Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 145

Listening to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad

The universe loves a coincidence, so I happened to start reading Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad the week Ingram Marshall died, and I stumbled on this in the third chapter:

For years people recommended the book to me, almost always because of a rock’n’roll element, and I would try to explain that sleaze nostalgia is not my thing, and that I’m more interested in refrigerators humming than in the same three chords all over again (I meant and mean that literally, not just as a diss on the straightjacket that verse/chorus/verse songwriting can be). Fortunately the book shifts gears pretty quickly (or at least appears to, or at least adds new gears — I’m only four chapters in). And the author has less than kind words for nostalgia in the process. Though that may be a fake-out.

These moments stuck out from the second chapter:

“He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room.”

“the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh”

“Nostalgia was the end—everyone knew that.”

The “he” in the first quote is Bennie Salazar, one of the main characters in Goon Squad. The second and third are from the especially (if you’ve read the book, you know what I mean) omniscient narrator, but reflects Bennie’s perspective, and seemingly that of his mentor, Lou, both of them being music industry figures.

For every Bennie who bemoans the rise of digital technology in modern music (and there are a lot of Bennies in that regard), there was someone decades earlier who bemoaned the rise of amplification (there were a lot of those someones, too). Bennie is trapped in his own perspective.

I’m not particularly a Bruce Springsteen fan — having grown up on Long Island, I suffered from overexposure near the source — but I definitely get his fixation on not being stuck in the past: “It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap.” The line is from “Born to Run,” and it’s directly about leaving behind a town but, like the comically misunderstood “Glory Days” (curse of the chorus, à la Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”), it’s also about uprooting oneself from the past before it’s too late. I think of Springsteen here because that rough and tumble posturing connects with Bennie’s East Coast record label vibe, and because of his own self-proclaimed old-fashioned-ness.

I think there’s a connection between Bennie’s aesthetic anxiety, in the face of modernity, and the way his brain loops frequently back to the past — in what Egan excellently describes in this chapter as a “memory spasm.” I say “I think” because I haven’t finished the book yet.

Disquiet Junto Project 0544: Feedback Loop

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, June 6, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 2, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0544: Feedback Loop
The Assignment: Share music-in-progress for input from others.

Step 1: This project is about two things: (1) requesting feedback and (2) providing feedback. Keep that in mind.

Step 2: Upload a track you’re working on and would appreciate input on from fellow Junto members. When doing so, consider mentioning the sort of feedback you’re looking for: tone, production, development, instrumentation, etc.

Step 3: After uploading your track, and in the days following the conclusion of the project, provide feedback to other people’s tracks, either on the Lines discussion (link below) or on the website where they’ve posted their track.

Note: The Lines BBS runs on a discussion platform called Discourse, which has some built-in restrictions. Among these is that you can’t reply too many times to the same thread before someone else replies first. This is a “consecutive replies” matter. The best practice is to compile feedback to multiple tracks, and to tag reach recipient in one reply. If those instructions aren’t clear, just wait a little while after tracks begin to appear on the thread. Soon enough you’ll see examples of people doing exactly this.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0544” (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 “disquiet0544” (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-0544-feedback-loop/

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, June 6, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 2, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Consider it’s a lot to ask people to listen to something very long.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0544” 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 544th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Feedback Loop (The Assignment: Share music-in-progress for input from others) — at: https://disquiet.com/0544/

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-0544-feedback-loop/

Expanse UI

I’d certainly like not to have to wait until whenever in the human future it is that the ninth book of the Expanse series takes place for this to be actual UI for voice dictation. There’s another voice-activity comment a little after this one, making me wonder if at least one of the authors, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (dba James S. A. Corey), usesd voice dictation while writing these books.

This Week in Sound: A Consensus of Jackdaws

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the May 30, 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.

▰ Tubular bells isn’t merely a classic Mike Oldfield song that I enjoy most when DJ Krush works it into his DJ sets. They’re a form of instrument patented in 1884 and in production until the 1920 — so we learn from a detailed study by Bill Hibbert, whose The Sound of Bells blog is now one of my favorite things on the internet. ➔ hibberts.co.uk(Via Chris Lowis’ Web Audio newsletter)

▰ “Culture, once thought to be uniquely human, is found in a wide range of animal species.” Thus begins a fascinating dive into the maintenance of complex songs as they are learned amid humpback whale communities. ➔ nature.com

▰ Google may be working on Android software “to track time spent snoring and coughing at night.” ➔ androidpolice.com

▰ Apparently when a flock — excuse me, murder — of jackdaws is heard making squawking in near unison, what is apparently happening is that they’re taking a vote. “By establishing consensus to leave the roost early and in large flocks, birds may reduce predation risk, facilitate access to useful foraging information,” write researchers. ➔ france24.com

▰ Google speech recognition is getting personal: “’Personalized speech recognition’ feature now looks to help Google Assistant get ‘better at recognizing your frequent words and names.'” ➔ 9to5google.com

▰ You know all those Indian loudspeakers I’ve been writing about each week as having been confiscated during noise-pollution crackdowns? Wonder what happened to them all? “Schools have become the unlikely beneficiaries of the state government’s campaign in April to take down loudspeakers installed without permission at various public places and sites of worship. The owners of some of these loudspeakers have over the past few weeks donated the devices to educational campuses that operate on tight budgets, cajoled by the police.” ➔ indiatimes.com

