Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 13

On Repeat: Duo, Quartet, Solo

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ This duet between guitarist Eivind Aarset and electronic musician Jan Bang was recorded early in the pandemic, but I believe has only just now appeared online. A lot of the music Aarset makes is deeply indebted to Miles Davis’ electric era, and to the subsequent work of Jon Hassell; this track is a reminder that Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which bears the influence of Hassell, also looms large. The piece, “Witness,” originally appeared on the duo’s fantastic 2020 album Snow Catches On Her Eyelashes.

▰ A very tight saxophone quartet performance, by the Amstel Quartet, based in Amsterdam, of a segment of Philip Glass’ score to Mishima. This is Vitaly Vatulya, soprano; Olivier Sliepen, alto; Bas Apswoude, tenor; and Harry Cherrin, baritone. There are moments when the highest part, which I assume is Vatulya’s soprano, chiming away, puts this over the top. Just tremendous.

▰ Ted Laderas, aka the OO-Ray, is back — or will be soon — with the forthcoming solo album Marginals, on the great Beacon Sound label. It’s due out August 15, 2025. Laderas plays solo cello with an array of electronic accompaniment and processing. Two tracks are up for pre-release listening. Especially recommended is “Harrow,” which has a quiet pulse and thick layers of playing.

Scratch Pad: Fog, Metadata, Earaches

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ I’m not saying the fog isn’t thick today. Thick it is: no bridge, no Headlands. But when it’s this thick and there’s no fog horns, I wonder if I’m overestimating its thickness, like it’s so thick that it’s muffled the sound. A tugboat drones along China Beach, simply to confirm my ears haven’t gone.

▰ I’m reading Moby Dick, which is way funnier than I expected: “cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical” (actual quote). I’m 18 (short) chapters in, and there is much comedy gold. I love how Ahab’s cartoonish henchmen are like “No cannibals!” Then the cannibal, Queequeg, throws a touchdown. And they’re all: “We want the cannibal!” (Those last two are paraphrases.) Also, how they call Queequeg “Hedgehog.” OMG.

▰ MP3s, FLACs, and WAVs: “Music metadata is a mess”

ebooks: “Hold my beer”

▰ I’m prone to earaches when it’s windy, and I’ve been amazed by how earbuds essentially solved this problem: I set the earbuds to ambient* mode and then go for a walk.

*that is, enhancing the environmental sounds, not listening to ambient music at a high volume

▰ I often read a novel over breakfast, but there are better ways to start the day than a protagonist’s dog and (human) oldest friend both dying within a few paragraphs of each other.

▰ I’ve switched browsers on a test basis (Zen, a streamlined take on Firefox). With a heavily used tool like a browser, such a switch means a lot of muscle-memory revisions and habit shifts. Emerging from a week of UX decompression, I find myself still not recognizing the new browser’s logo as my browser when I tab through the open software on my laptop. Otherwise, I feel at home.

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I enjoyed it, even though I ventured in due to the suggestion of science fiction, which then becomes an either-or decision on the part of the individual reader, and I found myself erring on the side of it not being science fiction, which meant the book’s end proved quite dark, which is an interesting effect, amounting to an encouragement, after the fact, for the non-believing reader to retroactively believe the protagonist, in order for the end to be recast as a positive one.

SF Art Book Fair 2025

Some of my favorite tables at this year’s SF Art Book Fair.

Disquiet Junto Project 0707: Chain of Practice

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0707: Chain of Practice
The Assignment: Make music from how you make music.

This project is the third of three that are being done by the Disquiet Junto in collaboration with the 2025 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 3 through 7. The festival topic this year is « Kette » — which translates, as the organization explains, to “Chain”: “Chains connect but they also bind. They create relationships but also restrictions. As a gift they look nice, feared when used in vice, and yet they can span bridges across fire and ice.” All three Junto projects this year engage with the work of Svetlana Maraš, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 festival.

We are working again at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the seventh year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern. Tobias helped prepare this week’s compositional concept.

Step 1: Think about your artistic practice.

Step 2: Write down one sentence that in some manner describes your artistic practice.

Step 3: Record yourself, or someone else, reading the sentence that resulted from Step 2.

Step 4: Use the recording made in Step 3 as the sole source material for a new musical/sonic composition.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0707” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0707-chain-of-practice/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, July 14, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 707th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Practice — The Assignment: Make music from how you make music — at https://disquiet.com/0707/.

