Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 114

Scratch Pad: Granular, Bad Batch, Oscars

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.

▰ There’s lots of types of granular ambient music. There’s cloudy granular, all hazy softness. There’s industrial granular, all textural tension. There’s classical granular, all string-section sustain. There’s sodden granular, all murky goodness. This has been a sodden granular morning.

▰ I’m working on four different articles for The Wire at the moment.

▰ Dee Bradley Baker rightfully gets a lot of praise for voicing multiple clones in Star Wars animation, especially The Bad Batch, and composer Kevin Kiner (who has worked a lot with Clint Mansell) deserves similar credit for his chameleonic abilities. This current season has had him making music in so many different modes, especially the three most recent episodes (second season, episodes three, four, and five), which ranged from Blade Runner to Tron to Indiana Jones in their styles.

▰ I could complain about no Oscar nominations for Tár or for Women Talking, or for Bones and All or for Empire of Light, or for Kimi – but the Oscar list is still pretty solid.

▰ Just installed Duet Display (to use an Android tablet as a second screen for my Mac) for the first time in forever. What year is it? (It’s working great, by the way. It used to be quite finicky back in the day. How long has it been around anyhow?)

▰ A note that I’m now mostly using Ivory, the app from the folks who made Tweetbot, for Mastodon on my phone. Online I use the default Mastodon browser webapp.

▰ I finished reading my fourth novel of the year, Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, which I took my time with. It’s about a former Russian royal, the Count, who is, following the Revolution, offered a cushy exile: relegation to a luxury hotel. The book follows him over numerous decades. I found the opening section to be as tightly wound as a Wes Anderson movie, so choreographed that when I closed my eyes I pictured it as, more than anything, a Pixar movie (certain elements, notably an observant cat and a cartoony man identified by his ethnicity, support this). If you are allergic to alliteration you might want to avoid Amor. At the end of the second section, the Count makes an important decision that informs the rest of the book. At the end of the fourth, there is a reveal (not a huge surprise, but important once stated) that I feel the final section doesn’t really do much if anything with. The Count is, in effect, a wise fool. Does he grow, despite his breeding and predilections? That is for the reader to decide. It’s a beautifully written book, if sometimes overly rich (I had to take breaks). If books lacking proper endings bug you, then this one is the perfect corrective. (A TV series is being filmed, with Ewan McGregor as the Count, and they sure better hire that Russian kid from Mysterious Benedict Society!)

▰ Ben Monder. Ava Mendoza. Eivind Aarset. Jamie Stillway. Bill Orcutt. Mary Halvorson. Sharif Sehnaoui. And of course Bill Frisell. It’s a pretty good time to be into guitar, lemme tell ya.

▰ If I ever get to the point where all I’m writing about is the past, please lock my website and take away my keys.

▰ That thing where you’re practicing “Autumn Leaves” for guitar class, and if you play the melody just wrong enough, it ends up being “Moon Over Bourbon Street,” and if you emphasize the major seventh chords too much, it sounds like the Style Council, which is to say, no matter how you mess it up, it sounds pretty good. (And once I’m done I go back to churning chords through my granular effects.)

▰ Fifth novel I finished reading this year: Elmore Leonard’s City Primeval. I knew he wrote a bunch of westerns, too, but to say this isn’t a western is pretty silly. It’s a western with electricity, running water, disco, and more than its share of self-consciousnesses. As the subtitle makes clear, it’s “High Noon in Detroit.” The bad guy actually steals a black hat, and the good guy gets compared to Gregory Peck (who wasn’t in High Noon, but apparently was offered the role before Gary Cooper). The story features more legal bureaucracy and car talk than did High Noon, and the final chapter sets the inevitable shootout about as far from the old west as one might get, but it’s a duel nonetheless. This is not a horror novel, but as someone who has never gotten into much of the horror he’s read, I’d say the depiction of the antagonist’s sociopathic willpower and his girlfriend’s addled supplication are some of the scarier things I’ve spent time with. And as in much horror, the hero doesn’t walk away psychically unscathed. The book is taut and unwieldy, formally structured and fiercely anarchic, in equal measure. (I mentioned this book previously, and updated that post after finishing.)

▰ Report from the breakfast table: Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season is not a novel you sit down with to relax.

▰ This icon is an alternate available within Ivory, the Mastodon app (with an unfortunate name) made by the folks who used to make the Twitter app Tweetbot. It also is the answer to the question: What is the opposite of a subtweet?

