Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 17
June 12, 2025
Disquiet Junto Project 0702: Chain of Applications
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 0702: Chain of Applications
The Assignment: Make music by misusing a piece of music software.
This project is the second of three that are being done by the Disquiet Junto in collaboration with the 2025 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 3 through 7. The festival topic this year is « Kette » — which translates, as the organization explains, to “Chain”: “Chains connect but they also bind. They create relationships but also restrictions. As a gift they look nice, feared when used in vice, and yet they can span bridges across fire and ice.” All three Junto projects will engage with the work of Svetlana Maraš, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 festival.
We are working again at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the seventh year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.
There is only one step in this project:
Select a piece of software, preferably one you use regularly, and misuse it in the service of recording a piece of music.
Note: If you don’t generally use software, then misuse something else you regularly use when making music.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0702” (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-0702-chain-of-applications
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you.
Deadline: Monday, June 16, 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 702nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Applications — The Assignment: Make music by misusing a piece of music software — at https://disquiet.com/0702/
June 11, 2025
David Lynch’s Objects & Aura
There’s an auction for personal items from the life and work of the late filmmaker David Lynch. I’m relieved to not harbor much of an attachment to objects that are accompanied by what Walter Benjamin might have described as the aura of previous ownership — all the more so given the apparent uptick in price such an aura can incur.
However, given Lynch’s extended interest both in sound and in music-making, I was intrigued by what may be for sale, so I scrolled through the auction listings. In addition to lots of guitars (including a four-in-one combo) and guitar pedals, and even a Stylophone and a hybrid Indian instrument called a Swar Sangam, a few things did stand out:
A solid-state Moviola 1027C Tape Reader:
A 1930s Western Electric RA-1142 transmitter ribbon microphone, in a quite awesome sound department case:
A Theremin by Tony Bassett of No.1 Electronics. Note the “Space Trip Passport” on the rear further below:
The auction begins June 18, 2025, at 10am Pacific Time in Los Angeles at juliensauctions.com.
This Way or That
Two options per apartment
June 10, 2025
Lost in the Clouds
It’s been nearly three years since the excellent synthesizer musician r beny posted a video on his YouTube channel, and he returned on June 9 with an exploration of a specific approach, using a popular module to simulate low-fidelity tape delay. The result is the slowly decaying sound of what originates as a clearly plucked instrument. The plucking remains for a while, but it is eventually all but smothered by its processed aftermath. More from beny at Instagram and Bandcamp. Oh, and there’s no talking in the video. He just plays.
June 9, 2025
The Tragedy of Home Audio
I spent a chunk of Sunday afternoon getting my old, secondhand Mac Mini that I employ as a central home jukebox running properly again.
The computer hadn’t stopped working, per se. I could still listen to the music files on it remotely — both at home and away from home — on my phone, laptop, and iPad. I could — when at home — add to the computer’s hard drive new music files from albums I’ve purchased or received advance copies of from musicians, record labels, and publicists. I could also play the tracks at home from the living room television, because the software I use to keep track of my ever-growing digital library/archive/collection has an app that appears as part of the television’s interface.
However, two things had stopped working in this somewhat fragile system:
First of all, the Mac Mini’s physical audio jack was no longer sending music to the living room amplifier, which is, in turn, connected to a proper pair of speakers, which sound better than the television’s speakers.
Second of all, the secondary software service that I use to keep the library of music files backed up in the cloud had stopped working.
The existence of these two issues was ironic, because I had spent lunch the week prior with an old friend providing some advice to him about how to manage the modern hassle that is maintaining a personal audio library of digital files.
By the end of Sunday afternoon, one of those two problems had been fixed, the first of them. I made an attempt at sorting out the second issue, the cloud one, and my efforts didn’t appear to do the trick, so I’ll try again soon.
I run my Mac Mini “headless,” which means without a screen. It sits on a shelf below the television alongside the amplifier and record player and CD player, etc., just a modestly proportioned aluminum box with some cables coming out of it, including those connecting to small external hard drives.
