Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 173
October 22, 2021
REM State
Spare moment yesterday in the parking lot while the sky has taken a momentary break from melting and all the cars were in REM state
October 21, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0512: The Sequel
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, October 25, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 21, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0512: The SequelThe Assignment: Record a piece of music that follows up a preexisting piece of music.
Step 1: You’re going to record a piece of music that is a sequel to a preexisting piece of music. Your finished work might be an answer song, or it might be the next logical development of melodic or other material, or it may take an entirely different approach. First, select the piece of music to which you will compose a sequel. It may be your own, or someone else’s.
Step 2: Now record a sequel, however you might define it, to the piece of music you selected in Step 1.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0512” (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 “disquiet0512” (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-0512-the-sequel/
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, October 25, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 21, 2021.
Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0512” 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 512th weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Sequel (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that follows up a preexisting piece of music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0512/
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-0512-the-sequel/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.
The image associated with this project is by Larry Darling, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
October 20, 2021
The Ingredients Are the Recipe
Sometimes the ingredients are the recipe. Why eat banana bread when you can just eat a banana? Why cook salmon, when you can have sashimi? Why make a brownie, when you can eat the chocolate chips straight from a bag? And yes, you may elect to make music from Simon James French’s new sample pack, but you could also just pop the 20 tracks into an audio player, sit back, and listen. You’d hear frazzled tones with a slight delay (“Broken Phone”), and soft pads with a textural heft (“Warm Piano”), and ominous, echoing, dank-corridor ambience (“Press”), and warped nostalgia reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti (“Drunken Wander”), among many other drifty, dreamy sonic spaces. The set opens with “Glitchy Reverse Rhodes,” in which the electric piano plays the sound of a frozen moment. That track is reason enough alone to check out the new French collection, and then there are 19 more waiting.
Released at sjfmusic.bandcamp.com. It’s the third (“and final”) in a series.
October 19, 2021
Hotel Drone
I think that I shall never hear a drone album as beautiful as the HVAC ambient environmental sound of a hotel room in the morning before the world has woken.
The beauty isn’t merely the drone, isn’t merely the combination of foundational hum, its origin untraceable, and more device-specific sounds, like the rumbling churn of the air vent.
It isn’t merely how the passing traffic, both air and street, adds drones to the drone, in turn creating moiré patterns of drone variations: rich, seemingly uniform, yet endlessly shifting and changing.
It isn’t merely how the drone changes as you move through the hotel room, how slight shifts in the micro-geography of the space alter the balance of tonal elements, sometimes subtly, often evidencing sharp contrasts.
It’s how the drone is still, for all its components, a single drone, one that is thick yet ether-thin, transparent yet utterly blanketing.
October 18, 2021
Norah Lorway’s Maximalist Ambience
Norah Lorway’s “digitalOcean,” off a forthcoming release on the Xylem Records label, is full-on maximalist ambience. It’s quiet-seeming music that manages to remain loud even as you lower the volume. The shimmering white noise has all the signals of reflection, of peacefulness: the absence of percussion, the adherence to sameness, the limited and consistent range of sounds. But it is anything but peaceful. This is static only in the way that being in the pouring rain means to be continuously wet. This is static only in the sense of elements taking their wondrous toll on a cliff, and the whole thing being filmed over the course of millennia and then the film being sped up for our geological education. The track is beautiful in a brutal way and brutal in a beautiful way.
Originally posted at soundcloud.com/norahlo. More from Lorwaym based in Cornwall in the U.K., at norahlorway.com.
October 17, 2021
Rain
October 16, 2021
twitter.com/disquiet: Construction, Surveillance, Dings
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 air strike LARPing is over, right?
▰ Colleague on conference call: Are you working from the library?
Me: Oh, this is the dining room.
▰ I’m not not working at this moment. I’m simply sitting here while the electrician drills lots of holes in our house and there’s only so much power of concentration that I possess.
▰ The electricians are pulling a Marathon Man on the front entrance to this building. Zoom picks up the noise of the drilling and pops up a “Playing music?” window.
▰ Second day of electrical intervention action in the building has begun. The drilling left me frazzled beyond description last night. Let there be light, indeed.
▰ Just two paragraphs into the new John le Carré novel, Silverview, the spymaster’s final, published the week he would have turned 90, and someone is “jabbing” a doorbell and all is right in the world, except of course the world of these characters. The Le Carré is the first of five new fictions I’m blocking time for between now and year’s end (also: James S.A. Corey, Mick Herron, Fonda Lee, Neal Stephenson), though often the most enjoyable work is by people I’ve never read before, like Alison Stine’s Road Out of Winter, which I’m currently mainlining.
▰ Russian military veteran and charity fundraiser
French resistance fighter and politician
Ukrainian-born Macedonian handball player
Spanish paleontologist
The biographical haiku of Wikipedia’s daily notable deaths list are a morning staple. Coffee, oatmeal, mortality.
▰ You’re welcome to hold for a human, or to spend the next ten minutes helping train our nascent voice AI menu system.
▰ I will not play-by-play the electrical work being done in the building, but I will say that as someone who can nap to Einstürzende Neubauten, this is testing my capacity for noise.
▰ There are days when I think the results of a search return on Duck Duck Go are really a complicated form of psyops trolling. Here’s a good example. Note the top return versus the actual query.