▰ It seems meaningful that while reading a book about a witch over lunch, my Kindle suddenly displayed nothing but a bright white screen, and there was nothing I could seem to do to reset it. Please recommend any spells or other offerings.

▰ On an episode of Leverage: Redemption I watched this week, a character was playing the New York Times Spelling Bee (well, a fake version of it) on her phone. She got to “Genius” level and said to her phone, “I’m Queen Bee, bitch!” I felt seen, even if the character turned out to be the episode’s villain.

To “Gear” or Not to Gear

I think it’s pretty funny that people sometimes slam, as “gear videos,” synthesizer videos in which the instruments are prominently displayed. Most of the time that term of disparagement is not a meaningful articulation of what’s going on. What’s going on is you have the opportunity to witness a connection between the sounds you’re hearing and some of the means by which they’re produced. In the best of cases, such as when a single synthesizer is involved, they can even serve as contemporary études. There’s plenty of “gear” video out there (tutorials, reviews, “reviews,” tips, walk throughs, and various forms of often not remotely self-aware consumer fetishization — and then there’s perhaps the vilest of streaming infirmities, the “unboxing”). But just because you can see the gear doesn’t make it a (pejorative) gear video.

When I mentioned this online, I was asked if it weren’t the case that those complaints align with when the gear is expensive, and that either way, you have to admit that there are a lot of videos that put visuals (“even the cables”) first.

I’d say that sometimes the expense isn’t inherent in the critique (a couple used Pocket Operators can trigger the haters), but when it is expensive, the critique is more likely, for sure — though often the gear is still way cheaper than the guitars and pedalboards you see in other videos.

I definitely agree that’s the case about many overly designed videos, though I’d also argue that a lot of critiques, which verge on inside-baseball chatter, about evolving music norms don’t take into consideration similar circumstances outside of music. If you’ve dipped into bicycling, photography, or any number of other gear-oriented pastimes, you’ll find similar modes of activity. I think that’s just part of the post-hipster, over-designed, Instagram’d world we’ve woken up in.

So, yeah, some are prettier than they need to be, and some are pretty for pretty’s sake. And then some of the not pretty ones are probably not pretty to make a point — which is to say, they’re reactive while trying to appear not so.

Online Hangs

I’m of the “barbershop or grocery store” mindset when it comes to online hangouts. A barbershop is the sort of service of which you really need only one, and once you’ve found the right one, you stick with it for a long time. In contrast, to a degree, grocery stores are more interchangeable: you still ultimately have your primary one or two, and you visit others that are useful for special purposes. I don’t know that I have an online barbershop, per se, but these are my main grocery stores:

Lines: This message board, llllllll.co, is my favorite hangout online. It’s largely focused on electronic music, and I don’t really participate in the threads there that aren’t related to music. It’s where much of the Disquiet Junto discussion takes place.

YouTube: A lot of my listening (and viewing) is on YouTube (youtube.com/disquiet). I used to post videos on occasion, and hope to get back to it. The recent relabelling of accounts has improved communication there, and maybe even moderated discussion in a positive manner. (I also spend a lot of time with my YouTube Music account — essentially the same as Spotify and Apple Music, etc., except it comes with ad-free YouTube, which is awesome.)

Bandcamp: The main other source of my listening besides YouTube is Bandcamp. I’m at bandcamp.com/disquiet, and if we follow each other then the service’s low-key social component serves up recommendations in the “feed.” (If you’re interested in sending me music for review consideration, a /yum code is arguably the best way. Warning: I’m a horrible correspondent. Online music distribution has been a boon to availability and access, but it has hammered my email inbox beyond utility.)

Mastodon: And while Mastodon (I’m at the inherently awkward post.lurk.org/@disquiet) is no Twitter replacement, it scratches the itch. It does have its unique qualities, some of which are even benefits (“How I Got from Mastodon’t to Mastodon”).

Instagram: My instagram.com/dsqt gets updated pretty regularly. I go through jags focused on one subject, one visual mode, or another.

SoundCloud: My soundcloud.com/disquiet is a bit of a conundrum. The service has a 2,000-follow max, so I can’t really add anyone, because I don’t know whom to delete, because I don’t know of any tools to tell me which accounts I follow have gone dormant. Also, I’ve got almost 11,000 followers, but those numbers don’t translate to much traction or communication. It is, though, where most Disquiet Junto music community posting takes place, because no other service has surfaced that makes sense. Sad to think how great SoundCloud once once, especially when it had Groups and Discussion features.

