Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 165

My Troubles with MP3s

MP3s continue to be a source of confusion — consternation? apathy? entropy? all of the above? — for me. I should be clear that by “MP3s” I mean any fixed digital documents of audio. So, by “MP3s,” I also mean WAV files, and FLAC, and ALAC, etc. Actually, I specifically don’t mean WAV, because WAV files don’t play nicely with metadata, and files (at least cultural, third-party files) that don’t include self-explanatory contextual information seem inherently problematic. But in any case, I’m using “MP3” here as shorthand for fixed audio files that have contextual information (in this case, things like artist, title, album, year of release, etc.).

I struggle with MP3s to the extent that I have failed over the course of two and a half decades to actually employ them in the long term, to engage with them repeatedly, casually, in an active archival manner, as I have, by comparison, with CDs and vinyl. MP3s are fine to download, to preview music, to listen to for a while — but actually returning to them? Scanning through a collection of files as one might a wall full of alphabetized spines? That was barely a habit for me in the age before and of the iPod, and even considerably less so today.

Yes, physical formats involve their own shortcomings. I have tons of old CDs packed away I haven’t listened to in years. The organization of my LPs is sloppy at best. I recall one time, back in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when a friend mentioned how I hadn’t talked about a certain type of music in a while. Initially I was confused by the comment, but a week or so later I noticed I had, indeed, at some point put boxes of research materials directly in front of the lower wall racks where those particular CDs were stacked. I hadn’t listened to the music because it was out of sight and, thus, out of mind. With MP3s, which bear no physical form besides pixels on a screen, out of sight is an even bigger issue.

There are technical matters, as well. Time has not been kind to CDs. The media was plagued with rumors that they would decay when the years passed. The years have passed. As someone with thousands of them, I have never experienced a single one going bad; perhaps there is a ruined one buried deep in my collection, but I’ve yet to come across it. However, the things we play CDs on don’t work forever. The multi-CD changer in my living room died recently, after 30 years of service, and finding a good single-CD replacement has been tellingly difficult. It’s easier to locate a good turntable these days than it is a proper CD player. I bought a cheap DVD player to fill the void in my stereo system, but only temporarily: it doesn’t even have a readout of where you are in the disc. I have my eyes out for a used one.

Now, part of this MP3 issue is about my own listening habits. I’ve always been listening forward, listening ahead, dipping back on occasion, but doing so more instinctively and for research. I’ve always been focused on new releases, part by predilection, part because I’ve written professionally about music since 1989 and did so in college beginning in 1985, and for the high school newspaper before that. I listen back, yes, but what’s coming up is where my ears are directed. As a result, I am not naturally inclined to collate, to tend the garden. And MP3 collections require tending.

And I’m not alone. If there were more of a common habit of managing our MP3 (etc.) collections, there would be better tools to accomplish the task. There are tools, mind you. Apple Music does a fine job even if you don’t subscribe, and there are contenders like Vox (vox.rocks), but their usage pales to streaming. Streaming, in the modern sense of the word, on services like Spotify and YouTube Music, is more like how I imagine exploring my own hoard of digital music files, and yet a useful system to accomplish has never worked for me: RAID discs accessible like a private cloud, nested folders on Dropbox, sync’d across devices like Apple Music and Vox. All nice, or nice enough, in theory, and yet for all my listening, and I listen a lot, not one approach has stuck. And not for lack of trying.

When I purchase an album from Bandcamp, or receive one as a cloud-accessible Zip archive from a musician, or download a set of tracks from a blog, the online place where those files originated is part of the way I think about them henceforth. In the absence of a physical object, the connections between bits of information provides a semblance of an object. I have a few albums I associate with the places where I purchased them (a Laurie Anderson box set I got at a steal used when I could not have afforded it new, a few LPs still bearing the labels of the stores where I snagged them), but it’s different with MP3s. MP3s sort of scream out for context. These lighter than air files that contain music benefit from tethering; additional information — a cover image, a title, the musicians’ own comments — gives them something akin to weight. Best I can, I have tried to gather notes and documents, and set them alongside the tracks in a folder, much as I’ve occasionally slotted interviews, reviews, and other (flat!) artifacts inside album sleeves, not just LPs but CDs as well (folding one-sheets to fit inside a jewel box is a hard-earned skill). These additional files aren’t generally accessible from within whatever app I use (or, more accurately, try to use) to organize my MP3s, so it’s a bit of a fool’s errand — which may be the fact of MP3 collecting more broadly, as well.

