Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 166

Sign Wave

I should be clear that I don’t claim the above statement as my ethos. What it is is a peculiar sign that someone took great effort to attach fairly high up a telephone pole on the main drag in my neighborhood. I marvel at the effort that went into it all: the production of the sign, its placement in a high traffic area, the professional grade installation. It truly hides in plain sight.

Notes

As a constant notetaker, I can say that I am neither immune to nor unfamiliar with the concept that a writing implement might feel transformative in some manner — a fine tip that balances ink flow with durability, a mechanical pencil with a stiletto point that retracts fully, an upgraded digital stylus that allows you to flip between modes with a gesture — but even then, I was struck by the promises made for this item at the hardware store.

twitter.com/Disquiet: Mingus, Ellington, Science

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.

▰ Spent too much time after the first And Just Like That… episode wondering what LPs Big doesn’t own if his collection jumps from Rondstadt to Rundgren. … Also: at the end of the episode, when the thing happens, is the score a super slow take on the Rundgren song played earlier?

▰ “Physicists Discover a Remarkable New Type of Sound Wave” is my kinda clickbait (via Karl Fousek), even if I’m still trying to sort out what the scientists’ findings mean: scitechdaily.com.

▰ Me: Oh, cool, this new laptop has a standard SD slot built in. No more dongles or adapters!

My synthesizer module: Time to update the firmware, so just plug in this microSD card.

▰ Shoutout to whoever crafted the Find My alert for iOS. Sometimes I play it just to hear it.

▰ [pensive instrumental music]

Oh, The Expanse, how I’ve missed you, and how I’ll miss you when these final episodes have run their pan-galactic course.

▰ Hum a few bars and AI’ll transcribe it: “This notebook is an interactive demo of a few music transcription models created by Google’s Magenta team. You can upload audio and have one of our models automatically transcribe it” (colab.research.google.com).

▰ Afternoon trio for light rain, chimney wind, and passing truck with ancient breaks.

▰ I don’t miss the sound of a computer’s fan. I remember with early laptops and physical hard drives, how you could just tell, from the sound of things, when you should wait an extra split second before doing something, ’cause otherwise the whole contraption was gonna blow a gasket. (That’s both metaphorical and accurate.) As for the new laptop, I maybe shouldn’t have waited until the previous one was almost dead to level up, but so it goes.

▰ The Expanse may be my favorite recent-ish (space) science fiction show, if not of all time. (Fringe, Travelers, Counterpart, and Person of Interest, among others, would rank, high, too. They’re just not in space, except to the extent that, you know, Earth is in space.) (And yes, I’ve read all the books, except the ninth/final one. Gonna wait until the season is over, even though the season seems like it’s essentially the sixth book.)

▰ I love the moment in the first episode of the final season of The Expanse when Chrisjen Avasarala, Earther to the core, floats in her room. It’s a beautiful callback to the moment in season four when Naomi Nagata, belter extraordinaire, takes her first steps on an actual planet.(Also, I’m gonna finish Fonda Lee’s new, and final, Jade book before I start the new Expanse one. Both books end their respective series.)

▰ If you spent too much time consuming YouTube videos of neighborhoods in cities around the world, as I do, and loitering in video games to experience virtual approximations, sometimes the bus going by your home in the afternoon can sound like a cue triggered by in-game variables.

▰ Waiting for the Star Wars: Biomes second unit animation director’s cut where they remove the music so it’s actually, you know, the biome. Unless planets in the Star Wars universe actually have music playing naturally all the time. Which, well, would be an interesting environment.

▰ The haiku of lives summarized on Wikipedia’s Deaths in 2021 page:

Spanish lexicographer
Italian animation historian
Australian punk rock guitarist
Russian microbiologist and politician

▰ Hopeful that an updated Splinter Cell means a remastered Amon Tobin score and a whole new remix album: “A ‘Splinter Cell’ remake is underway” (engadget.com).

▰ The use of Nokia AI to gauge vehicle noise pollution in Genk is interesting, though it might just punish people who can’t afford electric cars: “Nokia Brings IoT and AI to Bear on Vehicle-Based Noise Pollution in Genk Smart City Trial Program” (hackster.io).

▰ The Disquiet Junto has been around for 520 weeks. If our planet didn’t wobble around the sun, the Junto would turn 10 years old today (December 16, 2021), but various leap years and related incongruences mean the anniversary will occur on January 6.

▰ The kids are alright. Ethan Hein reports: “For her final project in music tech class, one student did a seamless mashup of all of her projects from the semester. That is a classic Disquiet Junto move, and I didn’t even prompt it! But maybe I should assign everyone to do that.”