▰ The beautiful thing about the internet is not only does a rooster disturb its neighbor, but news of the crow circulates around the world, becoming, in a way, a larger form of disturbance. Apparently there are lots of laws on the books in Greenwich, Connecticut, about animals —but “noise from an animal is exempt.” At least as of now. ➔ greenwichtime.com

▰ Actor Giancarlo Esposito is the source of the Sonos Voice Control system’s default narration. ➔ protocol.com

▰ “When you put your head underwater on a coral reef, it is just an absolutely dizzying array of shapes and colors and noises and sounds, it is completely overwhelming,” says marine biologist Tim Lamont, in the context of describing the ongoing threats to marine life. “One of the things we discovered when the reefs were degrading, where it was that they were going quieter, that sort of, you know, this biological symphony was being silenced.” ➔ kuow.org (Thanks, Lotta Fjelkegård!)

▰ Voice phishing — or vishing — is on the rise: “We are seeing an increase in threat actors moving away from standard voice phishing campaigns to initiating multi-stage malicious email attacks. In these campaigns, actors use a callback number within the body of the email as a lure, then rely on social engineering and impersonation to trick the victim into calling and interacting with a fake representative.” ➔ techrepublic.com

Sound Ledger¹ (Vishing, Carson)

550: The percent at which voice phishing attacks have increased in the past 12 months

60: The number of years since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, its title relating the decline of bird populations due to environmental issues

22: Number of weeks in a row I’ve now managed to publish This Week in Sound, definitely a personal record

________
¹Footnotes

Vishing: techrepublic.com. Carson: mongabay.com.

Originally published in the May 30, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via tinyletter.com/disquiet.

The Health of the Ship

The final volume of the nine-book (not counting novellas, comics, and six-season TV show) Expanse series was high on my list for end-of-2021 reads. But as the release dates overlapped, I put the final book in the three-volume Jade series by Fonda Lee first, and after it was done, I just wanted to delay the end of another series I’ve spent so much time with. I started volume nine, Leviathan Falls, a few months ago, but still wasn’t ready to say goodbye, so I put it down. It would never be a short goodbye, anyhow, as the book weighs in at 528 pages. I finally started again at the end of May, which meant re-experiencing this moment early on, when Naomi Nagata explores the ship, the Rocinante, that has carried her and her crew mates through so many adventures. She does so by listening, and by doing so, sensorially brings the reader, as well, into the hull for one last trip.

twitter.com/disquiet: “Bloggen ist Seven of Nine”

I do this manually each Saturday, 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.

▰ 14th novel I’ve finished reading in 2022: Hervé Le Tellier’s An Anomaly. Largely enjoyable high-concept scifi puzzle told in fragments of characters’ experiences. Varying degree of detail aligns with the story’s philosophical conundrum, but can feel cursory. Does, in the end, tie things together better than Lost did.

▰ My happy place is when Iannis Xenakis drawings look like Lebbeus Woods drawings.

▰ I usually keep autoplay turned off, but sometimes it turns back on. The Algorithm just decided to follow up the modern industrial music of Vladislav Delay’s forthcoming album (there’s an initial track up) with Chet Baker and Paul Bley playing “Every Time We Say Goodbye.”

▰ Seems appropriate that this actual-in-existence Miles Davis figurine from Funko Pop looks like a deer caught in the headlights. (Via Eugene Holley, Jr.)

▰ “Bloggen ist Seven of Nine, Social Media ist Borg.”

I didn’t need Google to translate that but I did need it to translate the rest of this great post in which someone dug into some of my 2019 thoughts on the 20th anniversary of the word “blog.”

▰ This one graffiti artist in the neighborhood is next level

Carmen Villain x Arve Henriksen

Only Love From Now On by Carmen Villain

I often don’t get past the first track on Only Love from Now On, the recent album by Carmen Villain, because the nearly eight minutes of tribal Fourth World trance is essentially designed to be played on loop. It draws you close with held granular background textures, settles your pulse into a groove with a roughly 30 BPM slomo headnodder (or double that, depending on where you find the rhythmic locus — and even then, still quite sedate), and proceeds to layer the electronically mediated trumpet of Arve Henriksen — Villain’s fellow Norwegian — on top.

Henriksen alternates between the breathy noir melodicism of a hologram Chet Baker and the digitally generated chords long associated with Jon Hassell, finding blissful peace between two very different eras of jazz trumpet. He hits these plateaus of sound and lets them linger, playing call and response with himself thanks to distant triggered trills. All along, the underlying setting suggests something is afoot. The music feels ceremonial, yet the cause of the ceremony is unstated — an ambiguity that is right in line with Villain’s expressly atmospheric approach.

Album originally posted at carmenvillain.bandcamp.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0543: Technique Check

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, May 30, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 26, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0543: Technique Check
The Assignment: Share a tip from your method toolbox.

Step 1: Think of some technique — small or larger, simple or complex — that you employ when making music.

Step 2: Make a piece of music employing that technique.

Step 3: When sharing the piece of music, describe the technique so that others might employ it.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0543” (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 “disquiet0543” (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-0543-technique-check/

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, May 30, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 26, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0543” 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 543rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Technique Check (The Assignment: Share a tip from your method toolbox) — at: https://disquiet.com/0543/

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-0543-technique-check/

Tele Genic

Got a second guitar used, this one to keep in my office