Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 138

twitter.com/disquiet: Ominous, Headroom, Stats

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.

▰ Most of the time a TV caption reads “ominous music,” I’m like, “That’s the backing track for when I’m reading a novel on the couch.”

▰ I knew the Outside Lands festival is coming when I saw a giant tractor trailer hauling giant stacks of giant gates.

▰ Recent readymade poetry from Wikipedia’s list of notable deaths:

Japanese mass murderer
Israeli mysticist
American bassist
Burmese politician and rapper

▰ This week’s Disquiet Junto project, the 552nd consecutive one, draws inspiration from a conversation about radio between John Cage and Morton Feldman that Tobias Reber (of Musikfestival Bern) and I were discussing (coincidentally one that Damon Krukowski recently wrote about).

▰ The word “blindsight” finally appears in Peter Watts’ novel of that name about 45% of the way through, sort of how the term “termination shock” appears roughly 50% of the way through Neal Stephenson’s novel of that name. I’ve seen other examples, but that’s the one on my mind. (The essential sentence “Time’s a goon, right?” is the first appearance of “goon” in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I think that’s roughly 45% of the way through, though my Kindle-math is failing me at the moment due to stuff at the end of the book. Been a long day.)

▰ In an industry-first innovation, the new Max Headroom TV series will be produced entirely as a discontinuous suite of blipverts.

▰ Pioneering statistical data analysis takeaways of BBS discussions by people talking about recording their own electronic music:

1% gear someone made
2% money someone was(n’t) paid
7% music someone made
15% gear someone used
25% gear someone wants
50% pictures of gear

▰ My Instagram feed is filled with flyers, mostly hand-drawn, for concerts that list the date but not the year and the address but not the city.

(I’m guessing this is not some next-generation UX testing and, instead, merely a personalized reflection of my past browsing.)

Not Remotely Confrontational

I visit homes for sale in the neighborhood sometimes just to see how a familiar landmark looks from the inside, sometimes to get a sense of the regional architectural history, and sometimes I am rewarded with archaic details that make my heart sing. And with the realtor’s approval, I can hit the button and give it a listen. This one was a beauty. Large as this is, the sound it produced was not remotely confrontational. The attack was soft, and it trailed off for an admirable length of time.

Disquiet Junto Project 0552: The Radio in My Life

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 1, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 28, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0552: The Radio in My Life
The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation.

This project is the second of three that are being done in collaboration with the 2022 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 7 through 11. The topic this year is “unvermittelt,” which is a little tricky to translate. Literally it’s “unmediated,” but it can also mean “sudden,” “abrupt,” or “immediate.”

We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the fourth year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects will be played and displayed throughout the festival.

Step 1: There’s a great moment in the recorded conversations of composers John Cage and Morton Feldman when they discuss a trip to the beach. Feldman isn’t pleased by the way transistor radios let music, and sound in general, appear in places it hadn’t previously. Cage jokes that having composed music that involves multiple radios, whenever he hears them he thinks, “[W]ell, they’re just playing my piece.” You can listen to it in the first 2.5 minutes of this excerpt:

https://youtu.be/chEvxoypyUo

Step 2: Think about Cage and Feldman’s conversation, in particular about the idea of what is and isn’t a sonic “intrusion” in our lives.

Step 3: Record a piece of music that reproduces or otherwise suggests the sympathetic (i.e., non-intrusive) commingling of radio and everyday sound.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0552” (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 “disquiet0552” (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-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/

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 1, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 28, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0552” 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 552nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Radio in My Life (The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation) — at: https://disquiet.com/0552/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern

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-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/

Start a blog.

Start a blog. Don’t amplify stuff you disagree with. Mute stuff that bugs you. Focus; veer occasionally. Add context to links. Consider waiting a day after writing something before posting it. Write for yourself first. Expect to not know what you have to say until you’ve written.

Yutaka Hirose’s Varied Spaces

Trace: Sound Design Works 1986-1989 by Yutaka Hirose

I sometimes wonder if the steady stream of archival, often never before heard, ambient music from Japan is, in fact, an artful ploy, an aesthetic provocation in the form of a narrative prank — like a music-history equivalent of the Wikipedia user, Zhemao, who reportedly created an expansive fictional medieval history of Russia (see: vice.com). Also, not a prank in the Punk’d “gotcha” sense, but more in the sense of the RE/Search book, a compendium that argued they “constitute an art form and genre.”

In any case, there’s a fine new collection of historical material, Trace: Sound Design Works 1986​-​1989, out from musician Yutaka Hirose. Many of its 11 tracks have the deep, echoing resonance of sound recorded in situ, like the dubby beading of “Inner Voice,” all moist clangs and spatial ambience, and the mechanical soundscape of “Voice from Past Technology.” This physicality represents what Hirose told critic Narushi Hosoda in a Tokion interview published last month: “I wanted to build sounds based on space rather than do something musical.” Other tracks further expand the scope, allowing for seemingly virtual spaces, like the lofi beats and warped vocal of “The Breath of Cyberspace.”