▰ “Her pronunciation revealed an accent that would tear itself to shreds on razor wire if the authorities ever found the time to build a fence around Buenos Aires.” from Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarac

via Stephen Beachy via Alvin Lu

▰ Two records I’ve listened to for decades are Bitches Brew (Miles Davis) and Money Jungle (Ellington/Mingus/Roach). I love ’em both. Bitches Brew has gotten mellow, even comforting, as time has passed, whereas Money Jungle sounds more aggressive and complex with each passing year.

▰ Got a new TV, replacing the one from 2008. Higher rez, thinner, larger screen in same dimensions. Best thing? It makes no sound when turned on. With the old one, it was a challenge to hit the mute button at the right moment so the room wasn’t filled with an egregious twhmoomp.

▰ And on that note, have a good weekend.

Let your home appliances serenade you.

Take a nap in white noise’s embrace.

Pay attention to whether that novel you’re reading (or writing?) pays as much attention to sound as it does to sight and touch.

Six Strings & Five Footnotes

These are my six¹ favorite² guitarists, listed in reverse order of when I first came upon and learned to love their music. Please recommend others.

Ben Monder³
Eivind Aarset³
Ava Mendoza⁴
Michael Brook³
Bill Frisell⁵
Robert Fripp

¹I likely forgot some.
²Ambientish and living
³Never seen live
⁴Used to see often in San Francisco before she left town
⁵Used to see often in New York City before I left town

Disquiet Junto Project 0520: On the Clock

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 20, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 16, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0520: On the ClockThe Assignment: Get that thing done before the end of the year.

Step 1: Think of some musical idea you’ve been putting off doing all year. It could be a riff, a new approach to an instrument you use, reworking an existing track. Whatever’s been on your mind.

Step 2: Stop procrastinating and do the thing you focused on in Step 1 above. Record a track that exemplifies the thing from Step 1.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0520” (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 “disquiet0520” (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-0520-on-the-clock/

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 20, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 16, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0520” 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 520th weekly Disquiet Junto project — On the Clock (The Assignment: Get that thing done before the end of the year) — at: https://disquiet.com/0520/

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-0520-on-the-clock/

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

Another Form of Volume

UNDER HUDEN by Henrik Meierkord

There’s a trenchant, pulsing necessity to the three tracks that comprise Under Huden, a new EP from Henrik Meierkord. The music’s urgency is belied by its seeming quietude, the key word being “seeming.” The tracks are quiet by appearance, and by appearance only, for each is dense in its own way. Each is layered with sawed strings, blurs of overtones, stray trace elements. (What, for example, is that wonderful warble from 6:18 to 6:20 in the EP’s closing piece, “Under Huden III”?) Density is, arguably, simply another form of volume, not so much loud volume as heft volume, the sheer substance of what is occurring gathers in the imagination.

Also particularly striking about Under Huden is the sense of place. This may or may not have been recorded live, but the end result has a spatial quality to it, offering up a mental picture of a room, dimly lit, light cutting through the blinds, dust motes in the air, feet firmly placed on old planks, the cold winter just outside.

Music originally posted at henrikmeierkord.bandcamp.com. More from Meierekord, based in Stockholm, Sweden, at soundbread.se.

Firmware Party

I spent last night performing the routine if time-consuming update of the firmware for various synthesizer modules while the rain provided a white noise background just outside the living room window. A few months ago I acquired a new laptop, one that thankfully came with an SD card slot built in. This old-school upgrade (retrofurbish? untweak? phoenifix? deminimalism?) from the previous laptop model presumably meant no more dongles. But of course, the work I was doing required a microSD card, so an adapter in the form of a dongle was necessary. And another piece of hardware required a USB-A type connector — and, thus, another dongle, since the new laptop only has USB-C type connectors. The phrase “two steps forward, one step back” took on new meaning while I shuffled Zip archives, searched BBS discussions, consulted with friends via social media, and kept track of mental bread crumbs amid nested file folders.

The word firmware is the term for software that provides hardware with its underlying functionality. Often with music hardware, there are alternate versions of the standard firmware. These alt-firmwares add utilities and other tools, sometimes extending the life of sunsetted equipment, other times serving as a parallel development process to the real deal. Such alt-firmware may ride side by side with or entirely overwrite the original firmware. Sometimes the alt-firmware is such a great realization of the hardware object’s potential that it’s hard to believe the hardware wasn’t designed with it in mind. Among the more widespread examples is a package called JJOS, a full replacement system for some of the MPC line of Akai beat machines. I’m not sure if the identity of the creator of JJOS is publicly known or not. I’ve read that it’s a former Akai software engineer.

