Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 150
April 24, 2022
Current Favorites: Trumpet, Melodica, Buddha Machine
My weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them:
▰ There’s a new album from the late Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo due out next month. It’s two CDs. One CD is all what the label describes as ambient pieces, and here’s a taste:
The second CD is a concert from 2005. Here’s a video of some of it, complete with live painting by Seitaro Kuroda. The band is Kondo (trumpet) + Bill Laswell (bass) + Hideo Yamaki (drums) + Yoshinobu Kojima (keyboards).
▰ Kaori Suzuki’s nearly half-hour “Music for Modified Melodica” exemplifies her penchant for intensity. The overtone overload — the notes note: “Intended for hi-volume listening!” — cycles through like a massive chorus of insects with phenomenal breath control, and I mean that as a high compliment.
Music For Modified Melodica by Kaori Suzuki
▰ With “Transporter,” J Butler reworks a Buddha Machine, singing bowls, and other atmospheric source material along with field recordings into something that sounds like if Brian Eno’s “Apollo” was about a walk in the forest:
April 23, 2022
twitter.com/disquiet: Noyes, Mingus, BPM
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.
▰ I didn’t know until today that (yeah yeah TIL) “Noyes” is pronounced “noise.” A friend visiting Chicago sent me a four-second video from a train. The automated voice is heard saying what appears to be “This is noise.” The screen at the rear of the car reads “This is Noyes.”
(And yeah, now my cultural-jukebox brain is revisiting old issues of The Duplex Planet.)
▰ Got a bunch requests in this regard the past couple weeks while I was traveling, so I wanted to mention it here: I enjoy writing liner notes, and I make time for doing so. Artist bios (like for press kits, etc.) are something I don’t really have time for. Thanks.
▰ Start a blog. Then in 25 years you can tell yourself what a rewarding way it has been to spend 25 years, as I’ve been doing this year in between writing new disquiet.com blog posts.
▰ Yes, you’re drinking a cup of coffee while your brain whirrs up for the day, and you’re listening to the new edit of Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey,” and at the appropriate moment you do, indeed, find yourself crossing your arms, instinctually, in front of your chest.
Just as a side note, the original “Shock the Monkey” video now looks sort of like a supercut compression of the Moon Knight TV series.
▰ “So, what’s your optimal BPM?” That’s what I asked on Twitter. I got a lot of responses: ➔ twitter.com/disquiet
▰ It’s Earth Day. Take out your earbuds and open your window.
▰ “We care about your experience so we may record this call.”
Note: cause and effect are not simply the result of the insertion of a conjunction.
▰ The 10th novel I finished reading in 2022: I read Sayaka Murata’s excellent Convenience Store Woman earlier this year, and followed it up with Earthlings, which engages in a similar narrative (individual viewing society from an extreme remove) but in a much darker mode. And the novel’s end is hardcore Ballardian. Yow. (Also: There’s virtually no sound in Earthlings, a stark contrast with Convenience Store Woman, which was full not just with sound, but with the protagonist’s perception of sound.)
▰ Friday, April 22, 2022, was the 100th birthday of one of the greatest musicians of all time, American jazz bassist Charles Mingus. I tweeted a playlist of favorites to mark the moment, starting with a live 1964 concert with Eric Dolphy, wending through covers by Keith Richards and Joni Mitchel, touching inevitably on his own Ah Um and his trio album with Duke Ellington and Max Roach, Money Jungle, and closing on the opening cut of Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus — his initial solo on “II B.S.” is so deep, so intimate. Then he invites the band in a bit at a time until it scales out to something utterly massive in scope. ➔ twitter.com/disquiet
▰ And finally, the weekend, which I take off social media. Some recommended plans:
Listen to more MingusLet Earth Day lingerPrep for World Listening Day (July 18)April 22, 2022
EarthPercent for Earth Day and Beyond
As of Earth Day 2022, Friday, April 22, there’s a slew of tracks up on Bandcamp as part of EarthPercent (earthpercent.org), a project co-founded by Brian Eno. EarthPercent encourages musicians (and other participants in the music industry) to pledge 1% of their income in order to address climate matters. Given the dismal economic state of the music industry, this may sound like a difficult pitch — but, Eno being Eno, he managed to get a ton of musicians to upload exclusive tracks as part of EarthPercent’s fundraising activities.
The names in the Bandcamp event range across genres. On the ambient and post-classical tip, I recommend Isobel Waller-Bridge’s “Elizabeth,” a minute and a half of choral hush; Poppy Ackroyd’s live set (three pieces originally recorded for her glistening Pause album from late last year); and Galya Bisengalieva’s brutally arid “Kantubek.” (Major thanks to Ian Brooks on Twitter for having hipped me to the latter two.)