When I do need to access the Mac to actually use it as a computer, which is infrequently, the process is a minor hassle.
First, I have to attach a small wired keyboard and a small wired mouse that connect via USB.
Second, I have to hook up my iPad to serve as a screen. An iPad can’t serve directly as a screen, and the software options for doing so are better when the iPad is serving as a secondary screen, not a primary one. To use the iPad as the sole screen for the Mini, I employ an app along with a special dongle called a “video capture card,” which attaches to the iPad via USB, and then connects to the HDMI cable coming out of the computer.
Now, the first rule of tech support is to make sure your software is up to date, and neither the Mini’s operating system nor the music library software was, which seemed odd, since I was pretty sure I had set both to update automatically. I took care of these updates immediately.
The second rule of tech support is to reboot the computer, which I did as well.
After I did steps one and two, the playback-through-audio-jack issue had been solved. The backup issue remains. And there are two additional things I want to sort out: (1) how to add files to the Mac Mini when I’m not at home, and (2) how to remotely access the full Mac Mini at home with my laptop (that’s in contrast with merely dragging files to it over the wifi network), so I don’t have to do the whole iPad/dongle routine each time I need to actually do something to the machine beyond filling up its drives.
I haven’t yet mentioned the specific software I use, because the situation is fairly generic and lots of tools do the trick. For the record, I use Plex (plex.tv) as the server and Backblaze (backblaze.com) for backup, and on the iPad I use an app simply called “HDMI” (apps.apple.com) to serve as a second screen. I have experimented with Tailscale (tailscale.com) for the remote access I mentioned, but haven’t managed to get it to work.
The moral of this story is that the music industry remains broken. While it’s the case that streaming causes lots of financial and cultural damage, the alternative scenario has its own shortcomings, which have nothing to do with streaming. The main opposite of streaming music is to own your own digital files of music you have purchased. However, there are no simple means by which everyday listeners can take the files they’ve acquired, and play them back with the ease that used to be the case with LPs and cassettes and CDs and so on. There was a brief period of time when iTunes did the job, but the era of iTunes has long since passed.
I remain hopeful that someone will try to do something to answer this ongoing problem. None of the existing solutions do so sufficiently, except perhaps for those of us who are willing to give over our Sunday afternoons to trying to fix something and who will be satisfied when only half the fixing has been completed. Listening to music shouldn’t be reserved for tinkerers.
June 8, 2025
On Repeat: Three Live Performances
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening (and, per below, viewing) 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.
▰ Marcus Fischer documented a live solo set with electric guitar and dual reel-to-reel machines circulating a single, extended strand of recording tape. He uses the amps, and the space, and the unique qualities of his equipment to shape sound in real time. Pay particular attention to how he keeps the feedback under control.
▰ An ambient jazz performance by electric guitarist Eivind Aarset’s stellar double-drum band, recorded during their set on May 23, 2025, at Vilnius Mama Jazz Festival. The group features Audun Erlien, bass; Wetle Holte, percussion; and Erland Dahlen, percussion. I’ve found in recent years that I’m listening to fewer studio audio recordings and more live performance videos (which is the primary reason I pay for YouTube’s advertisement-free tier). In chamber music and in jazz especially, watching musicians who’ve played together for a long time is especially appealing and informative.
▰ I know next to nothing about choreography. The extent to which I’ve engaged with the topic is that I interviewed and researched several choreographers for my 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. This performance for two dancers caught my attention because the track they’re dancing to is “The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits” off The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint, by the great trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. The dancers are Sierra Drayton and Kaden Golding, performing a work by Ricky Ubeda, whom I believe to be the same person of that name who apparently won season 11 of So You Think You Can Dance in 2014, the same year the Akinmusire album came out. I don’t know how recent the piece of choreography itself is.
