Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 18

Legacy

This is the 13th comic in the ongoing series I’m doing with Hannes Pasqualini. See a full index of Frame by Frame comics at disquiet.com/fxf. More from Hannes at horizontalpitch.com and papernoise.net.

Amplifying Space

This is an amplifier made by the Terryphone Corporation, after that company’s acquisition by ITT, originally International Telephone & Telegraph. Photographed in the space exploration section of the Cradle of Aviation Museum, Garden City, Long Island, NY. I need to decipher some of this, notably the “listening silence” and “int accent” settings.

Scratch Pad: Eileen, AirTrain, Autumn

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.

I’m posting this halfway through a JetBlue flight home to San Francisco from New York, where I was visiting family.

▰ It’s a lesser-known Gen X superstition that if you happen to walk by an establishment that’s playing “Come On Eileen” before 10:30am, it’s gonna be a better than average day

▰ When I hear the robotic voice repeat “stop, look around” on the JFK AirTrain, I want a Kraftwerk version of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound)”

▰ ”The thing about being in Art Blakey’s band was staying in it long enough to have one of your songs recorded.” —Frank Lacy (March 31, 2025, at Smalls in Manhattan, leading his septet during the 9:00pm show)

▰ Imagining that by the time I’m due for hearing aids, people will be muting words in everyday conversation like it’s possible to do currently on social media

▰ The quiet after the dishwasher after the rain is a particularly quiet quiet

▰ Not bad. It’s April 3 as I type this, and I’ve been in New York since March 27, and I haven’t heard Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, or Bon Jovi once. Let’s see if I can make it to Saturday, April 5, when I fly home.

▰ Finished reading two novels this week: Ali Smith’s excellent Autumn (2017), a beautifully fractured story about the emotional and intellectual connection between two people toward the start of life for one of them and toward the end of the other’s, and Joan Didion’s even more excellent Play It as It Lays (1970), a bleakly fractured story about the lack of connection between a number of people, and now I want to read any novel that dares to use a quote from the Didion book as its epigraph. Also read a short little graphic novel by Rich Tommaso, In the Garden of Earthly Delights (Floating World Comics, 2024), which I picked up at the excellent shop Escape Pod at the recommendation of its proprietor, Menachem Luchins. That’s on Long Island in the town of Huntington, which is also where I lived in the same house from when I was about two weeks old until I left for college. I’m a sucker for small comics, and comics written and drawn by the same person, and heist stories, and comics that include depictions of art, and this is all of those. I’m also pondering print formats for small comics, given Hannes Pasqualini and my ongoing Frame by Frame series, and this one was informative.

Shifts

Apparently this zone had a previous life as a lane.

Disquiet Junto Project 0692: Combust a Move

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 0692: Combust a Move
The Assignment: Make music using fire for the rhythm track.

There is just one step for this project: Record a piece of music in which the sound of fire — match, burner, cigarette, etc. — provides the primary source for the rhythmic track.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0692” (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-0692-combust-a-move/.

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long before this fire burns out?

Deadline: Monday, April 7, 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 692nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Combust a Move — The Assignment: Make music using fire for the rhythm track — at https://disquiet.com/0692/

Submitting Music

I’ve updated the part of this site’s FAQ (disquiet.com/faq) that relates to submitting music for review consideration. Here is the revised section, and I’ve italicized the two most important sentencesbelow:

2. Does Disquiet.com accept music for review consideration?
I want to hear your music, but I also want to hear other people’s music, and so the less time I spend doing correspondence, the more time I can spend listening. Please don’t expect me to reply to correspondence, not even with a quick confirmation of receipt. I don’t have the time to engage in back-and-forth emails about whether I plan on covering a given release. I receive an enormous amount of music from musicians and their record labels, and that doesn’t count all the time I spend seeking out music (and sound-related art). I can’t promise to write back — either in a timely manner, or at all. If you include the word “teiuqsid” (no quotation marks, and that’s “disquiet” backwards) in your email, I’m far more likely to find your email message, because your including it means you’ve read these instructions. Also, if you include me in bcc list containing many Bandcamp “yum” download codes to try, I may ignore it, because that’s time-consuming, and my experience has been that when I do try, all of them have been used already. What I can promise is the following: I will listen to as much music I receive as possible, without diminishing the attention I can pay to what I do elect to listen to, and I will consider it for coverage. I listen constantly, and when something really strikes me, that’s when I write about it — either here, or for other publications to which I contribute. My preference is that you email me a link to a zip archive containing lossless files, and also include a link to it streaming somewhere, so I can preview it before downloading. If you feel the need to send me a CD (or vinyl copy, or some other physical format), you can email me (visit this site’s contact page) to get my address in San Francisco, where I live — though, again, there’s only a small likelihood I will reply. Please don’t send audio files as attachments: they clog up my email, and I immediately delete them. And don’t pitch me your music via social media, as I’ll just direct you to this page.