The piece of alt-firmware I use most often is Hemisphere, a suite of several dozen virtual modules replacing (or complementing) the software that comes with a module called Ornament and Crime (which has a great home URL, ), the title borrowed from architect Adolf Loos. Unlike the Akai MPC line, the Ornament and Crime module is entirely open source, not just software but hardware, so it’s quite possible to be running alt-firmware on alt-hardware, which is the case with my o_C (as Ornament and Crime is abbreviated) setup.

Another device I updated recently made the step of taking its formerly closed source code base and turning it open-source, thus unleashing a lot of opportunity that hadn’t existed previously, such as virtual instances that run on standard computers. I located an interesting piece of third party software for the device, which required another piece of third party software in order to run. Neither of these two pieces of additional software were directly related to the device’s new open source status, but they did reflect the interconnectedness of individuals’ efforts.

I doubt I’ll ever have the skills to produce or even contribute to alt-firmware myself. The best I can do is employ it, make something with it, celebrate it, and occasionally note a shortcoming or propose a tweak. Last night, all I was doing was updating software, swapping in and out cards, attaching cables. And there’s more of this to come. Before bed, I did finally have a few moments to test out what I had done, and to marvel as my devices made sounds they never had before.

25th Anniversary of Disquiet.com

And just like that, it’s been 25 years since I faxed the paperwork necessary to purchase the domain Disquiet.com. This having been 1996 (December 13, a Friday), no one, I believe, owned the URL previously. I wanted a new “identity,” having then recently left Tower Records’ magazines (Pulse!, Classical Pulse!, and epulse) after seven years of employment (I stuck around in a freelance capacity for another eight years while working full-time elsewhere). I was a big Fernando Pessoa fan, and remain one. The name Disquiet was a natural choice, thanks to Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, although much deliberation was involved before it became the obvious one.

At first, Disquiet.com’s material was ported from a site I’d housed on services with names like Netcom and Calweb since 1994, mostly focused on music and comics. The one cool thing was you could mouse over handwritten text on an image (writing on yellow lined paper) and click on the word. Fancy! I wish the Wayback machine was old enough to locate a copy of it. Far as I can tell, it’s lost to the digital dusts of time.

Soon enough I finalized the logo, and I got the site set up, and then I started uploading old articles from Pulse! and other places. In time I added datelines (at the suggestion of my friend Jorge Colombo) and started writing for Disquiet.com, rather than just porting over writing from elsewhere. (It’s hard to describe how new all this was at the time.)

From 1996 to 2007, it was all hand-coded by me in HTML, even the RSS feed. Then I paid someone to port it over to a CMS, and then a friend (Max La Rivière-Hedrick) upgraded that to something properly responsive. Around then I also started collaborating with musicians, later still came the Disquiet Junto (celebrating its own 10th anniversary in less than a month), and now, in a way that feels quite sudden, it’s December 13, 2021, two and a half decades gone by: 25 years I’ve been doing this thing that eventually became known as a “blog,” a few years after I started. I never loved the word, but I’ve made peace with it, and even embraced it.

I feel fortunate that today, December 13, 2021, falls on a Monday. December 13, 1996 was a Friday, giving me the weekend to set things up. Today’s a Monday, so even though I’m looking back a quarter century, the fact it’s Monday, the start of the week, feels like it’s the start of something. Today’s a big anniversary. Tomorrow is just another day, another day to post something else about sound.

Oh, and below is the earliest Disquiet.com snapshot recorded by the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, the current Richmond District, San Francisco, offices of which are just a block away from where I was living in 1996. It’s a small web after all.

Disquiet.com 25th Anniversary Countdown (12 of 13): San Francisco Soundwalk

The route shown here comes out at about 2,835 feet. That’s the length, roughly estimated, of a soundwalk I’ve taken my students on most of the semesters I’ve taught a course about sound at a local art school, the Academy of Art University.

A soundwalk can be understood as follows: Ever take a docent tour at a museum? A soundwalk is like that, except the museum is the world, and the art is the sound that surfaces in the world.

I’ve occasionally done this particular soundwalk for private groups. There’s a lot packed in on a stroll that lasts just over half a mile: urban sound, retail sound, public space, private space, Hollywood, silence, acoustics, architecture, noise pollution, urban planning, and much more. Only a few blocks away is Union Square, a central setting for Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 1974 film The Conversation, a great teaching tool about sound in its own right.

On a good day, we’ll have watched the movie in advance, and after the soundwalk we’ll wander over to the plaza to talk about the topics that Coppola, in collaboration with editor and sound designer Walter Murch, explores in the film: surveillance, perception, technology.

I didn’t teach the course in 2021 because Covid-19 impacted the school’s planning. This coming year is up in the air. Who knows what the future will bring, whether post-pandemic or during an extended mid-pandemid? Either way, I have no doubt that aspects of this soundwalk will have changed, in some cases drastically, because the city has changed. At some point I’ll walk this path again, and I’ll see what I hear.

