Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 172

twitter.com/disquiet: Robot Sandwalk, Gary Chang

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.

▰ The lingering question is can the Norsonic Nor277 mimic the “sandwalk”* of the Fremen in Dune.

*”a dance-like rhythm which emulates the natural sounds of the desert”

(via Nathan Moody)

▰ Ring my bell

▰ Perhaps this is a language, but for the time being I’m enjoying imagining it as otherworldly graffiti à la Alien Nation.

▰ The main thing I’ll say about the recent rain here in S.F. is I seem to no longer have the hurricane PTSD I had after leaving New Orleans in 2003. But, I’m now so utterly not used to rain that I exhaustedly realized halfway through Sunday that I’d barely slept Saturday night.

▰ Re-watched Breakfast Club this weekend. Realized that it was Gary Chang who composed the few elements of non-pop music that appear, definitely (in 1985) some of the earlier ambient music I was semi-consciously exposed to, especially in the context of film. (Chang later composed one of my favorite scores of all time, A Shock to the System, 1990, which he performed with Turtle Island String Quartet.)

▰ Phone app that, when the phone is laying on the table, registers the angle at which you might glance at it and also whatever might be reflected in it, and then cancels out the reflected material so the screen always appears totally blank

▰ This weekend’s cognitive dissonance was watching the sands of Dune flow on TV in the living room while the atmospheric river roared just outside the window.

▰ Today’s pressing question: who chooses music for when the FDA panel pauses on its YouTube channel? (Today it was “Samurai Japon” and “A l’encre de mes voeux,” if Shazam and my still waking short-term memory are to be trusted.)

▰ 1: The ever-changing mood of the ever-changing sounds of the ever-changing city.

2: The sfchronicle.com “Restaurants Playing Music Outside, and the Neighbors Who Hate It” sounds like a collection of Raymond Carver short stories.

(via Sara Gaiser)

▰ Say what one might about Zoom-era education, it’s really (like, really) nice at the end of guitar class to just continue to sit here in front of my screen and quickly record, while it’s still fresh, what I’ve been instructed to play so I can refer back to it later.

▰ End of day

▰ “And of course the most important spec is … how bad is the fan noise?”

▰ To borrow a formulation from Yogi Berra: Always buy other people’s albums, otherwise they won’t buy yours.

(Berra was, truth be told, talking about funerals. So, kind of an awkward, if contextually aware, reference in regard to the recording industry, I admit.)

▰ Stumbled on the X-Men’s semi-secret headquarters in my neighborhood:

I mean, seriously, when I look at this photo all I can think is, “Who hired Frank Quitely to design their house?”

▰ Something messed up the endless stream of academia.edu alerts I receive (I’m not a paid subscriber),and it now tells me every day about people’s work on Ernest Hemingway, and (1) I have no idea why and (2) I realize this tweet will just seal the deal for the Algorithm.

▰ Halloween is pretty close to the end of the standard 4-day #DisquietJunto project cycle, so this week’s assignment won’t be much a surprise when it goes out shortly via http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto. Time to get spooky.

I took this photo of graffiti in my hometown of Huntington, New York, last month during a visit to see my family, and it didn’t even occur to me at the time it’d work perfectly come Halloween.

▰ Or should I say: play that spooky music, white caricature of a disembodied soul.

▰ Really looking forward to Outside Lands

being over.

▰ My main Outside Lands memory is the year I finished writing my Aphex Twin book, coming up the hill from a cafe where I was the twitchy guy in corner typing madly. As I made my way home, Paul McCartney was screaming “Helter Skelter” from Golden Gate Park.

I pretty much know exactly where I was standing at 3:02 in this video.

▰ Drone sandwich: microwave from the kitchen, street-cleaning vehicle outside.

▰ Barely a month until the 25th anniversary of http://Disquiet.com. Nothing big planned. Just reflecting.

▰ I love the shots the local record shop (Noise, here in San Francisco) does of people buying used LPs.

▰ I only just last night realized that folks #tag their #DisquietJunto projects sometimes with the project tag of the week, such as #disquiet0513 this week for the Halloween project. I’ll do a better job keeping an eye on them.

▰ And on that note, have a good night, and a good weekend. It’s Outside Lands here in San Francisco, so home is gonna be vibrating with not-so-distant Golden Gate Park beats through Sunday night.

Ring All Bells

Disquiet Junto Project 0513: Ghost OST

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, November 1, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 28, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0513: Ghost OSTThe Assignment: Play that spooky music.

There is just one step for this project. It is Halloween. Make some holiday-specific background music.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0513” (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 “disquiet0513” (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-0513-ghost-ost/

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, November 1, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 28, 2021.

