Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 112

Eliane Radigue, 1980

Back at the very end of 1980, Eliane Radigue performed a lengthy concert on the radio station KPFA. The nearly two hours of music included the world premiere of her Triptych, a work of trenchant drones that originated as a piece for choreography. The second of its three parts had premiered two years earlier, in 1978, as part of Dancehall/Theatre of Nancy production. (I know little to nothing of Dancehall/Theatre of Nancy. If anyone has information to share, I would appreciate it. I’m assuming the Nancy is Nancy, France, and this is related to Jack Lang’s work there in the arts.)

That original composition was, as of 1980, now bookended by two other pieces, similarly built from tones whose slight variations yielded intense beading, patterns, the minimalism of which didn’t even make an effort to belie what was, in fact, a quite forceful sonic presence.

And those Triptych recordings have now, thanks to Important Records, been remastered for the album 11 Dec 1980. Also included is “Chry-Ptus,” a piece for synthesizer originally composed in 1971, and the sounds of which are slightly more varied, ranging from white noise to metronomic pulses to high-pitched whirs to warbling wave forms that sound like science-fiction effects, à la the BBC Radiophonic Workshop — but all still held tight and close, exhibiting Radigue’s refined control. This is exhilarating music, at once static and energizing, meditative and fierce.

https://imprec.bandcamp.com/album/11-dec-1980

Catching Up

Listening in an Elmore Leonard novel, City PrimevalHam radio’s paper trailMy review, published in The Wire, of a new Negativland documentary, Stand By for FailureA minor technical victory — sorting out a portable microphone for one of my favorite synthsTo “Gear” or Not to Gear — emerging video normsMy online hangsProfiles of musicians (and Disquiet Junto participants) Daniel Díaz and Ian JoyceLearning to love LightningMaps.org from a distanceTwo graphic novels written by Tom KingListening in Take No Names

Junto Profile: Ian Joyce

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? It’s Ian Joyce. I generally release music as ikjoyce, but annoyingly my Twitter handle is iankjoyce, because there was someone else using ikjoyce already.

Where Are You Located? Currently based on the North Wales coast. I grew up here, then moved away when I was 17 to go to university in Bristol. Spent a year living in Richmond, Virginia, as part of that degree, which was an amazing experience. That’s where I bought my first “synth” and sequencer (an XP10 and MC50) from Boykins on Broad Street, and shipped them back when I came home. Still have them, still working! I then lived just outside London for a few years (*cough* decades *cough*), where my little studio gradually grew. Moved back here three years ago just pre-pandemic. Never thought I’d be back, but very much glad I am. It’s a beautiful area; a lovely sandy beach at the end of my road, lush green countryside just inland, and the mountains of Eryri (Snowdonia) just a short drive away.

What Is Your Musical Activity? My main activity stems directly from Disquiet Junto prompts and Naviar Haiku challenges — although I don’t always get the time to do them. I also play a lot, just making noises, improvising, jamming.

I’ve been making music since I was 14, when my mum started teaching me to read music on the electronic organ. I then went on to teach myself piano, harmony, sequencing, synthesis, and so on, reading whatever I could get my hands on. I’ve got pretty broad tastes and will listen to pretty much anything (wasn’t always that way — in my teens it was basically Jarre and Beethoven and not a lot else, but thankfully that changed in my early 20s!)

My own music is mainly ambient, sometimes verging on new age, sometimes more towards drone / dark, and occasionally my synthpop childhood shows up with a snappy noise based electronic snare drum. I keep meaning to do more musique concrete / cut-up stuff as I quite enjoy the results.

My stuff is usually pretty soporific — I like the weird states between sleep and waking, so I tend to make things that put me there. If you fall asleep listening to my stuff, it’s a compliment.

Ian Joyce and (some of) his synths

What Is One Good Musical Habit? Play. By which I mean, have fun. If it starts to get dry, do something else for a bit. Let loose with your instruments. Jam, improvise, make noise. Make that cheesy cover version for yourself. Enjoy it! But keep in mind that this is different to “practice,” which should be focussed and structured — *looks sternly over the top of his glasses and wags finger, in a teacherly manner*.

What Are Your Online Locations? Facebook is generally more for family and people I have met or interact with a lot. Twitter (iankjoyce) is where I mainly hang out, and follow musicians and artists and any other creatives. I’m on Lines and the Disquiet Slack (ikjoyce), but I’m more of a lurker on both. I do try to be more sociable, honestly. I use Soundcloud (ikjoyce) for posting my Junto and Naviar Haiku pieces, and Bandcamp (ikjoyce) for album releases.

