Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 15

Timbaland Portable

I was fiddling with my old Nintendo DS, and apparently I was so addicted to Timbaland’s production that I stored some instrumentals, including Xzibit’s “Hey Now (Mean Muggin),” on there at some point in the distant past.

And in case it’s not familiar, here is the track. It is fantastic:

And then Peter Kirn reminded me about Timbaland’s PSP (PlayStation Portable) release, Beaterator, which I now need to reacquaint myself with.

Novels Read — First Half of 2025

I’ve finished reading 12 novels so far this year. Two a month seems like a good pace, leaving room for other reading. Below are the titles in the order I read them. The ones with the + signs I recommend in particular. I put Middlemarch on pause after I was about a quarter of the way in, and I’ve picked it back up, though I really need to read a good essay or two about what I’m due to appreciate about it (recommendations welcome), as it’s precisely the sort of compendium of courtship micro-interactions that I could never get engaged by. I’m also currently reading Blood Meridian, Moby Dick (which I’ve started several times in the past, and this is the first time when I’ve felt like I will actually not just finish it but enjoy it), and The Hummingbird.

1: C.S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

2: Jakob Kerr: Dead Money

3: + Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon (reread)

4: Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier (reread)

5: + Cory Doctorow: Walkaway

6: + Ali Smith: Autumn

7: + Joan Didion: Play It as It Lays

8: + Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Time

9: Michael Connelly: The Black Echo (Bosch Vol. 1)

10: Stephen King: The Long Walk

11: Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley

12: Michael Connelly: The Black Ice (Bosch, Vol. 2)

On Repeat: Deupree, Pritcher, Orio

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.

▰ Gorgeous live solo performance by Taylor Deupree (apparently a promotion for Benson amps?).

▰ A solo guitar performance by Andy Pritcher from the same series as the above Deupree.

▰ An album, Santa Rosa, of Federico Orio’s music for church bells, recorded at Basílica Santa Rosa de Lima in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While the sound of the bells is familiar, their use here is distinct in the employment of repetition and an emphasis on percussive elements, all amid a range from quiet minimalism to the chaotic.

Scratch Pad: Singularity, Reading, Shortwave

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.

▰ Fortunately, my brain was long ago trained to interpret the ongoing nearby construction as abstract minimal techno

▰ Overheard at restaurant this week: “Human connection is going to be outdated in five years.” Someone in the group also said, “Human connection is overrated.”

▰ I have a choice between the drummer near the office and construction near home

▰ Nice: my (successful) attempt to have Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds (2002) run on a modern portable gaming console made it to Jason Kottke’s blog and Austin Kleon’s newsletter.   

▰ I finished reading two books, both novels, this week: Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and the second in Michael Connelly’s Bosch series, The Black Ice. That brings me to the average I’m going for, two novels a month, a dozen so far this year — and with a few days in June to spare. I’ve paused Middlemarch at about a quarter of the way through, and I am currently reading Moby Dick, Blood Meridian, and a few others.  

▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: John Kelly shared, on Threads, some Justin Green comic drafts from the 1990s, some of which I edited for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine. ▰ John Kannenberg, whose Museum of Portable Sound has an admirably broad scope, reminded his followers of a 1981 assassination attempt involving a tape recorder. ▰ A post on Instagram from Music Thing Modular introduced me to the Shortwave Collective, “An international feminist group using the radio spectrum as artistic material.”

A Thief Moment

Michael Mann’s Thief (1981), his feature film debut, is having a moment. It was mentioned in “One Last Job” (a recent episode of Poker Face that focused on an aspiring filmmaker) and a track from the movie’s score, by Tangerine Dream, was featured prominently in the opening episode (“Groundhogs”) of the latest season of The Bear. The latter makes particular sense, since both the movie and the show are based in Chicago. The Bear team knows what it’s doing, in that the track used in the episode, “Diamond Diary,” is buried under a lot of dialogue, which is true to how Mann’s movie, even when a scene was free of actors speaking, generally mixed the music with a lot of diegetic sound.  

