Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 111
February 25, 2023
Scratch Pad: Digital Silence, 150% Velocity
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.
▰ The unique digital silence when the other person due to attend your online meeting doesn’t show up, and you just hang out all by yourself in the virtual space, un-disturbable and undisturbed, for a period of time — say 10 minutes — before logging off.
▰ This week in the #DisquietJunto, participants are creating new techno subgenres (more at llllllll.co and disquiet.com/0582). I’d say “imaginary” subgenres, but they’re not imaginary because they’re then recording example tracks. So far we’ve got:
Techno BossaOrgan(ic) TakenoLockdown Techno▰ Taking an online class. Unless the concepts get especially complicated, I watch the videos at 150% of the recorded speed. The main issue is the background music can get a little peppy.
February 24, 2023
Tending the SoundCloud Community Garden
I still find plenty of interesting music and sound on SoundCloud. The most complicated (i.e., annoying) aspect of the service (aside from spam, which you know is automated, but you can’t — or at least I can’t — resist the instinct to anthropomorphize) is that the number of accounts you’re allowed to follow remains capped at 2,000. This means that every time I want to follow a new one, I have to find someone among my many follows to unfollow. It also means I can’t follow the vast majority of the 10,600+ people who follow me. Such a restriction seems like an ill-considered structure for a social-media community, because it forces individuals to, in essence, be rude by not allowing them to easily reciprocate a fundamental social action.
Exacerbating the problem is that there are no tools (within SoundCloud or third-party), at least that I’m aware of, to assist in the whittling necessary when you do want to follow someone new once you hit to the magic 2,000 ceiling — this tending of my plot in the virtual community garden. The best thing I can do is to type two or three random letters into the search option that lets me filter my existing follows, then click on the handful that show up, and then locate an account among them that hasn’t posted in a few years (yeah, yeah — there’s plenty those). Then I unfollow that account in order to make room for the account I want to follow.
SoundCloud was founded back in 2007, and I think I joined at the start of 2010, because that’s the earliest email I can find that mentions SoundCloud that involves my having an account. I have a couple other emails dating back to 2008 that were professional promotional requests for me to listen to someone’s music on SoundCloud. The service hasn’t changed much in years. As community gardens go, SoundCloud is more than a bit thick with weeds, but it’s still plenty alive. It’s just hard to deal with those weeds without some good tools.
February 23, 2023
Disquiet Junto Project 0582: X Techno
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.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 23, 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 0582: X Techno
The Assignment: Make a new subgenre.
Step 1: You’re going to make a new subgenre of techno. Think for a moment about what makes techno techno.
Step 2: Choose a word and put it before “techno.” Those two words in combination are your new subgenre.
Step 3: Record a piece of music in the style of the subgenre you came up with in Step 2.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0582” (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 “disquiet0582” (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-0582-x-techno/
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. What’s the norm in your new subgenre?
Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 23, 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 582nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, X Techno (The Assignment: Make a new subgenre), at: https://disquiet.com/0582/
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-0582-x-techno/
February 22, 2023
Deep Reading
Very interesting read. More shortly.
February 21, 2023
Full-Throttle Ambient
Norah Lorway has a new album coming out on Xylem Records, the label she runs from Falmouth in Cornwall. “Like Nothing Before” serves as a preview track. It’s nearly 10 minutes of full-throttle ambient, all the earmark textures — white noise, drone, shimmer, chorus — turned all the way up, in turn exuding a sense of tension and even, somehow, speed. At some point along the way, a core tone deep amid the piece shifts down an octave — perhaps there’s a subtle leap, or perhaps a filter just slowly trims enough of the overtones to give the impression. The effect is quite beautiful, like a sunrise, or a sunset, or something akin but entirely other.
More from Lorway at norahlorway.com and from Xylem at xylemrecords.bandcamp.com.
February 20, 2023
Junto Profile: xiiixxi
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? My name is Dominic. I have published material out under my surname Peel, and my previous surname, Hayward-Peel, when I was married. I have been using the name xiiixxi (pronounced zik-see) for about a year, mainly because ThirteenTwentyOne was already taken. And I’m fascinated by Fibonacci ….. … .. .. .