▰ Society will get to that four-day work week, but the fifth day will be all mandatory software updates, and it’ll run into unpaid overtime.
▰ I’ll keep clicking on articles about strange radio signals with names like ASKAP J173608.2-321635 until the Galactic Federation arrives to tell us to get our act together: gizmodo.com. (Oh, and A$KAP J173608.2-321635 is my new instrumental hip-hop DJ name.)
▰ Whew, industrial strength vacuums are pretty much on par with incessant drilling. TIL, and so forth.
▰ Forgive me for being new to a half-decade-old clip that’s been watched half a million times, but I love how Keeley Hawes mentally rewinds the audio of her Lara Croft panting and gasping, and recognizes which cue went with which move.
▰ I’m intrigued when decades-old guitars are listed as blemish-free or near-blemish free. I don’t know how a guitar can be played for that long without dings. I bought mine used because of the dings: so I wouldn’t be able to tell my inevitable dings from the ones I inherited. And no, dear Algorithm, I’m not in the market for a guitar. I’m still in nuptial bliss with the one I got five years ago. (I don’t doubt they’re blemish-free and I don’t doubt they’ve been played. I just don’t live a ding-free life, myself, apparently.)
▰ Was working to complete something urgent, and when I came out of the time-sensitive myopic focus, I realized I was picturing, and hearing, the whole time Debbie Allen and her stick from Fame.
▰ I love when Zoom hears the carpenter’s drill two rooms away and asks if I want to adjust my microphone settings for music playing.
▰ “It lasted too long to be a sonic boom signature.” Reports of a loud noise over New Hampshire and into Massachusetts. Also the tantalizing: “NASA did not immediately comment on Tuesday.” The current suspect is meteor explosion: nytimes.com.
▰ I recognize that I still tweet as if everyone has a reverse-chronological timeline. I realize that lots of people, consciously or unaware, have an algorithmic Twitter thing going on. Sorry if my “imminently” and “momentarily” are in fact your past tense.
▰ “the security devices contributed to harassment”
The headline is a little confusing, but the gist is that a judge (in the U.K.) “ruled that the video and audio captured” by the widely used IoT doorbell constitutes an illegal infringement: gizmodo.com.
▰ A $35 million UAE bank swindle employed a deep fake voice (“deep voice” in this article’s parlance, apparently not meaning you sound like Orson Welles) to emulate the account’s owner. It’s a “We need your Apple ID” spam phone call on an epic scale: forbes.com.
▰ My weekend will begin in 154 words. I don’t need to write that many. I need to trim that many. The words in this tweet don’t count. In any case, have a great weekend.
129
123
102
96
77
66
61
52
45
38
34
19
15
11
10
-1
Done!
Handwriting Status Report
I’m changing my handwriting. Or trying to. I take lots of notes by hand, pretty much all the time, and I always have. After decades of writing in tiny type, I’m trying to learn to write in ALL CAPS for both legibility and speed. (I use the test-to-speech in Google Recorder and in Apple Notes a lot, and I sometimes use Rev for long-form transcription, but I also just take a lot of notes by hand.)
Size isn’t everything. It’s not about the amount of ink. It’s about line efficiency. I’ve long admired the handwriting of comic artists, designers, and graphic designers. I’m following their lead.
After some practice, I still had ten difficult letters: EFGHKQTXYZ. (Numerals are easy.) After another week, I’d whittled to five: FHTXZ. It’s one thing to trace a path, another to do it naturally. Z is a peculiar outlier. It shouldn’t be more complicated than M, W, or S, but I’ve got a mental block due to decades of putting a slash across it. I’ll get there.
The process, over time, left me with four difficult (to me) letters: F, H, T, and X. The goal is to have a standard approach for each in which I never lift up the pen(cil). I can do X with a bit of a vapor trail, and it’s not too bad. T and H keep backtracking and overlapping. Again, I’ll get there.
I’m still working on an efficient F. I may just have to deal with F and T requiring pen lifts, H looking like a shallow EKG, and X leaving a trace of the path beyond its standard geometry. Kinda just settling that F is two or three lines and T is two. Rest of the alphabet is one. Maybe that final pair of letters will simplify over time, preferably before I need to unlearn things again.
October 15, 2021
Quiet Zone
Tell me more about becoming an official quiet zone, please.
October 14, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0511: Freeze Tag
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, October 18, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 14, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0511: Freeze TagThe Assignment: Consider freezing (and thawing) as a metaphor for music production.
Step 1: One secret to cooking is freezing. Certain things, like chili for example, often taste better after spending time in the freezer. Technically, it isn’t just freezing that can intensify the flavors. It’s the thawing, too. Think about how that freezing (and thawing) might be employed metaphorically as a music production process.
Step 2: Record a new piece of music or rework an existing one based on your consideration of freezing (and thawing) as a metaphor in Step 1 above.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0511” (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 “disquiet0511” (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-0511-freeze-tag/
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, October 18, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 14, 2021.
Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Depends if you use a microwave.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0511” 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 511th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Freeze Tag (The Assignment: Consider freezing (and thawing) as a metaphor for music production) — at: https://disquiet.com/0511/
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-0511-freeze-tag/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.
The image associated with this project is by Jay Wilson, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