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

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0513” 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 513th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Ghost OST (The Assignment: Play that spooky music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0513/

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-0513-ghost-ost/

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

Before a Drama Unfolds

Nathan Moody has shared this outtake from his 2020 De/Still album, for which I wrote the liner notes, ““Palimpsests All the Way Down.” The track opens with field recordings of everyday noises and equally quotidian conversation, and a guitar line that feels less like part of the whole and more like an introduction. At first, the guitar feels almost like a brief opening cue before a drama unfolds. Then the guitar doesn’t so much fade in as come into focus, like it was always there but has deigned to make its presence truly felt, to become part of the production, to become the production. There’s something in Moody’s mix that, at least through my speakers, sends some of the voices off into the distance, so it’s as if they’re commenting from the fringes rather than appearing center stage. He’s right that the piece doesn’t entirely make sense in the context of De/Still, which is a series of sonic reactions to the work of photographer TJ Norris. This track is its own thing, and it’s great it’s out in the world.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/noisejockey. Check out the album a flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com.

Lunchtime White Noise Source

Some Memories of Media, Part 1 (Slight Revision)

This is just a note, for anyone who primarily reads Disquiet.com via RSS, that the post I made yesterday, “Some Memories of Media,” underwent some minor revisions this morning.

Some Memories of Media

I heard a song on the radio, turned off the radio, walked downstairs, put on my sneakers, and walked to town, a little over half a mile. The record store didn’t have the record. The owner of the store had never heard of the record even though I’d just heard it on the radio. Then I walked home.

I heard a record had come out. I walked to the bus, and then got on the bus, and three and a half miles later got off the bus, and went through the mall to find the record store, and then found the record. I brought the record home, pulled off the thin cellophane wrapper, pulled the sleeve out, cupped the vinyl’s edge in my hand, tipped the LP onto the record player, lowered the needle, and turned up the volume. Other than the single, which wasn’t particularly good, it wasn’t good at all. In another week or two I could afford another record.

My parents dropped me off at the train station, where my friend was waiting. It was the weekend, and we took the train into the city, the two of us, and then walked a mile and a half or so downtown and wandered amid the shops, looking for record stores whose addresses we half remembered. With no small amount of anxiety, we went into the stores and flipped through bins looking not so much for something to buy as for the one or two things we’d choose to buy out of all the things that were of interest. We’d then carry those LPs with us for the remainder of the day, cushioning them while eating falafel or hot dogs, stowing them carefully on the train ride home, and the next day actually getting to listen to them. I’d keep the receipts for the totems they were.

Sometimes I would tape a record for a friend, and vice versa. One friend taped over something else, and I fretted, perhaps too aggressively, about the reduction in quality. Tapes weren’t cheap, but they were cheaper than LPs. It felt odd to have a collection split among two media, but that’s the way it was. One band in particular sounded much better on dubbed tapes than when I finally bought the vinyl. I realized it was because my friend’s tape deck taped a little fast.

College arrived, and there were two record stores very close to my dorm for two out of the four years. One, on the second floor, had new arrivals of used records seemingly every day. Someone without much taste or sense was receiving remarkable records from record companies and immediately selling them to the store. I would buy many of these records. I wondered if this person was one of my professors.

CDs were in a different league, and time passed before many were available used. These cost real money. They came inside plastic boxes that were, for a time, put inside long cardboard boxes, called longboxes, that were when put side by side the width, essentially, of an LP. The geometry facilitated slotting them into bins in record stores. Over time the amount of space for LPs shrunk, and CDs filled their place. But that took several years.

At first, I bought a new CD like it was a piece of jewelry or furniture, even though I didn’t own any jewelry or furniture. A few CDs sat side by side on the shelf above my desk. Their plastic spines caught the reflection of the sun at certain times of the day. When I bought my first CD, I didn’t even own a CD player. I had to go to the room of someone I didn’t even know very well and listen to it there. Eventually I got a CD player at a ridiculously low price (crazy, you might say) at a store that liked to have what it called “Christmas in August” sales. The owner would eventually serve time for financial crimes. With the exception of that first CD I bought, which was available only on CD, all the others I initially purchased were of records I already owned on LP or tape. They had qualities that made me want to hear them in the pristine vacuum of digital sound. I was not disappointed.

We lived in the city now. College had come and gone. We knew where the record stores were, every one of them. Halfway down this block, around the corner from that train stop, up above that shop. We would flip through the bins and buy records other people had discarded. We bought used records. New records were another tax bracket entirely. There was a filter on our purchases: We bought what others no longer wanted. Some of these records were stamped with little bits of legalese claiming the record label could, at any point, come take the album back. Many had little slits in the covers that reduced their value, though for whom I did not know, because the slits meant nothing to me. Some actually were used, rather than promotional copies someone had exchanged. The worn ones had to be inspected carefully. Some were past their sell-by date. I learned to ascertain with a glance what was and wasn’t playable. Sometimes I messed up, but the records were pretty cheap used, so it rarely mattered. I wasn’t collecting records; I was accessing music. Those actions weren’t unrelated, but they weren’t the same thing, either.