Where Are You Located? I currently live in York, England, but have spent the majority of my life in and around London. I was actually born about 20 miles up the road from here in Ripon. I have lived in West, East, and North London over the years, but never over the River in the South — which has always been viewed as akin to Mordor where I was growing up. ;-)
What Is Your Musical Activity? I was raised in a household full of the sounds of Italian Grand Opera: Puccini, Verdi, Mozart, Wagner, etc., and I saw my first opera, Turandot, at the age of 6. I played the piano and flute and sang as a boy soprano in various semi-professional choirs. As I got older, and because we had moved to London — Shepherds Bush — I became desperate to be in a band, eventually leaving school before finishing my A-levels to do so. I played in various bands in and around North London before deciding to return to full-time education, and did a degree in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Following this, because of a growing love of musical analysis, I studied for a Master’s at King’s in London in Music Theory and Analysis, where I specialised in the music of the Second Viennese School: Schoenberg, Berg, and my particular favourite, Anton Webern. This is all highly relevant to me at this time because, like him (well, all of them) I am fascinated by music as strands, or rows, or sequences, melody defined by the space between pitches, the intervallic content rather than the pitches themselves, that are then subject to rigorous, ordered transformations and development to produce developing variation and, eventually, structure. My current projects are generated by exploring this tenet: a basic sequence — not tied to a timeline — which is then processed through Euclidean rhythmic development, and transformation through transposition, intervallic inversion, expansion and contraction, reversal and any others I can think of at the time, to inspire and facilitate the creation of a fixed musical statement.
What Is One Good Musical Habit? Always back-up or record your ideas for a rainy day.
Live from York, England: xiiixxiWhat Are Your Online Locations? I listen to music on SoundCloud and Bandcamp, and occasionally by searching through YouTube. I read things wherever I can find them and have spent a disproportionate amount of time recently on the Juce forum due to my recent C++ addiction.
What Was a Particularly Meaningful Junto Project? My favourite piece of music is generally, and genuinely, the one I’m working on at the time but, the project Octave Leap (Disquiet Junto 0564) helped inspire me to produce what I feel is going to be a perennial second favourite, because I think, for all the apparent “dryness” of the exposition above concerning process and technique, this piece shows that it can work very successfully in creating organic, naturally developing, and well-structured tunes that capture, for me anyway, the feeling of a moment in time. It shows that the key to using process to inspire is to know when to break it and deviate, or tarry a while, just because it sounds good … .. .. .
Could you explain, for those who are not familiar with the concept, Euclidean rhythmic development? The Greek mathematician Euclid discovered the algorithm, or mathematical process, which now bears his name, in around 300 BC. It was designed to evaluate the greatest common divisor between two numbers but has since been used by many mathematical disciplines to now embed itself within a huge variety of modern theorems and equations. The maths itself is relatively simple — but I guess all the really clever bits of mathematics are less about the algebra and more to do with the concept itself and how far it can reach. If you are interested in the maths behind it then the Wikipedia article is a good starting place.
It took until the early 2000s for a computational scientist Godried Toussant (wikipedia.org) to draw a direct line between Euclid’s algorithm and its possible involvement in explaining the success of some of the world’s most identifiable musical rhythms. He proposed that Euclid’s equation could be seen as a way of organising temporal — rather than physical — space, and also pulled in the work of Eric Bjorklund, who was working on an extraordinary theory within the science of nuclear physics in which nuclear timing sources were being evaluated and graded with regards to their “uglyness” — which totally depended on how even the pattern of pulses were; the more even the distribution of pulses, the less ugly they were … .. . . brilliant! 
. Toussaint’s work is here: PDF.
A detail from Godfried Toussaint’s workIn it he treats the two numbers that Euclid worked on as two groups of different events. One is silent, the other (the smaller one) has some event on — let us say a drum hit. The magic of Euclid distributes these two groups as evenly as possible, which results in what we hear as a rhythm — drums hits over time separated by silences — the silent pulses still being “felt” as part of the total sequence length. Bjorklund uses a slightly different algebra to get the same result as Euclid but, in the equations of his that I’ve used, we only have to give the algorithm the total number of pulses (both those with a hit and those which are silent) and the total number of hits. This is the basis of most Euclidean rhythm generators around today: How many pulses in total is the sequence and how many hits are needed to be distributed. Toussaint’s paper shows these rhythms as both a series of 1s and 0s, and also as a series of Xs and dots [ 1 0 1 0 ] = [ x . x . ]. Interestingly (for me anyway, as a musical analyst), he also introduces the concept of interval-vector notation, which I first came across at uni when I studied Allen Fortes’ system for Set Theory analysis (wikipedia.org). The numbers inside the () describe the sub-groupings within the main rhythm allowing, in the future, the development of an analytical system to draw bigger collections of Euclidean rhythms into meta-groups through comparison of their constituent sub-rhythms — a definite yawn for a most I guess.
