Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 181

When the Doorbell Tolls for Itself

You don’t miss you water ’til your well’s run dry, and you don’t miss your doorbell until it’s no longer capable of being rung. But before the doorbell gets to such a state, there is, apparently, a death rattle, as I’ve now learned firsthand.

In the case of the doorbell in the home where I have lived for nearly 13 years, this rattle took the form initially of a long held note, and a dense one at that — not so much handfuls as bushels of overtones. The doorbell was rung one recent afternoon, and many seconds passed before I realized it wasn’t receding. It wasn’t quieting. It rang, and then it held, like a violin played with an endlessly long bow — or to borrow a term from synthesizers, as if some tiny, granular segment of it had been captured and then looped so as to give the illusion of an extended pause. I was caught within a frozen, eternal moment of doorbell-ness. Part of me didn’t want it to ever end. Part of me feared it never would. Part of me knew this was the end, or close to it. This was the sound of a doorbell when it tolls for itself.

I woke from the spell when I recognized that while the doorbell may be on a kind of held pause, whoever had cause it to ring was outside the time-loop bubble, or at least outside the front gate. I opened the door to receive the inevitable package, and then headed back upstairs. There, at the end of the hall, above the entrance to the kitchen, the doorbell continued to ring. It was such a strange presence, this all too familiar sound — even when I knew someone was due by for a visit, it would shock me and send the hair of my arms up on end — heard in a new way.

As it played on, and on, my sense was this was no mere blip. This was the end. It was the end, but it just wasn’t over yet. The ringing was orchestral. It felt like it can be to watch ocean waves churn over and over: in constant motion, yet in many ways never really changing, and all along giving only a hint of the depths they cover.

And then the drone of this former bell, the held tone of this former terse chime, began to settle, like a balloon deflating, like ice melting, so slowly that there came a point when I couldn’t tell if it was still ringing, or if I was just remembering the impression of its ring.

And then briefly it surfaced again, fading in, rising to a substantial volume, though with none of the strength it had moments before, only to fade out with an unambiguous finality. This fade was the end. There was a memory, but there was no illusion of presence. No pressing of the buzzer outside could revive it.

When someone rings it currently, if the house is quiet, there is a distant buzz. There is, of course, no ring. A replacement needs to be selected, and installed, but there’s time for that. Replacing it too soon feels a bit like replacing a recently deceased pet. A respectful void is necessary before one truly moves on. For now there’s near silence, and I could get used to it, impractical as it may be.

“Loner” Versus/Plus “Joiner”

Leave it to ever insightful Peggy Nelson, aka Otolythe various places online, to point out something about the Disquiet Junto that had never occurred to me previously. In a tweet linking to an interview she did with me on the occasion of the 500th consecutive weekly Junto project, she noted the countervailing origins of the music community. There is, of course, on the one hand Fernando Pessoa, author of The Book of Disquiet, and on the other Benjamin Franklin, who in 1727 founded the Junto in 1727 from which ours takes its name. Nelson in her tweet referred to the “dual, and dueling, presences of the ultimate loner (Fernando Pessoa) and the ultimate joiner (Benjamin Franklin).” I love this so much. It’s loner versus/plus joiner. So true! Thanks!

The full interview is at hilobrow.com. I want to reproduce one of the Q&A items here:

Nelson: Do you think, overall, the Disquiet Junto is more Pessoa-inflected, or Franklin-inflected, in how it has played out? (I am imagining the Franklin influence to be the discussions/comments.) Or are you satisfied that it’s been a pretty even balance?

Me: That’s a wonderful question. Thank you for it. I think the Disquiet Junto is fairly evenly divided between the influence of Fernando Pessoa and the influence of Benjamin Franklin. I should note that, by and large, it’s quite easy to participate in the weekly music composition prompts without being aware of where either word, Disquiet (from Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet) or Junto (from Franklin’s 1727 private society of that name), originated.

The “mutual self-improvement” aspect of Franklin’s original Junto provides a solid foundation for our group, and it’s a key part of why many people join in. Franklin was an instinctive creator of communities, small and large, from clubs to libraries to fire departments to schools to the United States of America. Our Junto is, in effect, his creation, as well. The Junto is very Pessoa in part because of certain aesthetic predilections inherent in the weekly music composition prompts: A lot of the musical prompts are about everyday sounds, everyday experiences, philosophical observations, then transformed into something artistic through reflection and consideration. In addition, an enormous percentage of Pessoa’s output was never completed. The Book of Disquiet itself is a collection of many scraps, of pieces of rough drafts. A big part of the Junto ethos is about posting unfinished work, works-in-progress, and I think that is very Pessoa.

However, there is one aspect of Pessoa I would like to see become more generally accepted. I think the Pessoa mode would be one in which individuals read a prompt and don’t ask, “Does this appeal to me?” but instead put the “me” aside and allow that doing something apart from “me” can be not just a beneficial experience, but an essential one. To borrow a phrase from another poet, Walt Whitman, it’s evident that Pessoa contained multitudes. I think it’s healthy to embrace one’s inner multitudes, or at least one’s inner many, even one’s inner handful. I think a lot of participants do that already, certainly, but I don’t think I’ve done a good enough job of emphasizing the benefits for people of doing projects that don’t seem, on first glance, as applicable to them as individuals. Doing so requires me to strike a difficult balance as a moderator, because I don’t want the Junto to be a source of stress. I don’t want anyone to fear they’re missing out by skipping any project or set of projects. The overall design and structure of the Junto is that it’s there when participants have the time and interest, week in, week out. I would like the Junto to be a little more Pessoa as we proceed, in this sense of it, in people trying things precisely because, as a member might say, “it doesn’t feel like me.”

