Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 174

Why, Hello There

Genre Chatter

“That’s not ambient.”

“No, it’s not. It’s ambient music.”

“But it’s not ambient.”

“Yeah, ambient is an adjective here, not a category, more a tag. It’s not ambient. It’s ambient music. Music with an ambient quality.”

“So, it’s not ambient music. It’s ambient music.”

“Yeah.”

About Today

Current Favorites: Four Turntables, Eight Needles

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.

▰ Maria Chavez reworks recordings of singing bowls on four turntables, each equipped with remarkable “double needles,” meaning we’re hearing two different parts of each record simultaneously, for eight separate lines of audio:

ASLEEP/AWAKE/EKAWA/PEELSA, Spring 2021 by Maria Chavez

▰ Christopher Hanlon submits deeply lofi, nostalgia-rich, crackly instrumental hip-hop in supreme slow motion with “Old Blue”:

▰ Evgueni Galperine and Sacha Galperine’s superb score for the series Scenes from a Marriage deserves a listen as close as the microphones were placed to the instruments, which by all appearances was quite very close, indeed.

twitter.com/disquiet: Air Strike LARPing

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.

▰ Remember: Every time the Blue Angels fly by, an ambient musician gets radicalized.

▰ Blue Angels, leaf blowers in the sky

▰ I haven’t been home in nearly three weeks. Listening to my home again for the first time after that long is going to be like opening the box set of domestic ambient sound.

▰ “Host is not in the meeting yet.”

Some days this is a generic statement. Others it has Lovecraftian undertones.

▰ The new compact is more compact than the old compact.

▰ We appreciate the appropriate use of a semicolon.

▰ After three weeks away from home, I found it took me a long time to just sort out how these monitors, this keyboard, and this camera even connect with my laptop.

▰ I trust there may be a “silent” episode in the upcoming Hawkeye series, as the excellent Fraction/Aja comics prepared us for, but that “The Boy from 6B” episode of Only Murders in the Building is gonna be a tough act to follow.

▰ First night back in the neighborhood after three weeks: banh mi.

Second night back: Sichuan.

It is good to be home.

▰ Third night: empanadas, albeit across town.

▰ People: You’re into sound. You must love when the Blue Angels fly over San Francisco.

Me:

▰ Next weekend’s the quiet zone between Blue Angels noise extravaganza and muffled pop overload of Outside Lands. The air show was scheduled from 10am to 4pm today but so far it’s been pretty quiet. Fingers crossed. Noise cancelling is meaningless when you feel it in your chest.

▰ Scuse me while I flip off the sky

▰ Lost a follower. Someone must luv them Blue Angels big time.

▰ People are like, Marc hasn’t been this mad since that museum in Brooklyn wouldn’t let people draw in the David Bowie reliquary.

▰ TIL Hellboy takes place in Burlingame

▰ I can’t say I loved the novel A Dragon Waiting by the late John M. Ford, but I did dig parts of it.

▰ And that’s a wrap. A bit more work, some tidying. Enjoy the weekend, even if there’s an air strike LARP convention happening overhead. Pretty much all I care about now is the final John le Carré novel comes out Tuesday. Well, not “all.” I’m just practicing my hyperbole. Be good.

The Chimes of Edith Finch

I hung out in front of the house for about 10 minutes, trying to figure out how to get in because my key didn’t work. I couldn’t get over the fence on either side of the building, I was beginning to feel a little ill, and I would have been at my wit’s end except for three things.

First, it was absolutely beautiful out in the woods, in a way I found relaxing, even though my pressing concern was to get inside the house. Second, the wind chimes around to the left of the garage melded nicely with the rural background sonic ambience. Third, this wasn’t happening in real life.

I was actually in my living room, laying on my back with my phone suspended between my two hands. I was playing a video game called Edith Finch. With my right thumb I was changing my viewpoint. With my left thumb I was moving around, or more to the point moving the in-game character around, within the forest setting of the game’s story, having already hiked in from the main road while what appeared to be a young female narrator provided some combination of memoir and exposition. This movement was what caused my sense of illness. First-person motion in video games messes with my head and my stomach. Two of my favorite games, Portal 2 and Mirror’s Edge, can send me to the couch for hours of recovery time if I play for too long, by which I mean as little as 20 minutes.

I don’t play games intensely. I’m like the guy on the European tour bus who never goes into any of the historical tour stops and instead just buys a pastry at each stop and wanders around the neighborhood. Thus, games that engage in wandering, even storytelling with fixed narrative guardrails in place, are particularly up my alley, games such as the first-person adventure that is Edith Finch.

It’s early going, and we’ll see how far I get, but I did capture this short bit of video of the wind chimes. I spent a considerable amount of time observing the chimes once I noticed them as I made my up the driveway. They came into view before they emitted any recognizable sound. This game, like all games, has that pixel-gradiated versioning of reality, where you can either be within or beyond earshot in an on-off sort of way. One step forward, they come alive. One step back, you’re just enough distanced that the system registers them as inert, out of range. They got louder as you approached, and circulated in a semi-randomness that was quite realistic, all the more so how the ersatz melody played amid the insect noise and occasional birdsong of the broader realm.

Shortly thereafter I found my way (spoiler?) into the garage, wondering if there would be some interior room tone to contrast with the outdoor sound design. Instead, a movie-like melodic cue was waiting for me. More to come, as I wander around.

Disquiet Junto Project 0510: Cold Turkey

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 11, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 7, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0510: Cold TurkeyThe Assignment: Record one last track with a piece of music equipment before passing it on.

Thanks to Adam Boyd for having come up with the idea for this project.

Step 1: Choose a piece of music equipment you’ve been intending to dispose of, to sell or perhaps even throw out.

Step 2: Record one last piece of music with that piece of equipment.

Step 3: Get rid of the piece of equipment. (Clearly you don’t have to. Recording with a piece of equipment you are simply thinking of getting rid of is also totally kosher.)

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0510” (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 “disquiet0510” (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-0510-cold-turkey/49338

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 11, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 7, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Make it as long as it take to achieve a sense of closure,

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0510” 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 510th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Cold Turkey (The Assignment: Record one last track with a piece of music equipment before passing it on) — at: https://disquiet.com/0510/

Thanks to Adam Boyd for having come up with the idea for this project.

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-0510-cold-turkey/49338

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 Richard Hemmer, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

https://flic.kr/p/7ri9hk

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Home Sounds (Night Two)

the dishwasher taking care of the remains from my favorite Sichuan restaurant; the bus seeming twice as fast as is in fact the case; a drone that is not a foghorn, except in the brain of a resident, where the parallel cannot be denied; a riot of garage enthusiasts doing doughnuts blocks away, their remnant tracks to be on view when the sun rises tomorrow; the low level whine of a decade-old television, on pause and due for replacement; the muffled half of a conversation as someone walks by outside talking into a cellphone; the flush of a toilet that is as device-specific as a human fingerprint; the grumbly chortle of a car engine that is way past its prime

Home Sounds

the bus that didn’t run for the past year and a half thuds by, clearly ignoring the stop sign, perhaps to make up for lost time; planes fly overhead, leaving trails of drones, the sky a metaphor for a different void, the void of time during which aircraft were never heard because no one was going anywhere; the laundry machine churns, my clothes shedding three weeks of travel across four time zones and as many beds; the clothes dryer’s elves chirrup their little end-of-cycle melody; there is no HVAC sound because the neighborhood is temperate in a way that feels alien; the building creaks to remind me it is almost 100 years old; my body creaks to remind me I feel a kinship with the building; there is the thrum of traffic mere blocks away, and I wonder why anyone is in a rush to get anywhere

Hotel Sounds

the thick, garrulous drone of a nearby truck on idle; the fragile rattle of plumbing; the rusty whir of the bathroom fan, the one part of this room that hasn’t been updated since the motel transitioned from surface-road travelers to airport stay-overs; the occasional door of adjacent units opening and closing; the ocean roar of traffic, each wave aligned with the changing of a traffic light; that tapping of footsteps just outside; the full-throated boom of airplanes taking off just a few miles away; the clang of a crossing signal as a train is due by; the antique rumble when it does arrive; the bleed of a neighboring room’s conversation, whether televised, telephonic, or intimate; the moiré when several of these sounds combine and yield some amalgam sound, some quavering hybrid formed out of thin air