And the General Diaspora: I do spend time on Facebook, but rarely expand my follows; it’s mostly old friends and work colleagues, and family. I barely even talk about music there, because the responses haven’t proved useful. My Twitter account (twitter.com/disquiet) remains on hold for the foreseeable future. I’m on a ton of Discords and Discourses, and a sizable number of Slacks, but aside from the modest Junto Slack I don’t do a ton on any of them. And I’ve tried out numerous post-Twitter services, such as post.news (post.news/@disquiet), but one only needs so many grocery stores.

Disquiet Junto Project 0578: Rabbit Spirit Ally

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, January 30, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 26, 2023.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0578: Rabbit Spirit Ally

The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year.

Step 1: Note that this year’s Chinese zodiac animal is the rabbit. 

Step 2: Take the rabbit as your temporary musical spirit ally, and make music inspired by it. (Alternately, choose the Chinese zodiac animal of your birth year.)

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0578” (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 “disquiet0578” (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-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

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. No animals should be harmed in the making inspired by this project.

Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 30, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 26, 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 578th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rabbit Spirit Ally (The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year), at: https://disquiet.com/0578/

Associated public-domain cover image by Johann Daniel Meyer (1748).

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-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

Backwards & Forwards

Ambient tarmac

Elmore Leonard Listened Closely

Or at least his heroes did. This is from City Primeval, one of two novels Elmore Leonard published in 1980. I’ve never read an Elmore Leonard novel before. Well, I started this one years ago, but didn’t finished it. I started all over recently and am close to done. A remarkable book. To say the author knows exactly what he’s doing is an understatement. The world of the book is a bit too intense for me, so I’m not sure I’ll be reading another one any time soon, but it’s an incredibly well-constructed novel.

In one earlier scene, the antagonist, who has a fierce dislike for disco, damages a Donna Summer album, having “swept the arm” of the record player across it in a fit. “That disco shit just ricochets off my mind!” he complains. Later, someone who was present the first time takes pains to save a Bee Gees record from being “scratched to death” by the same person. She succeeds.

Tellingly in this scene, this Raymond is the story’s protagonist: a detective tasked with bringing down a killer (of people as well as, secondarily, records). I love how Raymond becomes aware of how sound works in the bar, and his observation of people “working at having fun.” As I , one of the things about thrillers is there’s usually a character who is primed to listen closely. In order for the characters to listen closely, the author must, as well.

Lia Kohl’s Weather Report

That the cello at the start of “Sit on the Floor and Wait for Storms” might be mistaken for processed voice says something about musician Lia Kohl’s modus operandi. “Sit on the Floor and Wait for Storms” is the first track to be made available from Kohl’s forthcoming album, The Ceiling Reposes, due out in late March. The music initially layers sawed strings and buzzing kazoo, the various waves like threads in a thick fabric that’s being woven in real time, right before the listener’s ears. When a voice arrives, a snippet of a weather report, our senses have been primed: the man’s tone fits in with the soft coarseness of what’s come before. The storm does appear, in that the music gets more and more erratic, the processed sounds fragmenting and frazzling, while also congealing — all until the man’s voice is lost in the enveloping, consuming mix — perhaps disappearing entirely. Perhaps becoming one with the other sound sources.

https://liakohl.bandcamp.com/album/the-ceiling-reposes/

More from Kohl, who is based in Chicago, at liairenekohl.com. The album comes out on the American Dreams label (american-dreams.zone) March 10, 2023.

On Repeat: Sakamoto; Kasten-Krause + Pavone; Longobardi

I’m getting back in the habit of posting brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:

▰ It’s hard not to think about death when listening to the new Ryuichi Sakamoto album, 12, since the Japanese legend has been fighting Stage 4 cancer, and his recent livestream has been described as potentially his last concert. In addition, earlier this month his fellow co-founder of Yellow Magic Orchestra, Yukihiro Takahashi, died at age 70 (Sakamoto is a year older). It’s a gorgeous album, and a somber one, as well, with echoes of Erik Satie, Angelo Badalamenti, and even William Basinski, thanks to frequent elements of glacial soundscapes, notably on the opening cut. Sakamoto has at least one more release due out this year, his score for the film Monster, directed by Hirokazu Koreeda (whose Shoplifters was scored by the third co-founder of YMO, Haruomi Hosono).