Album released at the Bandcamp page of the WRWTFWW Records label.

This Week in Sound: Leaving Room for the Sound Design

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the July 25, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound: tinyletter.com/disquiet.

As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.

▰ Sara Novic, who is deaf, writes about the comfort in silence: “Taking out my hearing aids is a relief, not unlike freeing my feet from a long day in dress shoes, except the thing being squeezed is my brain. I choose to wear hearing aids in a variety of work-related or social situations, but they create a dull throbbing around the circumference of my head. For all the technological power and benefit the aids provide, lately I’ve found their greatest value is in the pleasure of removing them.” ➔ nytimes.com

▰ A synesthete chef, Eric Kim, bakes an A.S.M.R. cake for a deceased friend. “The sound of people eating, chewing, enjoying food makes me sleepy, which is unfortunate, considering that I cook for a living. … I always thought I was a freak. I didn’t have a name for what I thought was a medical condition until 2012, when I stumbled upon a black-screen YouTube video of a young man eating a taco bowl. When I came to, an hour later, I had a name for it. Soon after that, I started making A.S.M.R. videos myself.” ➔ nytimes.com

▰ “In an ambitious cross-cultural study, researchers found that adults around the world speak and sing to babies in similar ways. … Regardless of whether it helps to know it, researchers recently determined that this sing-songy baby talk — more technically known as ‘parentese’ — seems to be nearly universal to humans around the world. … The results, published recently in the journal Nature Human Behavior, showed that in every one of these cultures, the way parents spoke and sang to their infants differed from the way they communicated with adults — and that those differences were profoundly similar from group to group.” ➔ nytimes.com

▰ “Leaving room for the sound design, even when there’s a cue playing, was an important part of the way I approached it.” That’s Michael Abels, who composed the score for Jordan Peele’s Nope (he also did Peele’s Get Out and Us), saying something not enough composers (or perhaps, more to the point, directors) give thought to. ➔ indiewire.com

▰ Thúy N Trần, CTO of Astrid, an education technology company, breaks down the way AI is impacting language-learning. ➔ venturebeat.com

▰ “A new feature that lets you extract a short audio clip from a Twitter Space is getting a widespread release on iOS and Android.” However, the clips expire after 30 days. ➔ theverge.com

▰ So-called “prairie madness,” an affliction of 19th-century settlers of the Great Plains of America, may have been the result of the region’s “eerie soundscape — the silence and the howling wind.” The work is by paleoanthropologist Alex D. Velez of the State University of New York at Oswego. ➔ atlasobscura.com (Thanks, Joe Planisky and Glenn Sogge!)

▰ “A federal lawsuit filed against the city of Chicago is calling into question law enforcement’s use of controversial gunshot detection technology for gathering key pieces of evidence. … The suit accuses police of putting ‘blind faith,’ in ShotSpotter’s supposed evidence.” ➔ gizmodo.com

Sound Ledger¹ (Noise Accounting)

27,000: Cost, in $US, of a “noise-monitoring camera” purchased by the city of Knoxville, Tennessee

25: The distance, in feet, it is illegal in Florida for sound from your vehicle to be audible

244: Number of sound level meters purchased by police in Delhi, India, to fight noise pollution

________
¹Footnotes

Knoxville: knoxnews.com. Florida: motorbiscuit.com. Delhi: timesofindia.indiatimes.com.

Originally published in the July 25, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via tinyletter.com/disquiet.

God’s Music

The current season of Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s Westworld, the fourth, is probably the best since the first. There’s a major sonic component that I can’t really describe without spoiling things, so take that as the warning for people who worry about SPOILERS (in all caps because people who don’t like spoilers can get loud about it).

I’m not concerned with spoilers at all, myself, but so be it. Let the following vertical, manga-style ellipsis protect you from what you do not know:

.

.

.

OK. If you’ve elected to read on, you already know or won’t be disappointed to learn that Charlotte Hale, the character played by the always formidable Tessa Thompson, has turned the tables on humans, and it only took about a quarter of a century.

As of episode five, “Zhuangzi,” which aired on July 24, not only have we sorted out that nasty little flies can enter the bodies of humans and turn them into programmable meat puppets — in addition, the world we see in the show is a reverse Westworld, where the (semi?) sentient code creatures (robots? androids?) visit to have their way with their former, red-blooded masters.

Hale, having created this haven, is a god among gods. We find her midway through the episode as we so often find gods in epic stories. She is bored out of her skull.

We meet her on a cobblestone street, where she has forced a busker pianist to play for so long that his finger tips are bloody. Such is the control the robots have over humans that mere mortals stop in the street and, at Hale’s command, dance. (The moment serves as a dark callback to the mechanical piano and robot pianists from the very first episodes. If this guy plays any longer, his fingers will be as bony as the ones we’ve see in the show’s credits.)

