Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 17

Detail of a Draft of an Installment

Yeah, there’s a new installment coming soon in the Frame by Frame comics series I’m collaborating on with Hannes Pasqualini. Here’s a detail of a rough draft of one of the panels. Full archive at disquiet.com/fxf.

Zen Metal

This is the band Earth performing at the Chapel in San Francisco on the evening of April 15, 2025, on a tour that marks the 20th anniversary of the album Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method. They were pretty darn good in this expanded, quartet formation, with Steve Moore (aka Stebmo) on trombone and keyboards, and Bill Herzog on bass. Adrienne Davies was, as always, transfixing, as she played at what for most drummers would be a quarter of regular speed. Dylan Carlson, Earth’s founder, has said he aimed for “ambient metal” with the band, and this evening was like “zen metal,” just grounded, singular riffs played on repeat with a compelling attention to tone and pace. The light show — note: all those splendid, gooey images moved — was by Mad Alchemy.

Vibe Aspirations

Frame by Frame Coverage

Two wonderful mentions of the Frame by Frame comics that Hannes Pasqualini and I have been up to:

1. It was rewarding to see, quite unexpected, this shout-out from novelist Robin Sloan (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Moonbound) in the latest issue (April 2025) of his main newsletter. Our mention was slotted in between recommendations by Sloan of a book on typography in film and an essay on synthesizer presets — in other words, fine company.

2. The wavelight blog of ioflow, a talented musician whom I know through the world of Monome instruments and the llllllll.co BBS, includes a detailed close read of many of the Frame by Frame comics to date. Here is one section of his essay, in which he lists some connections he identified between our installments:

“Avril 14th” 2025

There are many great electronic holidays, like those associated with various Roland instruments: 808 Day (for the TR-808 Rhythm Composer, August 8), 404 Day (for the SP-404, April 4), 303 Day (for the TB-303, March 3). My favorite is April 14, for Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th,” off the 2001 album Drukqs. Many cover versions appear each year, and I’ll share some of my new favorites as the today proceeds.

Here’s flute (Serena Huang) and violin (Michael Shingo‬):

Here’s a harp (Sáoirse Éirinn) and pedal steel (Joel Harkin) duet rendition:

And it wouldn’t be Avril 14th without a Moog cover, this from a musician who goes by Sequence Mode:

Shane Parish on acoustic guitar, plus birdsong:

An upbeat rendition, entirely on the Elektron Analog Rytm, from my friend RPLKTR (Łukasz Langa)

And on the Sunvox software synth:

Celebrating Herbie’s 85th

How did I not know there is a small jazz club in San Francisco, just off Market Street, with a menu consisting of dim sum and a cocktail called the Oxford Comma?

It’s called Mr. Tipple’s. I caught a set there Saturday evening: bassist Kevin Goldberg’s quintet doing the music of Herbie Hancock on the great one’s 85th birthday, closing with a fantastic “Watermelon Man,” off Hancock’s 1962 album Takin’ Off, his solo debut. Goldberg’s band included Will Comer, piano; Ashley Jemison, alto saxophone; Mario Silva, trumpet; and Miles Turk, drums.

Tuesday Plans

Earth is on tour, and my plans for Tax Day are set.

Scratch Pad: Tron, NIN, Pacific

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.

▰ Interesting that Tron: Ares, the upcoming movie, has a score credited to Nine Inch Nails, not to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Is this just a name-recognition / branding / attitude thing, or is there more to it?

A friend on Mastodon helpfully directed me to an interview with Reznor, who explained: “It is as Nine Inch Nails, and I think it’s influenced the way we approach scoring. It’s going to be a little grittier, and it’s just different; it’s still the same two people, but we’re in a different mindset. We feel like we can play by different rules a bit, and the people working on the film were excited about that, so we thought we’d try it.”

▰ That thing where a couple days after you get off a plane you use your pen and realize a little too late that at some point it began to leak under pressure.

▰ Random low-level Gmail weirdness: why it is, when I search for “label:inbox label:unread” and tag some email (say, one of 100 new music PR messages) to a “label,” sometimes it goes there immediately, whereas most of the time I have to hit “apply”?

▰ 7 weeks from the 700th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project

▰ My hallucinogen of choice is realizing that I’ve been walking around with my reading glasses on

▰ End of day, end of week.

Whew, and what a week.

▰ I’m enjoying Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time more than I did his Shards of Earth, but as I may have learned the hard way, it’s also not a book to read if you have even low-level arachnophobia (which is to say, if you’re an even remotely rational human being).

▰ Over vacation I managed to read two novels and a graphic novel (Smith, Didion, Tommaso), and while I read a bunch this week (Tchaikovsky), I didn’t finish any novels, just one graphic novel, Kit Alexander’s Second Shift.

On Not Sounding Like Oneself

I sent this message as part of the email instructions to members of the Disquiet Junto, via the juntoletter.disquiet.com, on April 10, 2025:

We’re seven weeks from the 700th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project, which makes for a pretty great feeling. This week’s project — the 693rd — is extra abstract, and occasionally they go that way. It’s good to mix it up. I wanted to mention two related things to participants who sometimes may sense that a given project doesn’t “sound” like them — people say this to me privately, and also express it on the discussion boards, so this encouragement isn’t aimed at anyone in particular. First, if you are concerned some of your Junto projects are distinct from your work, you might set up a separate account when posting the results. Second, I like to paraphrase a writing exercise I believe I read in something Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs) published a long time ago, which is to try to write a character in a story as unlike you as possible and put it in an envelope for six months. Then open the envelope, and see how much of yourself you actually do see in that character.

Separately, we’ll be doing the trio project we do each year pretty soon. I may start it just before the 700th project, so the trios are complete coincident with that milestone, but I may take a different route. We’ll see.

Disquiet Junto Project 0693: Melody Sorted

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 0693: Melody Sorted
The Assignment: Reorganize a familiar song note by note.

Step 1: Choose a familiar song for which you have access to the sheet music.

Step 2: Select a segment of the song, perhaps one round of the chorus and the verse — perhaps more, or less, after you finish reading these instructions.

Step 3: Write down all the notes (and their lengths) in the main melodic line.

Step 4: Alphabetize the notes, and also sort them by length, in ascending order, so an Ab goes before an A, and a quarter note goes before a whole note, and so forth. (You might also adjust for where the note falls relative to middle C, starting low and proceeding up.)

Step 5: Record results when all those notes are played in the sequence that was derived during Step 4.

Bonus round: Also consider appending to Step 5 what it sounds like when that same set of notes is played randomly.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0693” (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-0693-melody-sorted/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How much time do you have to sort?

Deadline: Monday, April 14, 2024, 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 693rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Melody Sorted — The Assignment: Reorganize a familiar song note by note — at https://disquiet.com/0693/