What Was a Particularly Meaningful Junto Project? This is a hard question. I’ve been taking part since project 0222 (Bounded Foundation — 31st March 2016) so there are a lot to choose from. The most memorable ones have been the ones that pushed me way out of my usual working practices, but the most meaningful one for me personally is 0238 from 21st July 2016.

It has developed a deeper meaning for me since it was made. It’s not my best work by a long shot, but the recording has the sound of my old cat Gus, who came in while I was recording it. If you listen, you can hear the catflap going near the beginning, and then him chirping a hello to me just before I finish playing. He died the following year, aged 16. He had been my companion since he was an hour old, and was a really gentle and characterful cat. Many of my earlier Junto pieces were made while he was draped over my shoulders like a scarf, which he was always wanting to do. I still really miss him — that little recording of his friendly chirping, in a house we no longer live in, is strangely even more evocative than any of the photos I have of him.

Looking back, I did actually do the Junto prompt the week after he died (0303), which was to make music on a 303 or similar. It was quite therapeutic, and I am still quite happy with the resulting track. In a weird coincidence, I just bought a TD-3 that arrived yesterday.

Has moving back to a place you lived in a long time ago had any impact on your music — whether through memories, or local culture, or just reorganizing your home? The local soundscape is very different here. We used to live near Heathrow, so planes were constantly overhead, whereas now we have the sea at the end of the road, so the predominant sound sources now have much smaller wings — and very loud voices, especially when they are nesting on our roof! I will definitely be keeping an ear on differences in my music-making, because the whole vibe here is much more relaxed, and the landscape itself much more dramatic with the sea and mountains nearby. I am certain that it will have an impact.

On Repeat: Field Recordings, Roger Eno, Ambient Murk

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

▰ Nathan Wolek’s bench 6, every morning edits a year’s worth of just pre-pandemic field recordings made at DeLeon Springs State Park in Florida. The cuts jump around in time: near silence, then water, then chatter, then an announcement, a car, bugs, all at various volume levels. Moments of extended natural silence glitch into stutters of quite different experiences of the exact same spot. Wolek’s approach both enlivens and gives lie to the concept of a soundscape, emphasizing inherent change over idealized stasis.

https://nathanwolek.bandcamp.com/album/bench-6-every-morning

▰ A live performances by a string ensemble of a beautiful work by Roger Eno from a series of EPs. This is “Venerable Dilemma.”

▰ Eliza Brown has been posting weekly selections of field recordings since September of last year. The one from two weeks back, “TLY Week 31 – February 3, 2023” (“TLY” is for “the listening year”), is seven-plus minutes of an icy creek — the highlight being that Brown breaks the near silence by narrating what it is she’s witnessing.

▰ Roily, haunted sounds — muddy with a glistening surface — comprise the track “Language” by Christopher Hanlon. Set this ambient treat on loop.

Scratch Pad: Soderbergh, Pushead, Painlevé

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 (especially because the Algorithm keeps kicking me off Facebook even though I’ve down nothing even remotely inappropriate). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.

▰ The phrase “unforeseen consequences” is generally employed by someone who has never read a science fiction novel in their life

▰ After guitar class I sometimes shoot a quick video of myself playing what my instructor had just gone over, especially chord voicings that are entirely new to (and currently befuddling) me, and my face in them always look like someone shared some sort of really shocking state secret — eyes wide, brow furrowed, mouth shut

▰ Donald Fagen needs to get Pushead to draw his next album cover just to see if the haters can resist the lure of purchasing it

▰ The best thing about a new Soderbergh movie is new Soderbergh interviews

▰ Sometimes elegant solutions are more elegant than they are solutions

▰ That explosion at 9:20am (San Francisco) on Thursday, February 9, 2023, was something else. Whew. Incredibly loud. Set the hair on my arms up and frazzled my nerves. I saw reports of sirens across the park, so I got the sense it was in the Sunset, not the Richmond District (where I live), because I wasn’t hearing the sirens here. Looks like it was on 22nd Avenue, maybe near Moraga?

▰ That thing where after playing a video game for a while you stand up and are all too aware that moving and looking around are entirely separate actions

▰ PCB designs are my visual cotton candy. (This is the 4Swing module from Gieskes.)

▰ Ooh, Jean Painlevé’s The Sounds of Science, with the Yo La Tengo score, has been added to the Criterion streaming service this month

▰ 1993: “I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry.”