So, another year ahead, and along with it more files. Will they linger on hard drives, or will they gather into something useful? I don’t know.

Novels Read in 2021

A year in other people’s pages: To say 2021 was a tough year would be an understatement. I read a heap of books, which helped, what with what was going on more broadly in the country and the world. I read a lot more than novels, but here is a list of the 24 novels I finished reading. (I started a lot of books that I didn’t finish. Those aren’t included here.) It’s pretty much all what could broadly be described as “escapist” stuff, which makes sense (since who didn’t want to escape 2021?). I’m guessing I left one or two off by mistake, since I’m not great about updating my Goodreads account.

These novels are listed in reverse chronological order. I’m pretty sure I won’t finish reading the novels I’m currently reading until the start of 2022, but there’s still plenty of vacation days ahead, so who knows? (The better of them is Jade Legacy by Fonda Lee, and so far I am really enjoying it, as of 43%. It’s the third and, sadly, final book in her Jade series.) The ones with + signs are the ones I particularly recommend.

Technically I finished Time War at the very very end of 2020, but the book still felt fresh at the start of the year. It’s pretty revealing to look back at a year of reading, and to observe how some books feel quite recent, while others don’t. For example, I finished Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice before January 2021 was half over, and it feels like much much longer ago, whereas I finished Kay Larson’s truly excellent Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists in May, and it feels like yesterday. (Neither of those are fiction.)

With almost all of these novels, I have a sense of where I was when I read them. That’s more complicated during pandemic life, since every day has pretty much been the same (excepting a trip to New York, to see my family, during which I didn’t read much at all), but still these are breadcrumbs that trace the path I took.

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson
Silverview by John le Carré
+Road Out of Winter by Alison Stine
The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford
An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer
The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer
The Tourist by Olen Steinhauer
All the Old Knives by Olen Steinhauer
The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross
Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace
The Atrocity Files by Charles Stross
This Is What Happened by Mick Herron
Duchamp Versus Einstein by Christopher Hinz
+Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein
+A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes
Nobody Walks by Mick Herron
+Slough House by Mick Herron
Why We Die by Mick Herron
The Last Voice You Hear by Mick Herron
Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron
+Joe Country by Mick Herron
+Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Nerd Proxmity

My final 2021 article (for somewhere other than Disquiet.com) is about declining to call myself a nerd. I wrote it for HiLobrow, as edited and encouraged by Peggy Nelson. My short piece is the final entry of a 25-part series that included writers Lucy Sante, Vanessa Berry, Annie Nocenti, and other far greater nerds.

I’d mentioned when Dean Stockwell died earlier this year that not long before he passed away I had filed a story for later publication in which I borrowed a nerd-tactic monologue of his (well, Cavil’s) from Battlestar Galactica. This is that article.

The HiLobrow piece begins with the paragraph above. Read the full piece:

https://www.hilobrow.com/2021/12/27/nerd-enthusiasm-25/

Neon from a Distance

Today I learned that you can see the Balboa Theater’s neon sign from the bison paddock in Golden Gate Park.

Excursion

Goes into nature. Takes pictures of signs.

twitter.com/disquiet: Meta Feta

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 in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ That tweet about my favorite living ambient(ish) guitar players led to to a heap of great recommendations.

▰ I’m now getting Instagram ads for soldering equipment.

▰ I’m reminded on occasion that the musical saw is an analog theremin.

Following Twitter feedback, make that an “acoustic theremin” rather than an “electric theremin.”

▰ What are your favorite VCV Rack 2 modules that aren’t in the app’s library?

Among mine are these ports of the Monome Teletype, other modules, and Grids:

More at github.com/Dewb/monome-rack.

▰ My Twitter #protip is to make an unintentionally bad joke at the start of the day, and to then appreciate the informative conversations that follow it up.

▰ Folks asked about fave LPs by the 6 guitarists I highlighted recently and now all I’m listening to is Eivind Aarset in quiet electronic collaboration with Michele Rabbia (percussion) + Gianluca Petrella (trombone) on the 2019 ECM Records album Lost River.

This will sound like high praise because it is, but there are days when this album is precisely everything I want in music, locating as it does a rewarding balance between familiar/remote, lush/arid, soft/glitched, live/processed, hermetic/communal.