This park serves as the next to last day of the 13-day countdown to the 25th anniversary of Disquiet.com. Read the full post described above: “A San Francisco Soundwalk.”

twitter.com/disquiet: Shakespeare, Tate, Metadata

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.

▰ Yeah, I’m digging The Last Tourist by Olen Steinhauer OK.

▰ There’s an alternate universe where Fringe ran for a decade, and a simulation where Person of Interest is still unfolding weekly, and I’d love to visit both places.

▰ RIP, Greg Tate (October 15, 1957 – December 7, 2021). I only spoke with him a few times. He did a bit of writing for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine when I was an editor there. Last time Greg and I spoke, in the early/mid-1990s, he was gonna write for us about Anthony Braxton’s covers of standards. I sent him the vinyl, which I’d found used at Amoeba, but then he never finished the article, which is totally fine. Life happens. I’d hoped to run into him someday and joke about it. Now that’ll never happen. His was a strong, learned voice. Glad so much is on paper and online.

And here, ’cause it’s great and now it’s on my mind, is Anthony Braxton covering John Coltrane’s “Impressions”:

And via The Wire: “By way of tribute to the author and critic we have made a number of articles Greg wrote for the magazine free to read in our online archive for the next month.”

▰ Again, nothing’s happening on the 25th anniversary of Disquiet.com. I’m just enjoying the reflective process of counting down from the start of December until the actual anniversary. I had plans. But then: pandemic. It’s OK. Stay healthy. Do your thing. Rest.

▰ So, the YouTube Music (which if you use it regularly you likely think of as Music YouTube, since the URL is music.youtube.com) soft-boiled approximation of Spotify Wrapped came out, and apparently pretty much all I listened to was the Michael Clayton soundtrack on repeat.

▰ I admit I’m no instinctive list-maker (best this, top that), or one to gauge album against album. My disinclination may relate to my disinterest in competitive sports. But I read what Marc Masters said, and I agree end-of-year lists do serve a purpose, so I’m getting one together. (That may count as whinging, but in the service of getting past it.)

Update: Or at least trying to get one together. It’s not entirely my thing.

▰ I don’t think I recognized until last night that with the gain raised high enough, an electric guitar can be plugged directly into the ER-301.

▰ Inspiring motto on the package from the company that makes little rubberized caps to put over the blunt stiletto that emerges from the bottom of a cello.

▰ Only good thing to come of today’s news is Sly & Robbie’s music will flood the internet in the collective act mourning. Here they are with Nils Petter Molvær, Eivind Aarset, and Vladislav Delay:

“Rhythm Killer,” produced by the inimitable Bill Laswell, plus a Material who’s who (D.S.T., Bernard Fowler, Robert Musso, Nicky Skopelitis, Henry Threadgill, Bernie Worrell)

And with DJ Krush “The Lost Voices,” off The Message at the Depth:

One* more, Grace Jones’ “Nightclubbing”

It’s weird, ’cause just last night I was listening again to the latest Aarset & Molvaer albums, and in the process I was thinking about their work with Sly & Robbie.

*Who am I kidding? More to come.

▰ “AI spokesman, avatars enter election campaigns” is the most William Gibson headline I have read this week.

▰ Occasional PSA to musicians releasing music for download on Bandcamp and elsewhere that metadata is sorta important. It’s, like, floss-your-teeth important. Speaking of which, I just typed “yumload” instead of “download” and that’s alright with me.

▰ One of these makes for a quite different morning than the others.

▰ Today in #FreshMundaneHells, what keyboard sequence did I accidentally hit that flipped my audio to just the left side? (Which took a while to sort out.)

▰ There are four Disquiet Junto projects left in the year.

▰ Honk if you watch guitar tutorials on YouTube at half speed so they’re still in tune, just an octave lower.

▰ The press prerelease copy of the score to the upcoming Matrix movie went straight to my email spam folder, which feels like a truly mundane enactment of Matrix cyber-hijinks.

Spoilers: based on a first listen, this movie will have a lot of action sequences.

▰ There he goes: “Michael Nesmith, Monkees Singer-Songwriter, Dead at 78”.

Quickly rising to top of the playlist:

▰ “This album was mastered in analog utilizing the 20-bit K2 Super Coding system.”

▰ Listening to the background sounds of apps like Calm and Audible Sleep. Making the background sounds present. Paying attention to when sounds of labor, like the threshing of a harvest, or that are threatening, like the soundscape of Dune, become comforting, lulling, transportive.

In the novel Dune, we witness Paul learning to listen by observing his mother listening. As readers, we listen with her:

“She probed the farther darkness with her trained senses.

Noise of small animals.

Birds.

A fall of dislodged sand and faint creature sounds within it.”