2023: “I didn’t know if I should use the laugh emoji or the cry emoji.”

Schrödinger’s Misophonia

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously saw a commonality¹ between intelligence and a sensitivity to noise, which may have been on the mind of author Benjamín Labatut when, in the novel When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), he put² physicist Erwin Schrödinger through the misophonia wringer.

¹“On Noise” from Studies in Pessimism

²Adrian Nathan West, translator 

Two Graphic Novels from Tom King

I dug the Supergirl collection, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2022), written by Tom King and drawn by the Brazilian illustrator Bilquis Evely (suggesting a combination of P. Craig Russell, Kevin O’Neill, and Richard Sala). As a longtime reader of King’s, I was relieved it managed to not fall back on a combination of PTSD and faulty memory. It also had some welcome humor. It pairs Krypton’s most famous daughter with a young girl fueled by revenge for her father’s death. They travel the universe together for different reasons: similar goal, different aims.

We learn a bit about Supergirl along the way, in particular about her power of hearing. I’m always up for someone who’s willing to rewrite the overstated idea that there’s no sound in space. King does it well.

As to why there’s a schooner in space — just read the book.

. . .

I continued my Tom King–athon during my unfortunate if brief (27-hour) Facebook limbo. Facebook had, in its all-thumbs manner, temporarily (and in error) deemed me a troublemaker, so I read a graphic novel about one of comics’ most troubled troublemakers: Rorschach (2021). It’s pretty darn good. 

Having not read any of the other post-Moore Watchmen stuff (I’ve been fairly wary), I don’t know how much of the rest of that material aligns with the TV show, but I dug the touches, like the race history material about the untended graveyard. I was surprised by the role a certain Batman storyteller plays in it, that’s for sure (The Dark Fife Returns, indeed). I took the main bad guy to be a kind of Steve Ditko figure, though perhaps someone else was the intended model. Fascinating how inside-baseball comics have gotten — this book is so knee-deep in self-referentiality, it feels like it limited its audience to a degree, but maybe those characters are fine even without the background knowledge. I loved how pirates are the big-screen superheroes in that world, which is especially funny since Marvel’s having a lot more success than DC is in that regard. The pirate stuff also feels like it changes the context of the meta-comic in the original Watchmen, because it makes pirates feel more mainstream, less retro, but maybe I’m just misremembering the original (and maybe this is a theme in some of the other “expanded Watchmen” material). 

King does what he does well. He mixes up past and present so you don’t often know where you are until you’ve been there a while. The color-coding of time periods drifts into confusion, first on the audience’s part, then on that of the characters themselves. King also works so well with parallel structure, in particular when the three visitors to the ranch are telling their individual stories simultaneously yet separately. That was super duper. (His artist collaborator, Jorge Fornés, is totally up to the task.)

For better or worse, I saw the ending coming from quite a distance. Maybe that just makes this a tragedy. It’s not giving anything away to note that one character’s “hm” was paired with another’s telltale “hurm” several times too often for any actual surprise to have been intended. As a result, the end felt oddly certain whereas the rest of the book was enjoyably unfixed. And of course I greatly appreciated all the stuff about voices secreted in the silences of audio tape.

Introducing the Junto Profiles

I’ve started a new Junto undertaking, where I’ll be doing short profiles of members of the Disquiet Junto community in Q&A form. If you have Disquiet.com in your RSS reader, then you likely saw the piece on Daniel Díaz that I posted on Monday. I have two more ready to go, and several others in the works. (Daniel’s includes his photo and his full name, but that isn’t a requirement if you’re especially camera-shy or privacy-minded.) 

Going forward, my plan for this series, which is simply called the “Junto Profile,” is to focus on individuals who’ve participated regularly for, say, at least nine months. We’ll see how this takes shape. Things evolve (which is also the theme of this week’s project). 

I have wanted to do something along these lines for a very long time, and I actually took stabs at it in the past, and now I am finally actually doing it. I think the series will be a great way for participants in the Junto to have a richer sense of the varied perspectives, backgrounds, and thoughts of the people they’re creating alongside asynchronously, and often across great distances.

If you’re interested in being part of it, let me know. And if English isn’t your first language, that is no concern. I can put resources together where translation would be beneficial. 

Disquiet Junto Project 0580: Evo Evol Evolve

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 13, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 8, 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 0580: Evo Evol Evolve

The Assignment: Record a piece of music that develops like an organism evolves.

Step 1: You’re going to record a piece of music informed by evolution. Think of stages of evolution, perhaps choosing a specific animal or other life form that evolved over time.