The upshot of all of this is a way of subdividing a stream of pulses (with hits) as evenly as possible, which has proved very popular in recent years, adding interesting and unusual percussive rhythms over a drum beat, not only by layering a Euclidean rhythm directly over a similar number of bars, or beats, but also in layering longer or shorter Euclidean rhythms over the top — maybe a six pulse rhythm over a 4/4 beat, or a 21 pulse rhythm over 4 bars of ¾. The experimentation is almost endless. Conventionally, both Toussaint’s and Bjorklund’s Euclidean rhythms always start with a hit but these days most devices allow you to “rotate” the rhythm — move the whole thing up or down a number of pulses to create syncopation — allowing a whole lot more experimentation. Ultimately it is the musician’s ears that will define whether these experiments result in something “good” (and not Bjorklund’s “ugly”); it is all in the ear of the listener to decide.
My own use of Euclidean rhythms moves this on a bit further. I have removed the “backbeat,” as it were, and rely on layering different lengths of rhythm over each other to produce “hybrid” rhythms — loosely influenced by the concepts behind Leon Theremin’s Rhythmicon of the 1930s (wikipedia.org). The hybrids can extend for extraordinary lengths of time if one wishes by combining prime number pulse lengths — for example 23, 29, and 31 pulses — which won’t coincide until over 20,000 pulses have elapsed. Crucially though, this does not mean that there won’t be more regular, smaller scale repetitions along the way — depending on the internal Euclidean rhythm that each sequence is assigned. To be honest, I think explaining exactly what (I think) I might be doing will probably take a bit too long for this interview, but I will definitely keep working on writing it all down, with references, so that the process and thinking behind it is clear. I have been working on this for about 8 months — mainly through the Disquiet Junto challenges. I purposefully make use of really simple sounds for this process, as I’m really interested in understanding how the melody and rhythm develop over time before complicating this further with timbre and instrumentation. The resulting music is overtly polymetric but does use some polyrhythms at times. The “Chromaticon” aspect of the music will definitely have to wait for another day.
Please feel free to contact me if you would like any further info about the process. Below is a link to my Soundcloud playlist of Euclidean Chromaticon pieces (the software I am developing to make using these ideas easier).
February 19, 2023
On Repeat: Beats + Ambience
Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ When Arckatron released blango! v. 1.0 last year, his fantastical (and fantastic) instrumental hip-hop set, he promised an update that would make good on the 1.0 nomenclature. That update has arrived, blango! v. 2.0, breaking the original track, nearly 13 minutes long, into six constituent parts (with “actual track names”), and adding a bonus five-minute track, all lolloping downbeats and kitchen-clatter percussion, at a sedate 80 bpm.
https://arckatron.bandcamp.com/album/blango-v-20
▰ Karen Vogt’s album Losing the Sea is due out toward the end of February. The opening, title track, featuring the heavily concealed guitar of Guillaume Eymenier, is available for an advance listen. It blends shadowy drones with diaphonous vocals.
https://marenostrumlabel.bandcamp.com/album/losing-the-sea
▰ A beautiful live rendition by guitarist Jamie Stillway, abetted by a small pedal collection, of “Wood and Windows,” off her recent Lullaby for a Stranger album, one of my favorites of 2022.
▰ Spencer Tweedy’s drumprints vol. 1: 2301 collects 10 drum parts, ranging in length from 16 sections to just shy of five minutes. They’re funky and spare, and available for creative reuse thanks to an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Creative Commons license — and they’re entirely listenable to on their lonesome, too. I’d love to hear DJ Krush go to town on the opening of track two, “DP2301 Contact Sheet 167.”
https://spencertweedy.bandcamp.com/album/drumprints-vol-1-2301
February 18, 2023
Scratch Pad: Eno-less, Tolstoy, Audiobooks
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. Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.
▰ Window open like it’s spring or something. Bus, car, garbage truck, bird, gleeful kid, elderly person on a cellphone in a Slavic language, distant construction noise, even more distant traffic. I could listen to this all day. Or at least until it gets cold.