Stigmatic Ambient Music, Update
Per the above screenshot, if I currently ask Google what “stigmatic ambient music” is, the top link (on the right) listed as a source is a previous blog post of my own, from April 28. In that post, I detailed the absurdity of the idea of this non-genre, which Google’s AI mechanically divined gibberish to justify the existence of when I first inquired. Its broad-strokes response registered like a student who hadn’t studied for finals, let alone read a book all semester.
What is now even more remarkable to me is that the AI actively interprets my negative as a generally applicable positive — a statement documenting certain falsehood becomes, simply due to its presence on the internet, evidence of truth.
When I wrote that original post back in April, there were literally zero search results for “stigmatic ambient music” (with the quotation marks around it) on Google, which was the point of my initial experiment. As of this moment, a little over a month later, Google only returns four (yes, four) non-redundant results in the search return. There will now, as of this follow-up blog post, be a fifth result, and yet Google will likely persist in providing an encyclopedia-like description of something that doesn’t exist — caveat usor, and all that.
June 7, 2025
Scratch Pad: Frahm, Franklin, Mingus
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.
▰ I thought I’d make a helpful playlist of music I tend to play in the background while working — less listen to than surrender to — and then I realized it’s pretty much just Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon and Nils Frahm’s Music for Animals.
▰ Occasional reminder to myself that 2027 will mark the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s original Junto club, as well as the mere 15th of the Disquiet Junto (and also its 800th consecutive weekly project).
▰ I don’t understand how anyone can enjoy Monopoly. Here’s a game called Cholera, for three or more players. Whoever rolls first dies first. Whoever rolls second dies second. Continue until final player. Final player rolls five times in a row, slowly, and on the fifth roll also dies. The game ends.
▰ I dug the Succession main theme music, even as it reminded me of things I couldn’t quite place. Just yesterday I was listening to a 1956 Charles Mingus album, and one of those things suddenly became apparent: “All The Things You Can C#” (off Mingus at the Bohemia).
▰ Kind of amazed to wake up to news of a massive fire in the neighborhood, and I hadn’t woken earlier to the resulting sirens
▰ This week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Thorsten Sideboard posted on Bluesky news that the next AAAssembly — that is, the Algorithmic Art Assembly — will happen March 26-28, 2026, back at Gray Area in San Francisco. Stay tuned at aaassembly.org. ▰ Ethan Hein’s been in Memphis for a conference and he’s posting photos on Instagram of culturally charged relics, like the Hammond M3 organ that Booker T. Jones played on “Green Onions.” ▰ Bruce Levenstein posted on Bluesky an advertisement for 1980s computer camps sponsored by Atari that, for an OG TRS-80 owner like myself, provided a nice reminder me that the concept of a “digital native” may date back earlier than the term’s general application suggests. ▰ The DNA Lounge in San Francisco is owned by Jamie Zawinski, a former Netscape coder; he posted on Mastodon about an upcoming performer requiring a half dozen CDJs.
June 6, 2025
$upporting The Wire
The great music magazine The Wire, fast approaching its 500th issue, due out this October, is suffering financial difficulties. The publication, for which I write on occasion, has set up a donation page, available at a PayPal address, which is also accessible via this QR code. A recent call they put out for donations has put them on better financial standing than they had been, and this new round of donations is to give them a stronger overall foundation. Alternately or additionally, you might subscribe.
And visit The Wire at thewire.co.uk.
June 5, 2025
Disquiet Junto Project 0701: Gap Ear
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 0701: Gap Ear
The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces.
Step 1: Choose a piece of music (whether your own or something in the public domain) and break it into sequential pieces. You might do this to a recording, or you might place gaps between parts of a notated melody (just to provide two different ways this instruction might be interpreted).
Step 2: Now, fill the various gaps, however many there may be, resulting from Step 1.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0701” (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-0701-gap-ear/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. The finished track will likely be maybe 50% larger than the source material.
Deadline: Monday, June 9, 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 701st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Gap Ear — The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces — at https://disquiet.com/0701/