Live at Smalls

That’s Frank Lacy giving it everything he’s got last night at the Manhattan jazz club Smalls in the West Village. He led a septet of — also seen here — Nicoletta Manzini (saxophone), Felix Moseholm (bass), and Brian Simontacchi (trombone), plus Mike Lee (saxophone), Miki Yamanaka (piano), and Wen-Ting Wu (drums). Wu was a standout, maybe because the show leaned on Lacy’s time with Art Blakey’s band, and Blakey was, himself, a drummer. Moseholm seemed familiar, and only later did I realize he was in a Brad Mehldau trio video (with drummer Jorge Rossy) from October 2024 that I’ve watched on repeat on YouTube. The full video of the septet show is on the club’s website.

Door Way

If you’re reading a Booker Prize finalist novel in a cafe and the inside of the bathroom door doesn’t look like this you’re doing it wrong.

On Repeat: Tortoise, Badalamenti, Earth

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ There are worse ways to wake up than to news there’s a new track of trademark slacker exotica from Tortoise. Apparently it’s their first new recording in almost a decade. All percolating rhythms and dreamy washes, it almost sounds like they’re auditioning some theme music for an espionage TV series. The most “Tortoise” thing about it may be not so merely how it switches gears at the last moment, but how the contrast let’s you hear the gears grind.

▰ I’m sure I’ve heard, and even seen, the guitarist Simon Farintosh (whom I’ve interviewed about his Aphex Twin transcriptions), play electric — rather than acoustic or, more frequently, classical — guitar, but I don’t recall having done so. Here he performs “Sycamore Trees,” from the score to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. The thing about musicians who do a lot of work in the realm of covers and transcriptions is how those pieces of music then, in turn, become their set of repertoire. Thus it’s interesting to think of Badalamenti alongside Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada and the other musicians whom Farintosh has explored.

▰ Listening to the band Earth, you may hear things you’ve heard before, from the rousing bravado of Social Distortion to the fuzzed-out roots rock of Neil Young to the drone metal of Sunn O))), but those are just flavors, not the real thick of it. Earth is its own special entity, and the key to the sound is the pace, set by drummer Adrienne Davies, half the band, alongside with founder Dylan Carlson, in this iteration. This video has been online for a year, but I only just stumbled on it.

Scratch Pad: Sirens on a Sunny Day

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.

▰ It’s a lesser-known Gen X superstition that if you happen to walk by an establishment that’s playing “Come On Eileen” before 10:30am, it’s gonna be a better than average day

▰ Current status: trying to run the battery down on a device so I can then see what chargers it does and doesn’t work with. I unplugged it and had it play MP3 files of Buddha Machine tracks on loop with the screen at the highest brightness level.

▰ A beautiful sunny and warm day translates to the sound of emergency vehicles heading quickly to the ocean at dusk

▰ The concise if ambiguous narrative of a car* with a freshly broken windshield and, dangling from the rearview mirror, a bright blue disabled person parking permit

*not mine

▰ Spent the day in nature, which was beautiful, but being now back in the city, I feel the need to take a walk, not for the exercise so much as to feel re-centered. I think “glimpse graffiti” is my “touch grass.”

▰ Vibe: if The Secret Garden was a first-person shooter

▰ I finished reading my fifth novel of the year, Cory Doctorow’s (very good) Walkaway (2017). And now I wonder: Is its use of the word “enfilthening” an origin point of his later and more popular neologism “enshitification” (2022)? I also read the graphic novel Zatana: Bring Down the House, written by Mariko Tamaki and drawn by Javier Rodriguez.