Eno himself sings on “Did The World Begin Today,” featuring Leo Abrahams. It’s a beautiful, super-slow ballad, on the order of his “You Don’t Miss Your Water” cover, and his collaboration with John Cale, Wrong Way Up. Eno also worked on tracks with Michael Stipe and with Hot Chip.
None of the EarthPercent songs are streaming unless you purchase them, hence the lack of an embedded player in this post. Explore the full collection at earthpercent.bandcamp.com.
April 21, 2022
Disquiet Junto Project 0538: Guided Decompression
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, April 25, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 21, 2022.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0538: Guided Decompression
The Assignment: Get someone from tense to chill.
Step 1: Your goal with this piece is to guide someone from a place of intense stress to something more sedate. Keep that in mind.
Step 2: A lot of meditation-oriented music takes the end point as the start. Consider that it can be jarring to listen to calm music when you are anything but calm.
Step 3: Compose a piece of music that starts in a state of accelerated tension, allows the listener to align their own tension with that of the music, and then slowly proceeds to calm down, until the music is sustainably peaceful.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0538” (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 “disquiet0538” (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-0538-guided-decompression/
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, April 25, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 21, 2022.
Length: The length is up to you. How long does it take to calm down?
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0538” 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 538th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Guided Decompression (The Assignment: Get someone from tense to chill) — at: https://disquiet.com/0538/
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-0538-guided-decompression/
April 20, 2022
New Loraine James Team-up
It hasn’t been that long since Loraine James announced her Ghostly album, Whatever the Weather, which came out earlier this month. And there’s already a follow-up, the upcoming EP 053 on the AD 93 label, also home to Dylan Henner, Moin, and Biosphere, among others. 053 teams James with fellow Londoner TSVI (Italian-born Guglielmo Barzacchini, who’s previously recorded for AD 93 as Anunaku). Two preview tracks, “Observe” and “Trust,” are already up. The first is IDM beats and async melodies. The second: lush, sodden piano and lightly granulated vocals. Instant heavy rotation. These two tracks close the five-song set. As for the rest of it, we’ll know on May 13.
Album first posted at ad93.bandcamp.com.
April 19, 2022
This Week in Sound: Graphene Drums, VR Audio
These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the April 18, 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.
▰ About NextSense: “with legions of folks wearing the buds for hours, days, and weeks on end, the company’s scientists hope they’ll amass an incredible data trove, in which they’ll uncover the hidden patterns of mental health.” The company spun out of Google’s experimental division. Steven Levy tracks its growth and projects its roadmap: “If artificial intelligence can decode tons of brain data, the next step would be to then change those patterns—perhaps by doing something as simple as playing a well-timed sound.” ➔ wired.com
▰ If it seems like every other week I have a story about sonic threats to ocean life, it’s because I’m being selective. It could be every week. This is a major and growing area of study. Writes Matt Simon: It’s a critical, and critically understudied, aspect of how rising temperatures—and increasing noisy activity like shipping—might be affecting marine ecology. ‘The soundscape of nature really only came to the forefront of people’s thinking in the last 10 or 15 years,’ says Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at UC Santa Barbara, who studies pressures on ocean ecosystems.” ➔ wired.com (Thanks, eddi!)
▰ AI can remove city noise from seismic data, thus improving earthquake research: “Earthquake monitoring in urban settings is important because it helps us understand the fault systems that underlie vulnerable cities,” Gregory Baroza of Stanford University tells The New Scientist’s Chris Stokel-Walker. ➔ newscientist.com
▰ The war on the Ukraine by Russia has impacted a lot of areas, including the availability of tubes for guitar amplifiers, reports Ayesha Rascoe, who interviewed Randall Ball of Ball Amplification. ➔ npr.org (Thanks, Rich Pettus!)
▰ Isabelia Herrera wrote a moving story for the New York Times about how her experience of her mother’s stroke influenced her appreciated of ambient music — from “late capitalist Muzak, smooth-brain anesthesia to pacify the mind” to something much richer: “Listening to it demanded that I relinquish control. It asked me to dispense with progressive time. It forced me to slow down and confront collapse.” ➔ nytimes.com
▰ On the role voice recognition plays in virtual reality for the training of college football teams: A coach “can grade what the linemen are doing and decipher what they are learning and where they still need to improve. With the data, he can design individual lesson plans for players to go over and over it again to enhance teaching.” ➔ csurams.com
▰ Changes are coming to hearing aids, as earbuds catch up with traditional models, the latter of which can cost upwards of $14,000. ➔ nytimes.com
▰ CheekyKeys is an ingenious tool that lets you silently type by using your mouth to spell out words. ➔ gizmodo.com, github.com
▰ Not only is that theme music for the Slow Horses TV show an original song by Mick Jagger, the song’s co-writer (Slow Horses composer Daniel Pemberton) re-uses Jagger’s harmonica in some of the show’s score. ➔ variety.com
▰ Speechly is “a tool for adding voice interfaces to the Unity virtual reality and augmented reality platform.” This is nifty: “It’s able to start carrying out commands before the user finishes speaking, adjusting as more words clarify the request.” ➔ voicebot.ai
Subscribe to This Week in Sound at tinyletter.com/disquiet.
