the point. The point is that the puzzle exists in the first place — that lives could be this intermingled and this alienated, this interdependent and this diametrically opposed, that they could fit together and yet not yield a satisfying whole. I alternated with lighter stuff (a history of mysticism, a pulp noir, a by-the-books spy novel, some utterly mainstream comic books), and slowly made my way. I started reading this because I saw it on a list of novels by someone on a list of someones, all of whom read books that were current and literary and demanding. Apparently a film is being made of it. I can’t imagine ever watching it. Imagining it was hard enough.