Disquiet Junto Project 0704: Right on Cumulus

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 0704: Right on Cumulus
The Assignment: Compose 8-bit music inspired by a Cory Arcangel / Super Mario video.

Step 1: You’re going to record 8-bit music (or something approximately like it). If you’re not familiar with means by which to do so, read up a bit. Also, there may be some discussion on the Lines (llllllll.co) message board for those new to it.

Step 2: In 2002, the media artist Cory Arcangel created a work of art titled Super Mario Clouds, which removed everything from the 1985 Super Mario Bros. video game except the blue sky and passing clouds. This means that Arcangel’s video was silent, because also excluded was Koji Kondo’s classic score. Read up about the work, which is well-documented.

Step 3: Part of the reason that the original Super Mario Bros. music wasn’t included in Super Mario Clouds may have been to do with how it, naturally, wasn’t aligned with how sedate the Arcangel hack turned out to be. Please now record very sedate 8-bit music that does feel aligned with Super Mario Clouds.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0704” (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-0704-right-on-cumulus/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Two to four minutes seems about right.

Deadline: Monday, June 30, 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 704th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Right on Cumulus — The Assignment: Compose 8-bit music inspired by a Cory Arcangel / Super Mario video — at https://disquiet.com/0704/

End of Day

End of day. The neighborhood today, June 25, 2025, didn’t hit 60° Fahrenheit.

On the Line: CSE, Lockwood, Surveillance

▰ Whale of a Time:

“You ever hear about the loneliest whale in the world? Whales have songs, right? They sing to each other, and the songs are at, like, 160 MHz, something like that. I forget the specifics, but they’re all within that range, yet there’s this one whale who sings at, like, 50 MHz. No one knows why. But none of the other whales can hear him. So he just goes around singing, and the other whales don’t even know he’s there.”

That is Agent Copano (voice: Joseph Lee Anderson) in the animated series Common Side Effects (season 1, episode 7, “Blowfish,” written by Karey Dornetto), from Joseph Bennett, one of the two creators of the fantastic Scavengers Reign, and Steve Hely. This moment occurs right after Copano’s newly assigned partner turns off the car radio and says, “I don’t like music. It’s distracting.” Copano misses his previous partner, Agent Harrington, with whom he’d often listen to music while on stakeouts. Fortunately, unlike Scavengers Reign, Common Side Effects was renewed for a second season.

. . .

▰ Locked In:

“I am seeking ways to recognize that we are part of that world, not dominant and not separate. And sound is so powerful for that. It affects our blood pressure and muscle tension. You can’t control it.”

That is composer Annea Lockwood, profiled in The New York Times by Joshua Barone.

. . .

▰ Mic Drop:

“Some of the conversations inside the embassy were picked up by bugs. The various branches of British security, sometimes unaware of one another’s activities, devoted much effort and ingenuity to inserting tiny microphones through the 22-inch-thick wall of the embassy and the 15-inch wall of the building next door. This required drilling holes by hand through granite and dense Victorian brick to avoid making a sound likely to alert the gunmen to what was going on. Fake roadworks were staged outside, to hide the noise of the drill. The aim was to come out behind an electric socket, so that the microphone would be hidden behind a piece of plastic. In the event, the field telephone which had been given to the gunmen for communications with the police, and which contained a permanently active bug, appears to have been the most useful listening device.”

That is Patrick Cockburn in the London Review of Books summarizing information from Ben Macintyre’s book The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama.

Voicemail

This is the 16th comic in the ongoing series I’m doing with Hannes Pasqualini. See the full index of our Frame by Frame comics at disquiet.com/fxf. More from Hannes at hannes.papernoise.net.

Sound Ledger: EVs, Noise, Clones

3,000,000: Number of views of one TikTok video parodying EV sound.

37: Number of countries collaborating to tackle underwater noise pollution.

30: Number of seconds of recording from which someone’s voice can be cloned. 

Sources: EV (fastcompany.com; tiktok.com), underwater (nature.org), clone (saturdayeveningpost.com)