April 18, 2022
Exploring Sonification.Design
The current issue of The Wire features a column I wrote, under the Unofficial Channels heading, about the website sonification.design. If you’re a subscriber now, you can read it in the magazine (the issue with Reynols on the cover). When the next issue of The Wire comes out, I’ll post the full text to Disquiet.com.
Sound Ledger¹ (Racing, Graphene, Cosmic)
97: The decibels level cited in a lawsuit to bring the planned Miami Grand Prix race to a halt
60: The amplitude, in nanometers, of oscillations measured as part of research involving graphene drums
16: The fasted known repeated frequencey, in days, by cosmic radio bursts
________
¹Footnotes
Miami: dailymail.co.uk. Graphene: nature.com. Cosmic: sciencenews.org.
Originally published in the April 18, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Get it in your inbox via tinyletter.com/disquiet.
April 17, 2022
Current Favorites: Tape, Score, Wind
Trying to get back in the habit of my weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them:
▰ As of this writing, three tracks currently preview the upcoming (May 6) release of Sanctuary, an atmospheric collection of tracks by Daou (born in Beirut, based in Pari) that all emit the melancholy warble of tape loops set on decay mode.
▰ Isobel Waller-Bridge’s scores (Fleabag, Vanity Fair) are always worth listening to, and just check out the submerged-orchestra wonder of “The Woman Who Ate Photographs,” a cue from season one of Roar.
▰ Google Translate tells me that “lye” is the translation of “灰汁” — that’s the title of the latest snippet of transmogrified field recordings from prolific Japanese noisemaker Corruption, who here bends wind to their will.
April 16, 2022
twitter.com/disquiet: Tokyo, Simulacrum, Greenacre
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.
▰ You could tell the first episode of Tokyo Vice is a Michael Mann production just by listening to it. The mix of ambient score, traffic noise, and the sound of occasional human gestures in the scene in the first episode when the police and reporters document a dead body is exceptional. The term “master class” has been degraded beyond rehabilitation. This is Mann in full control.
▰ The 1-star Yelp reviews of hotels in Manhattan are often a riot. So many noise pollution complaints, as if it’s specific to a given hotel.
▰ It’s enough to make you think we live not only in a simulacrum but one trying to evade our awareness of it if high-grade consumer text-to-speech would rather hear two bits of nonsense than acknowledge the existence of the word simulacrum.
Why I recorded myself saying this sentence: I was recording myself right after waking. The broader subject was how I’d lifted my phone a split second before the phone’s morning alarm went off. The original subject was the eerie synchrony. Then text-to-speech leveled-up the eerie.
▰ One of my favorite little parks in Manhattan, Greenacre on 51st, though I do wonder how loud this fountain’s substantial roar is in the neighboring apartments. I believe the water is turned off over night, when the park’s fortress-grade gate is shut. Here’s some video: instagram.com/dsqt.
▰ Alarms getting old never gets old
▰ The hotel alarm clock features a vestigial organ of the digital revolution.
▰ According to Gustave Flaubert (according to novelist Julian Barnes), trains in mid-1800s France were Web 2.0.
This is from Flaubert’s Parrot, the ninth novel I’ve finished reading this year. Loved the first third. After that it gets especially collage-like.
▰ RIP, actor Michel Bouquet (b. 1925), whose work I first encountered thanks to the great film Toto the Hero (Toto le héros), which also introduced me to the music of Charles Trenet.
▰ The sound my phone made when an alert this morning about the Brooklyn shooting popped up was like six cups of coffee in a split second.
▰ Thursday was Avril 14th. Celebrate accordingly. I did a quick thread of recent covers of the Aphex Twin song: twitter.com/disquiet.
▰ Thing I just discovered: if you hit your YubiKey at an inopportune moment during a call it sends out a peculiar, alien screech.
▰ On the flight Thursday evening back to San Francisco from New York, I used my excellent noise-cancelling headphones to muffle the weapons-grade drone of the airplane — and I then found myself, instinctually, pumping white noise into my ears so I could concentrate on work.
▰ And on that note, have a good weekend, or best you can.
Listen to two records at once.
Use IMDB to trace the work of a sound professional from a TV show you enjoy.
Sell some old LPs you no longer like. Trade them for something new.
See you Monday. Or maybe Tuesday.