The first holiday season after college ended, my bosses at my first job, a graphic design company, gave me a tiny little cassette player as a year-end bonus even though I’d only worked there for a few months. It was barely larger than the case in which a cassette came. It was made of metal. It wasn’t the most expensive thing I owned, but it was the most expensive thing I owned pound for pound. I carried it everywhere, and treated it carefully. For the first time, I had reason to tape my own records for myself, rather than to exchange with someone else. The change in size of the cassette player that rendered it portable utterly altered my sense of what a cassette tape was, what it was for. Now it was for me. I would record a record I liked a lot, and then listen to it while wandering the city, while waiting for the train, while concentrating at work. The metal was cool to the touch, its edges were sharp, and I’d feel the tape rotating as it played, the gears and other parts vibrating, emanating a rhythm entirely apart from that of the music.

Mike Dayton’s Music for Scarier People

Scarier Music for even Scarier people by Mike Dayton

Get your Halloween on early with Mike Dayton’s Scarier Music for Even Scarier People, a 12-track collection that is part Radiophonic Workshop alien invasion, part Blair Witch Project quotidian horror. The mix of whirligig synthesizers and everyday noise, of whizzy scifi sound effects and the creaking and scraping of your worst home-alone nightmares, is the perfect soundtrack for the upcoming annual festivities and, you might say, every other day, as well. Definitely check out the overwhelming choral onslaught of “Otherworldly Assemblage,” interrupted by anxiety-provoking stuttering that is, as time passes, totally consumed by the drone.

More from Dayton, who is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at twitter.com/dayton_mike.

Current Favorites: Score, Drone, Cover

A 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.

▰ The score to a short film, Jim of Earth, composed by Coma Calling, aka Kyle Cramb of Wichita, Kansas. Some richly suggestive atmospheres, full of tension and narrative.

Jim of Earth (Original Score) by The Coma Calling

▰ Three tracks by mora-tau, aka Takenori Iwasaki of Utsunomiya, Japan, comprise the album Memorial. The key track is the opening one, “Into Secret,” an 18-minute drone with varying textures.

Memorial by Mora Tau

▰ A synthesizer cover of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” by Perplex On (based in Munich, Germany), with a musicbox-like quality to it:

twitter.com/disquiet: novels, HVAC, pencils

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.

▰ “Things never sounded like what they were: guns, fire. Everything terrible sounded much more innocent.”

I finished Alison Stine’s novel Road out of Winter. I read too many books where plot takes precedence and there’s barely a memorable phrase. Stine layers description meaningfully. The above is a good example, in that the narrator (on the road during anarchic societal breakdown following intense climate change) herself employs description to communicate, not just to set to scene but to connect back to earlier moments in the telling.

▰ “I think it’s gonna be a long long time”

Nothing like being trolled by hold music.

▰ Quality customer service from Empress Effects:

▰ Only upon returning home did I fully appreciate how friggin’ loud the hotel’s HVAC was.

▰ Hears sound from other room.

Thinks, “Huh, I don’t listen to a lot of music with singers, but that sounds pretty great.”

Goes into room.

Learns the “singer” I heard was, in fact, an electric pencil sharpener.

▰ I’m fairly certain Silverview is the first John le Carré novel with a smiley face emoji in it. (As someone replied via Twitter, we’ve moved from George Smiley, who first appeared exactly 60 years ago in Call for the Dead, to a smiley face.)

▰ This week’s Disquiet Junto project is about, in a sense, serial composition, though not in the sense that we generally mean serial composition (that is, not in the Schoenberg sense). Instructions went out, as always, via tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.

▰ Thanks to my friend Bart Beaty for having alerted me to this. I love when an Onion headline is arguably even more interesting when you get past the humor: “Composer Surrounded by Discarded Sheet Music Suddenly Perks Up at Sound of Rhythm of the City” (theonion.com).

▰ It’s barely rained in years here.

I’ve watched endless hours of YouTube videos of people walking around in the rain over the past few years.

It’s raining right now.

So, somewhere in the back of my head, I feel like there’s a large YouTube video shoot going on outside.

▰ Four albums you were obsessed with in high school: King Crimson’s Discipline, Fun Boy Three’s Waiting, Violent Femmes’ debut, Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. Limiting to four was hard ’cause I was so obsessed. The pool for obsession was small compared to today. Those are what came to mind before bed. I slept on it before posting. Also: Let It Be, Double Fantasy, Face Dances, Security, Mr Tambourine Man, 90125, and on and on.