https://sakamoto.bandcamp.com/album/12

▰ The first track to appear from the upcoming collaborative album, Images of One, by Tristan Kasten-Krause (double bass) and Jessica Pavone (viola) is the record’s final of four, “On Axis.” Despite the instrumentation’s broad range in timbre and audio spectrum, it becomes admirably difficult to tell where one part ends and the next begins, so simpatico is their exploration of such contemporary classical modes as stillness, atonality, and silence.

https://relativepitchrecords.bandcamp.com/album/images-of-one

▰ Luca Longobardi, based in Italy, mixes widely spaced tones with crackly sound design in this understated live performance. I recommend his Instagram for glimpses into his creative process, including work that went into his forthcoming album, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik – Recomposed.

Scratch Pad: AI, Liminal, Reading

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means post.lurk.org.

▰ This hold music is like if an AI had been asked to make the worst possible album of Miles Davis’ Warner Bros. years and to leave out the trumpet parts.

▰ Let’s get liminal, liminal — I wanna get liminal — let’s get into liminal

▰ RIP, David Crosby. Hard to describe how much the Byrds influenced my early listening: the harmonies, the song structures, the tuning.

▰ If you have some (fiction) book recommendations, please send ’em my way. Thanks. Start of the year. I have a long list, and it’s pretty full up of sci-fi and thrillers/mysteries and classics, but I’d sure appreciate suggestions for recent-ish literary novels that don’t have as their topic (1) writers/writing and/or (2) the love lives of middle-class professionals. Bonus points if you can avoid using the words “devastating” and “stunning.”

▰ Third novel I finished reading this year: Take No Names by Daniel Nieh. I read it because I’d seen him mentioned alongside Fonda Lee, whose Jade trilogy I super dug, and it got a solid mention in the New York Times. It’s the second book in a series (same main character, and numerous secondary ones), but I had no difficulty jumping in because the narrative makes regular mentions of what happened in the previous one. It’s about a Chinese-American on the run after his dad is killed in the first book (he’s a suspect, even though he didn’t do it). He ends up in Mexico, initially trying to sells some goods, but then engaging in a crazy black ops situation that is quite out of scale with what preceded it. I found the trilingual aspects — English, Chinese, Spanish — rewarding, especially the Chinese material (nuances of translation, nifty bits of cryptography). The fight scenes were quite detailed without losing their sense of momentum (as is the case with Fonda Lee’s work), and overall there’s some pretty darn good writing, both descriptive and dialogue (especially in the case of a secondary character who becomes prominent pretty early on). I’ll probably go back and read the first book, Beijing Payback, at some point. Mostly I’m looking forward to what’s next.

▰ Sudden flashback: it’s the year 2000, and I wake to so much email in my inbox that by the time I am done deleting all the spam a whole new hoard of spam has arrived, and then a third round of spam deletion is necessary before I can actually begin to get to my non-spam email. The rest of the day it’s like swatting flies continuously.

▰ Belated notes on second novel I finished reading this year: Lauren Belfer’s And After the Fire, recommended by a new acquaintance because it involves Bach. It tells the story of a secret Bach composition that contains anti-Semitic language. The music is discovered when a WWII vet dies, leaving it to his niece, the central character in the novel. We also meet a few Bach scholars, and descendants of Bach himself, and their social and professional circles, including Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, as the story jumps back and forth in time. The Bach piece turns out to be a hot potato (a sort of anti-MacGuffin), passed down through history by people who don’t know what to do with it — they don’t want to destroy it, since it’s by Bach, and they don’t want to circulate it, since the text is unambiguously odious. The writing reminds me of big-picture science fiction, right down to awkward depictions of courtship in the romantic subplot, and the emphasis on people sitting around having lengthy philosophical conversations. It’s almost like “hard” scifi, with occasional musicological and theological deep dives (Michael Marissen, the author’s husband, is a Swarthmore professor of music and author of Bach & God, which explores anti-Semitic matters in Bach’s works) substituting for nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.

▰ Belated notes on first novel I finished reading this year: The Mother Code by Carole Stivers, a PhD in biochemistry who brings her scientific background — emphasis apparently on medical diagnostics — to her chosen futuristic scenario, one in which a global plague set off by the military wipes out most of humanity, and all that seems to remain are some kids rapidly bioengineered to survive in our newly poisoned ecosystem, and the robots designed to “mother” them. It was sorta fun that the plot eventually spends about half its time a few blocks from where I live in San Francisco.

Unt Zio

A thoughtful upgrade