Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 113
February 9, 2023
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/
February 8, 2023
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).
February 7, 2023
Visual Echo
Another year, another Lunar New Year, another echo — a visual echo — of the celebrations. Following all the tail-end holidays at the close of a given year, there’s a brief break, and then Lunar New Year comes ’round. This shot was snapped after the appearance of multiple giant yellow and red lions, ones with tellingly human legs and footwear, brought the promise of a bountiful year to small businesses down the street from where I live. It was a drizzly, cold morning. Neighborhood kids waiting in line for bagels or croissants or dim sum were covering their ears and marveling at the vibrant display. And then the lions moved on. And then the shopkeepers emerged through the diminishing smoke and swept the firecracker detritus, first into little piles, then into dustpans — the amount correlating with how intense the recent explosions had gotten.
February 6, 2023
Junto Profile: Daniel Díaz
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.
Where Are You Located? I was born in Argentina of Spanish parents, so I also have their nationality. After spending some time between NYC and Buenos Aires in the 1990s I moved to Paris, France, where I live now.
What Is Your Musical Activity? For decades I made my living with different combinations of: session musician (bassist mostly but I’ve been a multi-instrumentalist from the beginning) both in the studio and live, working as a copyist (handwriting in the late 1980s and then using Finale 1.0 and 2.0 and Encore 1), and giving music lessons (composition, improvisation, bass, guitar).
But the common thread of my musical life is composing and recording my own ideas. I started with a custom tweaked double cassette Sharp boombox, then a Tascam Porta One, then a Porta Two. Later it got serious with a Fostex 8 track open reel, then one ADAT (8 track digital), later 2 ADAT in sync (16 track digital) and finally digital DAW.
I’m happy that, since 2005 approximately, I make my living as a film/TV composer and arranger-producer for other projects, so I can do for 12 hours a day what I always loved the most and, I think, it’s my greatest strength: composing, recording and playing many instruments in the studio.
Disquiet Junto member Daniel Diaz, aka DedeWhat Is One Good Musical Habit? I see my creative process as a two-part thing: there’s the idea and the actual creation process itself. My habit is to always keep “ideas” in stock. I have a notebook (music notation paper) that I carry with me all the time and there’s also a folder on my PC with snippets of audio. So I try to keep a log of “ideas” to be used as a spark for a creative process. Sometimes using an idea that’s 15+ years old (and I can’t quite recall where that came from) takes me to unexpected places. I guess this habit made me avoid the “Blank Page Syndrome” for ages…
What Are Your Online Locations? I’m pretty bad at online “social” activity, so I mostly use social media for promoting stuff, I’m afraid. I do enjoy following the Lines Junto thread when I participate, reading everything but not writing as much as I would like. I participate on a couple of private forums (audio, composition) but I can be absent for months. I guess Instagram is the only one I do use regularly, and I respond to messages and interact a bit more. There’s a section “Socials” with all my links here: lnk.bio/ddiaz and on the left side bar of my website, dedeland.com.
What Was a Particularly Meaningful Junto Project? Hands down; the collaborative Juntos like 0270, 0316/0317, 0368/0369, 0430/0431, and 0526/0527. It’s all about what I was mentioning earlier about finding an outside or unexpected “spark” to take you places — something that sets in motion the creative process. I listen to those shared creations and they still surprise me.
And there are a couple of tracks inspired totally by a Junto prompt, things I started from scratch a certain Friday morning and finished before the end of the day, and looking back, I consider it as good as other personal stuff I composed and recorded with much more effort and time. For example this is one I’m particularly fond on and that would never have existed without the challenge:
February 5, 2023
On Repeat: Delay, Drumcorps, Corruption Loscil, English
Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ Just loving this Vladislav Delay EP, Hide Behind the Silence, three tracks of what sounds like desiccated dub. It’s epic and intimate, glitchy and static, antic and attenuated all at once. Apparently he’s putting out four more of these EPs over the course of 2023. Can’t wait. And as someone let me know on Mastodon, Delay is doing a simultaneous area-long series called Dancefloor Classics, of which the first volume is out. (Delay, born Sasu Ripatti, is originally from Finland.)
https://vladislavdelay.bandcamp.com/album/hide-behind-the-silence-ep-1/
▰ Night Ride is a splendid collection of (mostly) downtempo and reflective tracks from a musician (Drumcorps, formerly also known as Aaron Spectre, based in Amsterdam) more widely associated with metal-driven breakcore:
https://drumcorps.bandcamp.com/album/night-ride
▰ Japan-based Corruption is still at it, some 1,696 SoundCloud tracks and counting. “Bq” is just under two minutes that charactertistically merge/confuse/blend noise and field recordings and more overt if deeply submerged musical material into something entirely its own realm of experimental psychogeographic soundscaping:
▰ While bands are in short supply these days, one benefit of the rise of solo musicians is the subsequent rise in collaborations, such as this team-up of Loscil (aka Scott Morgan, based in Vancouver, Canada) and Lawrence English (based in Brisbane, Australia), Colours of Air, thick with vaporous wonders, discomfitting slomo percussion, and cinematic undercurrents:
February 4, 2023
Scratch Pad: Negativland, AI, Comics
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.
▰ Oh, cool. The Wire has a new design — and that mention of Negativland on the cover of the issue due out next week is for a new documentary I reviewed, Stand By for Failure, directed by Ryan Worsley.
▰ Best spam comment my blog has received in quite a while (this was on a post simply titled “520 Hz”)
▰ “Traverse the world’s lush soundscapes and record them with defined, dimensional precision.” Season: A Letter to the Future, a new video game in which a young woman collects memories, including audio field recordings, of a world in decline, is available as of today, after a long long wait, on PlayStation and Steam.
▰ Not all AI art looks like it belongs framed on a wall in Beaker’s living room, but if it looks like it belongs framed on a wall in Beaker’s living room then it’s likely AI art.
▰ Maybe 2023 has just melted my brain, but this captcha looks like it was created by an AI:
▰ Me a week ago: I really don’t care about whatever DC’s big new movie/TV changes turn out to be.
Me this morning: What?! There’s an Authority movie coming?! I am deeply invested in all casting news, especially Jack Hawksmoor.
▰ Sometimes you just need to stop reading that book you’ve been reading and move on (not a book I’ve mentioned here)
▰ Dang, the #HourlyComicsDay2023 hashtag yields exactly one participant from my Mastodon vantage. I recommend looking on Instagram if small-press comics are your thing.
▰ It’s a good day when I spell R. Murray Schafer’s name correctly the first time.
February 3, 2023
Doppler
February 2, 2023
Disquiet Junto Project 0579: Memory Serves
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 6, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 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 are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0579: Memory Serves
The Assignment: Rerecord a piece of music.
Step 1: The goal of this project is to simply perform and record again something you’ve performed and recorded previously. Think about something you’d like to revisit.
Step 2: Now rerecord the piece of music you decided upon in Step 1.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0579” (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 “disquiet0579” (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-0579-memory-serves/
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, February 6, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 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 579th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Memory Serves (The Assignment: Rerecord a piece of music), at: https://disquiet.com/0579/
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-0579-memory-serves/
February 1, 2023
Essential Ingredients
Tape, plastic, metal — all the essential ingredients of a warm welcome. There’s so much going on here, so much aftermarket iterative change, from the built-in doorbell button, to the intercom speaker, to the standalone button reinforced in a protective container and then labeled “BELL” because the whole thing has gotten so complicated — and heck, why not replace the key with a keypad while one is at it. This is a marvel of domestic hodgepodge, of the not so much dark side as the deeply mundane side of DIY. It takes a lot of care to not care this much.