Step 2: Record a piece of music that evolves as it proceeds, based on the patterns (phases, stages) you explored in Step 1. And yes, animals that went extinct are a potential subject.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0580” (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 “disquiet0580” (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-0580-evo-evol-evolve/

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. Evolution takes a long time, but depicting it needn’t.

Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 13, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 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 580th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Evo Evol Evolve (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that develops like an organism evolves), at: https://disquiet.com/0580/

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-0580-evo-evol-evolve/

Stand By for Review

Above is the opening of my review of the new Negativland documentary, Stand By for Failure, directed by Ryan Worsley, which is in the new issue of The Wire (the one with the Necks on the cover). I’ll post the full text in a month, once the subsequent issue is out. In the interim, some thoughts I had while writing the review that didn’t make the assigned length:

▰ The word “documentary” has been devalued in recent years. Often what’s called a documentary is more of a promotional film at worst and a celebration at best. This is more of a proper documentary (though not a particularly critical one), all the more so because it isn’t a proper documentary, in that it doesn’t adhere to a strict linear narrative form or clear storytelling. It embraces the weirdness of Negativland in the telling. It’s almost autobiographical, in the way it is built to a degree from work recorded by members of the group.

▰ I struggled when writing this review with whether or not to refer to Negativland as a “band.” They’re more a collective, an anarchist agency, a distributed co-op. It feels odd to say “band,” which suggests such a simple, received concept — when there is nothing simple or received about Negativland. But they debate the word themselves in the film (“Let’s just pretend we’re a band,” says Mark Hosler), so in the interest of concision, I went ahead with using it.

▰ As a former radio DJ (WYBC during college, and KDVS after I moved to California), I loved seeing the carts (short, looped cassette cartridges) employed by Don Joyce (who is a particularly valuable voice in the movie, perhaps because he joined the group after its formation and thus has an outsider’s perspective to a degree). The mechanisms of their collage work were quite different from the digital cut and paste of modern times. Seeing them at work is valuable.

▰ I wanted to talk a bit more about the group in the context of American pop surreality, notably the Firesign Theater and the Church of the SubGenius (J. R. “Bob” Dobbs), neither of which are mentioned in the documentary, or industrial music like Consolidated and Ministry.

▰ Joyce gives voice to the compelling question of why it is that culture that reaches us can’t, in turn, more freely be turned into something else. Negativland jammed culture because the rules were so tight that to do anything was illegal, and so they pushed further, against the absurdity of the world they found themselves in. (That sounds a bit like something from Howard the Duck, another outcropping of American pop surreality.)

▰ The included Marshall McLuhan quotes are informative, but also a little confusing, as they’re not particularly cutting edge. They could pretty much be overlaid with anything about modern technologically mediated life. What makes them special about Negativland is unclear.

▰ I also didn’t have room for the concept of culture jamming, which is (in contrast with the McLuhan elements) quite timely today. McLuhan has never gone out of style; culture jamming has never been more in-style. The role of the “culture jammer” has arguably become a daily norm for a lot of people, even though they don’t necessarily have that jargon at the ready (the term was coined by member Don Joyce). Post-post-ironic (I’ve lost track of the nested posts; it’s posts all the way down) social media is rife with people who communicate by saying one thing, meaning another, sending dog whistles intended not just to be heard by one audience but also to drive another audience to distraction, and ultimately to destabilize common perceptions and assumptions.

▰ I mention how when Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly), the most recent member to join the group, first heard Negativland at age 15, he thought he’d accidentally tuned into multiple radio stations at once. This led to a friendship with founding member David Wills, two decades his senior, who visited his home and brought police scanners with him. What I didn’t have room for was that visit, or this comment by Leidecker: “My mother was terrified.”

▰ We’re over 30 minutes in before the movie, quite literally, asks “What is Negativland?” I can’t say the movie answers the question. Then again, I’m not sure it’s easily answerable. They are the sum of what the movie shares, and of much more.

▰ In the review I mention how some of the material will be confusing to unfamiliar viewers. I didn’t have space to include the moments of American Top 40 host Casey Kasem cursing.

▰ In the end, David Wills (witty, fragile, insular, family-oriented, the elder statesman and by appearances also an eternal child) is even more of a mystery than is Negativland itself. A focused documentary on Wills would be a great follow-up, like the one on Don Joyce that Stand By for Failure director Worsley did (How Radio Isn’t Done, which a friend pointed out to me after I initially posted this).