▰ Just finished recording an episode of a podcast on which I was the guest. It was super fun: chatty, good-natured, idea-driven. I’ll mention here when it’s online. A tiny bit will be, apparently, behind a Patreon, but the vast majority of the recording, like 95%, will be freely available.
▰ I like Brian Eno’s singing voice, but I’m looking forward to the instrumental version of his recent record. I don’t need snazzy Record Store Day collectibles. Fortunately there will be a digital version.
▰ Q: How did you treat yourself at the end of a productive work day?
A: I finally updated a synthesizer module for which the latest firmware came out last November.
▰ “Time is fleeting / See what it brings”
Bergman -> Seinfeld -> Depeche Mode▰ I looked at my recent Instagram posts. The first, fifth, and sixth photos here are totally different buildings, despite potential appearances otherwise.
▰ Hey, #BookClub hive mind: I started reading War & Peace for the first time, and I’m not too far in (“only” chapter 17, a mere 5%) to change to another version if there’s a particular translator that you recommend. The version I’ve been reading is the one translated by Aylmer Maude and Louise Shanks Maude. I’ve also got Constance Garnett’s translation sitting here, borrowed from the library. Thanks. (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky has been recommended, indirectly by the Russian-born former dean of where I went to college, so I may switch over to that.)
▰ Haiku sourced from Wikipedia’s notable deaths:
Chinese engineer
Romanian pharmacist
English footballer
▰ “Ne plus recevoir notre lettre d’information” — I was always bad at languages other than the one I was raised in, English, but I’m aces at unsubscribing from things I never subscribed to.
▰ A moment in my week:
▰ Me reading: Books in this genre are all the same.
Me a few minutes later: Oh, I’ve already read this book.
▰ Story in my right ear, the world in my left. Afternoon audiobook walk.
February 17, 2023
Hania Rani’s On Giacometti
Hania Rani’s On Giacometti contains material from her score to a new film about the artist Alberto Giacometti and Giacometti’s broader family. It’s a gorgeous collection of quiet, contemplative music — the sort of music that fills the space in a film and yet is, through the strange received logic of film-making, intended to signify the presence of silence, the absence of sound. Start with “Knots,” in which a stoic piano part — the score is essentially all piano all the time — gets lightly embroidered with bits of synthesized filigree. Then try “Storm,” which is only stormy at a distance; to listen to its echoing patterning is to witness, purposefully, something through thick glass and grim darkness that is transpiring quite far away. One highlight is the occasional appearance of Dobrawa Czocher’s cello, notably on the opening track. Some of this material will draw comparisons to Nils Frahm (the muffled pads of “Mountains,” for example) and Philip Glass, but this is Rani’s music through and through: the gracious pacing, the lithe development, the ambiguous mood. The movie, The Giacomettis, was directed by Susanna Fanzun.
February 16, 2023
Disquiet Junto Project 0581: Helsinki Downspout
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.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 20, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 16, 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 0581: Helsinki Downspout
The Assignment: Use a rhythmic field recording as the foundation for a new track.
Step 1: This is a shared sample project, one in which all the participants will utilize the same provided recording, about a minute and a half long, as the rhythmic element for their own music. Access the track, originally recorded by Scott Fletcher and used with his permission, here:
https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/helsinki-downspout
Step 2: Listen to the provided track several times. Think about ways to map its content, perhaps making notations about when certain unique, momentary aspects surface.
Step 3: Record an original piece of music for which the provided music is the underlying rhythm. You might take this quite literally, using the source as it is, resulting in a track that is precisely 1:35 long. Alternately, you might elect to sample and rework the source material. If you go the latter route, make certain that the original sound is, at least at some point in the finished track, recognizable.
Step 4: Because this is a Creative Commons resource, be sure to identify Scott Fletcher as the original recorder of the source material, and include a link to the source track. Identify the license as: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0581” (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 “disquiet0581” (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-0581-helsinki-downspout/
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 did the rain last?
Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 20, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 16, 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 581st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Helsinki Downspout (The Assignment: Use a rhythmic field recording as the foundation for a new track), at: https://disquiet.com/0581/
Thanks to Scott Fletcher for having provided the original material. It is used thanks to a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Original track at: https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/helsinki-downspout/
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-0581-helsinki-downspout/