Unsolicited Advice

Aphex Twin (032c Edition)

Back at the start of the year, a special issue of 032c, the culture magazine named for a Pantone color, included writer Cassidy George’s lengthy A-Z of the great Aphex Twin. The roundup, which ranged from “Acid” to “Zealous,” with stops in between for “Chris Cunningham,” “IDM,” and “Xtal,” among other topics, included a quick little Q&A with me. Here’s my section:

That bit was filed under “Ambient,” in between “Analord” and “Bank.” This is from the Winter 2024/25 issue. The full run-down is online at 032c.com.

Price Tag

When I got back home from the store — with a gift receipt — I carefully peeled off the price tag, only to find a second and, in fact, a third tag underneath. The sandwiched price tag was inaccessible. The lowest of the three was from my former employer, Tower Records. This close-up photo, unretouched, better reflects my aesthetic-emotional experience of peeling off the labels than did the actual object in my hand at the time. There is so much detail here, notably those little slits, which I believe existed to make it impossible to remove a tag and affix it to another, more expensive item. The archeology of tactile media, the cycle of records being sold again and again back into the used bins, the visual wonders of mechanical typography — it’s all there, smaller than a postage stamp.

On Repeat: Glitched, Prepared, Installed

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ There is seemingly nothing Matt Madden can’t do. He’s foremost a highly inventive cartoonist, and also an expert guitarist. This is an ambient glitch track of shifting drones that I’ve been playing on repeat. Matt, an old friend, is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

▰ I owe thanks to Bruce Levenstein for introducing me to For renstemt klaver, a collection of contemplative recordings by Jo David Meyer Lysne, based in Oslo, Norway, utilizing a remarkable prepared piano of his own invention. I include the cover here to give a glimpse of what is going on. More information in the album’s liner notes, available on the album’s Bandcamp page.

▰ I owe a debt to Patricia Wolf for introducing me to the work of Pablo Diserens. This video is a concise documentation of a 2024 exhibit by Diserens, alytes, at Espacio Vilaseco in Lugo, Spain. The pinging calls are those of the midwife toad. Diserens is based in Berlin, Germany.

Scratch Pad: Fog, 707, STT

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ It’s one thing to think the sounds from neighboring construction kinda resemble experimental percussion music. It’s a whole other level when it all starts to sound vaguely like the muffled vocals of an unidentifiable singer-songwriter.

▰ The city’s Tuesday noon sirens are still out of commission, but the bay fog horns appear to have gotten a new subwoofer

▰ A happy 707 Day to all who celebrate

That’s for the Roland TR-707 Rhythm Composer, which was first released 40 years ago, way back in 1985. The above INXS track came out two years later.

▰ I love when my speech-to-text tool identifies two different speakers, even when it’s just me rattling off notes verbally. There should be an LLM STT tool called Black Swan Fight Club that identifies your various sub-personalities for you.

▰ Been digging having my phone on grayscale mode. For one thing, it looks nice. For another, I find myself less drawn to wasting time on the device. For a third, the setting obviates the remotest consideration I might have had for a “dumbphone,” not that I had much of such a desire in the first place.

▰ The fog is so intense today. I wrote all day and then went for a walk and it felt like I was still indoors.

I kinda love it.

▰ Sometimes I just think about how much toast is consumed in the book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, engineer/producer Geoff Emerick’s excellent memoir

▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: (1) Yuri Suzuki, sound artist and designer formerly of Pentagram, mentioned on Instagram that his partner, Amy Croft, founded a bed and breakfast in Margate, England, called Modja Modja House, and it now has artist residencies. He writes: “I’ve long had a passion for music and sound, and an ever-growing collection of synthesizers that really needed to be put to good use… so we thought: why not invite artists to stay and create?” ▰ (2) Robin Rimbaud is one of the OG electronic solo musicians from the 1990s, a peer — in time, impact, and sui generis quality — to Aphex Twin, Oval, and Squarepusher. His Instagram posts are regularly filled with his creative activities, as well as with a generous serving of what he is, himself, enjoying in terms of art and music. He writes detailed posts each time, such as this week about a visit to Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s “Clinamen” exhibit in the rotunda at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.

End of Week

I’ve been doing my best to really contain my social media use. This means not just limiting when I post (that is: not on weekends, nor on weekdays before breakfast or after dinner — with, of course, occasional exceptions, because being too strict is its own problem) but also frequency and range of topics. These end-of-day and end-of-week posts I make occasionally are a subcategory that just arose naturally, as I found myself at the edge of land on a regular basis, at the midpoint of a walk, whether to the Pacific Ocean or the San Francisco Bay. To a degree, these will all the look the same, which can also be said of most days. But at the same time, they’re quite distinct, as here given the awesome intensity of the fog down at China Beach. I watched a half dozen crows fly overhead, chatting nosily, and I could tell their relative distance from me because the closest ones were nearly black, the ones a little further were gray, and the ones furthest away seemed almost white, so deep were they in the fog.