There’s a connection between the pianist’s music and the larger plot of this season. The humans are controlled by sound. There is a deep thrumming that humans can’t hear, and that is produced by massive antennae that look like they were designed to trigger people who adhere to 5G conspiracies.

Hale is encountered on the street by William, played by an increasingly ascetic Ed Harris, to whom she moans with a self-pity on the order of the speech given by Dean Stockwell, as Cavil, in the “No Exit” episode of Battletar Galactica.

Here’s what Hale says:

“Humans are so bound by what they can hear. They’ll never understand what they don’t. What else exists below the threshold. They call this God’s music. You should hear it on an organ. It’s mesmerizing at that volume. The resonance. Vibration. There was a frequency at which the world vibrated. It caused joy. Harmony. Dip below that frequency… chaos. In chaos, the tone resonated in such a way humans couldn’t process. Their bodies shut down. Their organs stopped. They thought they were experiencing God. They are experiencing God. The problem is God is bored.”

In fact, humans are bound not just by what they hear but by what they can see — and what they can’t see in the episode is the largest of these antennae right off the coast. The thing looks like if Zaha Hadid took a commission from Verizon. I imagine that the season will climax with that broadcast structure being destroyed, but who knows? Many more episodes to go.

Cut Chemist’s (Deep) Crate

The Downstream section on Disquiet.com is a regular series of recommended recordings. The material is usually focused on recent music, and it’s generally the case that the music is in some way freely accessible — i.e., even if it’s for sale, you can listen to it somehow, even if only through an ad-supported streaming service. Today’s entry is an exception to both those norms.

Cut Chemist (aka Lucas MacFadden, ex-Jurassic 5 and Ozomatli) has a subscription service through Bandcamp packed with fantastic old-school hip-hop instrumentals (by artists other than himself) that he’s accumulated over the years. They’re inaccessible from his own cutchemist.bandcamp.com page unless you pay a monthly (Patreon-style) fee. Then they pop up under the A Stable Sound Club tab. The audio benefits from his own digital preservation efforts. As he explains in an accompanying blog post, “I’ve been doing some serious reconstruction for these. From sourcing, to clean up, remastering and editing.”

The latest batch, Cut’s Crate #16 Rare 80’s Hip Hop Instrumentals, released on June 20, includes choice material from Beastie Boys (“Time to Get Ill”), Cold Crush Brothers (“Feel the Horns”), and Big Daddy Kane (“Ain’t No Half Steppin”), all shorn of their vocals, leaving just the backing tracks.

For an earlier collection, Cut’s Crate #15 1990’s Rap Rare Show Vinyl, released the month prior, he rightly singles out one track in particular from the set, Digable Planets’ “Where I’m From Stripped Down Show Instrumental,” for its exquisite simplicity: “I particularly like the Digable Planets stripped down version of Where I’m From to accommodate their touring live band.” The way the sampled horn just echoes amid the spare drum loop is trance-like. Here’s a YouTube copy of the original “Where I’m From” instrumental (the “Novox” — which is to say, no voice — mix), which has some additional elements, including vocal snippets and crowd noise at the opening and closing:

Also — and this may simply be a matter of the way the YouTube version was processed — the horns move much more widely in the stereo spectrum in Cut Chemist’s “Stripped Down” copy.

Note: These aren’t amalgams that Cut Chemist created from the originals. They’re proper instrumentals he has collected: “These have been given to me,” he explains in a blog post, also for subscribers only, “by the artist, producer or label so no bootlegs were used.”

One of the unfortunate aspects of modern streaming services is that a lot of the instrumentals that accompanied singles in their original form are absent from the collective jukebox in the cloud. Fortunately, YouTube headz keep a lot of it in circulation, but hip-hop and r&b instrumentals aren’t as readily accessible as they used to be, back when vinyl 12″s were the primary means of distribution — nor are they as accessible as they should be, at least not in the contemporary scenario, where streaming is the norm. Many instrumentals aren’t available commercially at all, except used on vinyl via eBay and Discogs. Hip-hop instrumentals are a huge part of — and parallel to — the history of electronic music, and Cut Chemist is doing his part to keep the tracks out there.

Current Favorites: Peel, Reidy, Ide

An occasional answer to a frequent question: “What have you been listening to lately?” These are annotated, albeit lightly, because I don’t like reposting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.

▰ One highlight of the various artists album MSCTYEXPOUNKNOWN PLEASURES ZONE is a mix of drones and wordless vocals by Hannah Peel. The record also features work by Loraine James, Akrafokonmu, Yuri Suzuki, mcconville, Bill Fontana, and Yuval Avital.

MSCTY_EXPO_UNKNOWN PLEASURES ZONE by Various Artists

▰ Julia Reidy’s World in World is an album of otherly tonal, often textural, experimental guitar tracks with occasional vocal touches.

World in World by Julia Reidy

▰ Yasushi Ide’s new album, Cosmic Suite2​-​New Beginning-, includes a variety of collaborators, among them DJ Krush for this dubby treat, “Outer Space”: