Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 176

Travel Sound Journal

▰ The commonality of squealing tires as car drivers in all manner of settings assert themselves.

▰ The myriad new squeaks and burbles and vibrations from an entirely new phone, after the previous one was no longer eligible for software upgrades and had not only lost much of its tactile quality, but had begun to really fail for conversations.

▰ Main Street so barren at night, so quiet, that multiple crosswalk sounds can be heard from several directions at the same time.

▰ Passing by a hospital where your high school choir once sang, and hearing in your head some of the crusty old repertoire.

Disquiet Junto Project 0508: Germane Shepard

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, September 27, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 23, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0508: Germane ShepardThe Assignment: Use the Shepard tone to create a piece of music.

Many thanks to Robert Precht for having proposed this project.

There’s just one step: Use the Shepard tone to create a piece of music.

More on the Shepard tone at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0508” (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 “disquiet0508” (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-0508-germane-shepard/

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 per 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, September 27, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 23, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Given the topic, it may sound like it goes on forever …

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0508” 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 508th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Germane Shepard (The Assignment: Make music with 10 acoustic instrument samples all in a shared key) — at: https://disquiet.com/0508/

Many thanks to Robert Precht for having proposed 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-0508-germane-shepard/

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

https://flic.kr/p/5WabYH

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

Huntington

THe bank is for sale. Long ago I broUght rolls of dimes iN; goT my fIrst check book. The Greek place has New proprietors; the avGolomeno soup is remarkable, besT ever. And fOr my after-supper walk, the iNsects seem louder,though it could be my ears.

Wandering in and About the Rain

Rain is something that can be thought of almost as an echo of itself. Like an extrovert who only exists when there is an audience to perform for, rain is not heard so much as it is heard in reaction to something: an umbrella, the ground, a window, or generally some other surface that it strikes. There is also the way rain combines with the sound of wind, and how cloud cover and other related factors can utterly alter the broader sonic environment: dulling edges, nurturing a sense of closed space, walling off further distant noises.

That’s a case made clear in this video from the always on the move Nomadic Ambience (834,000 subscribers on YouTube as of this writing), who wandered around Chicago on a rainy day and captured not just the rain as heard against the protective gear that keeps the camera lens dry, but also as it bounces off the sidewalk, and creates slick streets and shallow puddles that cars turn into sound sources as they pass by.

The video captures some thunderstorm noise, and various urban sounds, one highlight being a tour guide aboard a boat that passes under a bridge just as we, the viewer experiencing this all YouTube-vicariously, cross midway: “It’s a very well-designed building” goes the narration, before trailing off, absorbed by the whir of the rain.

Video originally posted at YouTube.

Domestic Activity

▰ Ceiling fan whir + dishwasher racket + domestic HVAC drone = the lofi DJ Krush jam I didn’t know I’ve been looking for.

▰ It’s strange enough to be in the house you grew up in after this long, not just pandemic long, but life long. It’s stranger still for the old home to have, per chance, the same make of dishwasher you have in your current home. Thus, when the beep at the end of the cycle goes off, you have, briefly, no idea where you are.

▰ When a call comes, at least four lines ring out on two different floors, and the place is full, almost brazenly, with the once ubiquitous noise of the house phone. The last refuges of the landline are abundant with it.

▰ The one seemingly obvious thing this house alarm doesn’t do is tell you, upon entering, whether or not it is on (or, as the militaristic lingo goes: armed). A simple pair of opposed tones would more than suffice.

▰ It’s been a very long day, starting work in native New York time and ending in gone-native California time, all while you’ve been sitting still. You go for a walk in a suburban dark that swallows up much of the street lamps’ efforts. Waiting for the signal to change in your favor at an intersection, you glance up at a residence that predates the American Revolution. There is one light on, on the top floor. Through the partially closed shades you can see a violent single player shooter raging. The oncoming cars still have the right of way. The room briefly goes dark, and then the screen illuminates again. Even from a distance, you can tell some sort of character-review stage has been called up. There is no sound. The window is shut. The room goes dark again, and then the violence proceeds.

Current Favorites: Cocolas, KMRU, Haas/Laswell

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. (I haven’t done one of these in a while, and should get back in the habit.)

▰ Madeleine Cocolas’s 17-minute “Nebulous”, a new release on the Superpang label, is a suite that moves from sonic cumulus to UFO drones to cinematic minimalism.

Nebulous by Madeleine Cocolas

▰ KMRU’s “For Sure I Saw Him” is a standout track from As It Still Is, his recent set of ambient maximalism.

▰ A new collaboration between Alex Haas and Bill Laswell, the eight tracks of Incidents are dubby electronica with ghostly funk echoes.

Incidents by Alex Haas / Bill Laswell

twitter.com/disquiet: SFO -> JFK

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.

▰ At SFO, about to board a plane for the first time since March 2020. I’d track the travel-related sounds, but I’ve got some solid noise-cancelling headphones on, and I think I’m gonna stay inside my cozy sensory bubble. That’s a sonic story unto itself. Headed to NY to see family.

▰ Outside the JFK terminal, car after car pulls up, its driver speaking on a phone while looking to the curb. Each of us, traveling solo, knows a car with someone speaking behind glass will arrive for us. When it does, we nod goodbye to each other, having never actually said hello.

▰ What I learned when I returned from my weekend Twitter break is you can put work into expressing your thoughts and observations as tweets. Or you can just list a bunch of numbers, and then nearly 200 people will click the heart button, and many will reply and chat. So be it.

▰ I have a great Grendel sketch. I was at Comic-Con and Artists Alley was pretty packed, but Matt Wagner’s table had no one at it except him. He was just sitting there. I walked over and told him how much I liked his work and asked if he’d draw a sketch. Wagner said yes and for some reason he assumed I wanted him to draw Batman. I told him no, I wanted Grendel. He was somewhat surprised, happily so, and drew it for me. I love the picture, even though the memory always makes me a little sad.

Revisiting Some Texture

Listen through the shimmer. Listen through the held tones, and the bell tones, and the swelling notes. Listen past the asynchronous patterning and the resulting chance chordal play. Listen instead for the frictives, the less sinuous textural elements, the way vinyl surface noise (or its approximate) moves across the stereo field. Listen for the clatter, and how it lends a sense of scale to the sonic space. Then listen to the more tonal material, and how the presence of the less inherently sedative elements bring out textures in the seemingly texture-less.

I don’t think I’ve re-upped a recording in a while, but I just love this piece, so having written about it back in April, I wanted to mention it again. This video is part of my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live ambient performances. Video originally posted to YouTube by the talented Jae Ryan.

Disquiet Junto Project 0507: In DD’s Key of C

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, September 20, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 16, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0507: In DD’s Key of CThe Assignment: Make music with 10 acoustic instrument samples all in a shared key.

Step 1: This week’s project is based on a great “construction kit” of WAV files in the key of C recorded for us by Disquiet Junto member Daniel Díaz. Access the files, of which there are 10, at this Dropbox link:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fitxmqhkggxwpye/AADnKVkTbi4XejHRaqr_N1dsa?dl=0

Step 2: Listen through the tracks, which include piano, two electric guitars, melodica, bowed upright bass, and other instruments.

Step 3: Record your own track employing the source audio.

Background: Consider what the tracks have in common. They are in the same key of C and on a single chord, Cmaj13(#11). Daniel played the instruments in different registers from deep low C to a very high accordina note. Daniel says, “I didn’t listen to the other tracks while playing and didn’t pay attention to the length, so if all the tracks are pasted at the ‘one’ of a project the results will be random. I just used a metronome of 100bpm, so the rhythmic little bits would match, approximately.”

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0507” (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 “disquiet0507” (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-0507-in-dds-key-of-c/

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 per 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, September 20, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 16, 2021.

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

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0507” 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 507th weekly Disquiet Junto project — In DD’s Key of C (The Assignment: Make music with 10 acoustic instrument samples all in a shared key) — at: https://disquiet.com/0507/

Tracks made with samples created generously by Daniel Díaz.

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-0507-in-dds-key-of-c/

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 Thorsten Sideb0ard, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

https://flic.kr/p/bvKCrv

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

Radio

WheneveR I visit my fAmily I listen for which olD song from the area Ill hear that best encapsulates the lOcale, the culture