Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 136

Library Signage

twitter.com/disquiet: Visual Artist ID

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up sooner in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com. I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself. And sometimes I tweak them a bit, given the additional space. And sometimes I re-order them just a bit.

▰ That was a new-to-me flavor of awesome. While speaking with a service representative at what is clearly a massive call center, suddenly the entire room broke into riotous laughter. It felt cinematic, somehow, even though it was just a scratchy phone call.

▰ Hey, anyone recognize this artist’s name? I can’t decipher the signature, which is almost as abstract as the 1962 print on which it is inscribed.

▰ Today’s technique check: mentally practicing guitar scales by saying/singing them out loud while visualizing the fretboard (without a guitar in hand because you’re traveling) doubles as a sleep aid.

▰ And I discovered a new tuning: instagram.com/dsqt.

Michael Mann Surveils

Long week, more on which later. Been rewatching Michael Mann’s Heat in advance of reading the new novel, Heat 2, which he co-wrote with Meg Gardiner.

Disquiet Junto Project 0555: A Simple Timer

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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, August 22, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 18, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0555: A Simple Timer
The Assignment: Simplify by a factor of 5.

This week’s assignment goes to the inner workings of electronics. It was developed by longtime Junto participant Anatol Locker. Before getting to the instructions, here’s some background information: In 1971, engineer Hans Camenzind designed a simple timer IC, the Signetics LM555. It packs 25 transistors, two diodes, and 15 resistors on a small, eight-legged silicon chip.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Camenzind

Due to its sheer simplicity, it populates most PCBs that need a clock. The 555 is used for a multitude of tasks: as a pulse generator, timer, delay, or waveform generator. When it comes to DIY music projects, you can find 555’s in the Atari Punk Console and other DIY synths.

https://www.instructables.com/Atari-Punk-Console-Synthesizer/

You can get an impression of what the chip is capable on Wikipedia and Electronics Tutorials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_timer_IC
https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/waveforms/555_timer.html

So far, it has sold a billion times, making it the most popular chip design on the planet. Which is to say: It’s iconic, it’s simple, it’s omnipresent, and it “makes things tick.” By comparison, an SID chip, engineered a decade later in 1981, would be the equivalent of a symphony orchestra.

There are two steps to this project.

Step 1: Think about what simplicity means to you.

Step 2: Produce a track taken to the extreme minimum. Use only pure waveforms (sine, sawtooth, triangle, pulse wave) and no effects. Restrict yourself to 5 voices.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0555” (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 “disquiet0555” (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:

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0555-a-simple-timer/

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:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, August 22, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 18, 2022.

Length: The length should be some multiple of 5 (seconds, minutes, etc.).

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0555” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

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 555th weekly Disquiet Junto project — A Simple Timer (The Assignment: Simplify by a factor of 5) — at: https://disquiet.com/0555/

Thanks to Anatol Locker for having proposed this project.

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-0555-a-simple-timer/

Image by Stefan506, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Signetics_NE555N.JPG
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Legible Shot

Struggled a bit to get a legible shot of this, which is a little ironic.

Standard Warning

Standard warning for noise band rehearsal space

Last Night

Final night in the house I grew up in. Tomorrow it becomes someone else’s house. They’ll be its second owner. I had long forgotten, until this afternoon, that there was a peculiar additional doorbell on the exterior wall facing the backyard. Not quite Rosebud, but something for sure.

45 Holder

Back on Long Island, helping my mom clean out the house we moved into when I was about two weeks old. Found this spot in a cabinet where my late dad had installed a holder for the family room stereo system’s 45 rpm adapter.

twitter.com/disquiet: Guitar-less Practice, Diminished Chords

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up sooner in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com. I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself. And sometimes I tweak them a bit, given the additional space. And sometimes I re-order them just a bit.

▰ Thinking about diminished chords for too long diminished my brain. Generally speaking the more complex chords look like chemistry symbols to me, but the slash-zero as half-diminished chord in the thick handwriting of the Real Book makes me think about the runes in an old Tolkien paperback.

▰ Oh, sure, internet, send me news of a new Michael Mann interview three minutes before I have a long and important work call. Thanks. I’ll savor it later.

▰ Album title if you need one:

▰ Just finished reading Blindsight by Peter Watts. In it, a post-human spaceship crew is on the verge of first contact. And just to make matters more complicated, the ship is sentient and the person in command is a vampire. This is so-called “hard” sci-fi, but unlike a lot of hard sci-fi that’s really just heavily researched arcane jargon en masse, this is actually hard (as in difficult), in that the technical matters are connected to what it means to be human — heck, to be alive. (The 19th novel I’ve finished reading this year.)

▰ You’re traveling for a few weeks without a guitar. How do you best practice guitar, other than locating a loaner:

Speaking note sequences out loud?
Disecting chords?
Watching tutorials?
Reading theory?

Ideas welcome. Thanks.

▰ I want to see this remake of Nosferatu. (via twitter.com/_simeonsmith)

▰ I’ve had some weird coincidences recently. Last night’s took the cake. About to watch Only Murders in the Building, I first watched a brief Michael Mann interview, during which was a Last of the Mohicans clip — only for Martin Short to then say the same line in the OMitB episode.

30 Years after Cage

Tobias Reber informed me this morning — or this evening, that is, in Bern, Switzerland, where Reber is based — that today marks the 30th anniversary of John Cage’s death, which occurred on August 12, 1992. The comment, via Facebook, came on the occasion of a project we’re currently undertaking, the third in a sequence of music prompts for Musikfestival Bern. This marks the fourth consecutive year of the Disquiet Junto’s collaboration with the festival, thanks to Reber’s invitation. As it turns out, the project currently underway is built on Cage (details at disquiet.com/0554). It takes a chord from a Cage composition and asks contributors to create drones based on that chord. The project began yesterday, the 11th, and will continue through this coming Monday, the 15th.

As always with Junto projects, which I’ve now been moderating for over a decade, the sheer variety of approaches by musicians has been inspiring. One participant built a system in the Pure Data coding language, while another used a different instrument for each note in the chord, and someone else played it on the beautiful Hyve touch synthsizer. The tracks are appearing one at a time on a llllllll.co discussion thread.

Cage’s death is also on my mind because I’ve been re-reading his conversations with Morton Feldman that were collected in the essential MusikTexte book Radio Happenings, a portion of which inspired another Musikfestival Bern project a few weeks ago.

It’s been a while since I thought about the one time I saw Cage in person, which must have been not long before he passed away. He sat just in front of me in the audience at a Bang on a Can Marathon performance by Margaret Leng Tan of some of his work. I could swear it was toy piano music being played, but a review by Edward Rothstein that year — the year Cage turned 80 — says it was a regular piano (see: nytimes.com). This would have been at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan. If memory serves, I was sitting with the late K. Robert Schwarz, who died of AIDS in 1999 and had written for me when I was an editor at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine. Also, if I’m not mistaken, Tan sat with Cage in the audience up until it was time to perform. And Cage, quite sweetly, drifted off to sleep during her performance.