▰ Person of Interest rewatch continues. The show is even better than I recalled. Expertly internecine, patiently and rewardingly plotted, and funny as heck. I always think of it as excellent Colossus: The Forbin Project fan fiction that overshadows its seeming source material.

And the songs used are a great big beat / trip-hop / electronica flashback, so much Unkle, and Lo Fidelity Allstars, and DJ Shadow (among other acts and types of music), plus Ramin Djawadi’s score.

It’s fun to see Leslie Odom Jr. (later Aaron Burr in Hamilton) as the recurring leader of an anti-surveillance, quasi-nationalist crew (name: Vigilance) who add 1776-era flourishes to their violent acts. Bonus: Chris Jackson (aka Hamilton’s George Washington) has a tiny role.

Foremost there is the beautiful glitch aesthetic at work visually and, to a degree, sonically. It’s often like if Oval, Trevor Paglen, and Herman Kolgen teamed up. Gorgeous stuff.

▰ “I’ve got an arrow here. / Loving the hand that sent it / I the dart revere.”

Starting to watch Dickinson after first catching up with Hawkeye can be a bit confusing, in a dream-state crossover sorta way.

▰ My brain is so on holiday time, I almost sent the Disquiet Junto project out a day early. :)

▰ I love my neighborhood: The local movie theater is hosting live music, not that I’m attending live music indoors yet, or going to movies (48hills.org).

▰ Late afternoon quartet for TV audio bleed from next room, revving gearhead sports car, passing bus, and bare footsteps on nearly century-old wood flooring.

[As Heard Through Earbuds While Transcribing Text for Longform Writing Dub Mix]

ft. Gate Slam

▰ Starting one New Year’s resolution early, which is getting the Disquiet Junto projects out earlier on Thursdays.

▰ Wasn’t expecting those Pokémon in the Matrix sequel

▰ Went for a walk. Got dark. Then very dark. Then realized there’s a power outage in the Outer Richmond.

▰ Well, that was a lot of firetrucks going by. Blackout in the neighborhood last night. No idea what’s happening west of me at the moment. After those sirens, when cars zip by afterward they sound like little children keeping up with the big kids. And another siren. The sound’s passing is especially striking in its east-to-west fluidity because it’s clear the car carrying it is not stopping at any of the stop signs or lights.

▰ Scene report

▰ Scene report

▰ And, finally, it’s unusual that anything I post on Twitter gets particular traction, but the following blew up quickly, at least by the modest parameters of my social media activity. As of this evening, this actual screenshot detail from a local restaurant’s web delivery page had over 330 likes, 30 retweets, and 20 comments, a day and a half after I posted it.

My initial instinct when posting was to use this image as a way to comment on the fourth Matrix movie, which is heavy on the meta (I had a bad “feta” pun in mind), but I kept it simple. It read just:

Was gonna order some food. Not sure which of the two Greek salads to get.

(For the record, ended up getting sausages at Berliner Berliner in the Lower Haight instead of a Greek salad.)

No Honky Tonk

This little keyboard sit on the counter at the local sheet music shop. I imagine it’s there so you can try your hand at a piece before making a purchase.

Disquiet Junto Project 0521: Cannon Canon

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, December 27, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 23, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0521: Cannon CanonThe Assignment: Make a martial round.

Step 1: Let’s get our definitions straight:

A “cannon” is a “large, heavy gun usually mounted on a carriage.”

Whereas in a “canon,” an “an initial melody is imitated at a specified time interval by one or more parts, either at the unison (i.e., the same pitch) or at some other pitch.” (A simple version of a canon is a round.)

Step 2: Locate (or produce a facsimile of) the sound of a cannon. (One place would be freesound.org.)

Step 3: Record a canon using the sound of a cannon.

Definition sources: “cannon” from Merriam-Webster, “canon” from Britannica.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0521” (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 “disquiet0521” (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:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0521-cannon-canon/

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.

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, December 27, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 23, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Canons can feel like they go on forever.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0521” 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 521st weekly Disquiet Junto project — Cannon Canon (The Assignment: Make a martial round) — at: https://disquiet.com/0521/

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-0521-cannon-canon/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.

FM Listening

This icon certainly makes it seem somewhat painful.

Modular on the Bay

When such things are happening again, this old military installation at Baker Beach in San Francisco sure would make a solid Modular on the Spot setting.