CBC Radio on the Disquiet Junto

Major thanks to Lee Rosevere of CBC Radio St. John’s, I had the opportunity to talk with him last week about the Disquiet Junto music community on the occasion of its 500th consecutive weekly project. The segment is now archived online, having played on several CBC stations. Lee is both a producer at the CBC and a longtime Junto participant. The recorded conversation is just shy of 10 minutes long. (That’s not me in the photo. That’s the radio show’s host.) Listen at cbc.ca.

twitter.com/disquiet: Bandcamp, Pessoa, Vangelis

I do this manually each Saturday, collating recent tweets I made 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.

▰ It remains the case that Facebook is where I learn how little I have in common with my friends and Twitter is where I learn how much I have in common with people I don’t know.

▰ Say what one might about the decline of brick and mortar record stores, it was nice to buy records on Bandcamp Day before I finished my coffee. Heck, before I was outta my pajamas. Then again, I’ve worn pajamas pretty much non-stop since March 2020, but you know what I mean.

▰ I’m reading Richard Zenith’s Fernando Pessoa biography. I will be for some time, as it’s over 1,000 pages long. A key theme: how Pessoa’s employment of multiple, named, distinct voices (“heteronyms” in his trenchant terminology) offers a glimpse into the psychology of modernity. It’s an underlying concept for the recent Disquiet Junto music community project, our 500th consecutive weekly one, in which participants play the same tune three times: once as themselves, then under two fictional identities.

▰ Reward is a great reinforcement of good habits, and so it is that when I post the Disquiet Junto early enough (California time) on a Thursday, there are usually enough tracks for me to start the playlist rolling before dinner. This week, Thursday was such a day.

▰ This week in the Disquiet Junto music community, participants record the sounds of an alien landscape as inspired by Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.”

tl;dr

▰ Come for the Vangelis meme, stay for the sort of drama that even a sports-disinterested person such as myself can’t help but be astonished by. Sifan Hassan is an inspiration.

▰ Just noting that the new Los Lobos album, Native Sons, is absolutely killer, further evidence, as if any were needed, that the band is a national treasure. Native Sons is a love letter to the great city of Los Angeles. Slightly off-topic for this website, but so be it. Great is great.

▰ Another week over. My birthday apparently occurred at some point. Taking next week off. My Twittering may diminish, too.

🗹 workin’
🗹 longform writin’
🗹 bonus longform writin’
🗹 Junto 501
🗹 guitar: triads triads triads
🗹 exercise
☐ email catch-up
🗹 sign off until Monday

Night After Night

One of the great internet pleasures is to have your music reworked, all the more so to find that someone has taken one of your guitar loop experiments and expanded it to a nearly 30-minute amalgam of coded glitch refraction and improvised soloing. This reworking is by the saintly and enviably talented Van Stiefel.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/vanstiefel. More from Stiefel, a professor of music composition at the Wells School of Music of West Chester University of Pennsylvania, at vanstiefel.com.

And here’s my original, by way of comparison:

Disquiet Junto Project 0501: PKD Playback

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, August 9, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 5, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0501: PKD PlaybackThe Assignment: Record the sound of a Martian daydream, interrupted.

Step 1: Early on in the Philip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” a man name Quail has a daydream interrupted. He dreams of visiting Mars, but then reality intrudes: “the daylight, the mundane noise of his wife now brushing her hair before the bedroom mirror — everything conspired to remind him of what he was.” As the reader will learn, Quail has in fact already visited Mars, subsequent to which his mind was wiped free of the visit. His daydream at the start of the story is as much a remnant memory as it is a wish to be fulfilled. Keep this scenario in mind, and maybe read the short story.

Step 2: Record the sound of some realistic-feeling alien landscape, perhaps Martian, and then at the very end of the recording have real-world sounds appear to break the spell.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0501” (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 “disquiet0501” (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-0501-pkd-playback/

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, August 9, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 5, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you, with or without the Martian time-slip.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0501” 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 501st weekly Disquiet Junto project — PKD Playback (The Assignment: Record the sound of a Martian daydream, interrupted) — at: https://disquiet.com/0501/

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-0501-pkd-playback/

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 used via NASA/JPL-Caltech:

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/perseverance-s-left-navcam-views-ingenuity-during-its-third-flight

Sawtooth Waves IRL

I was mostly struck by the quiet irony of the word “plant” on the sign. Only later, when I got home from my walk, did I connect the orange and white angles on the sign to the angles at the top of the fence, and how the top of the fence casts a serrated shadow on the sidewalk. (Someone on Twitter subsequently pointed out that the sawtooth could, itself, be a musical score.)

Rhythm, Approaches, Publishing, and Unlike Minds

Joule, aka Marty Petkovich, today posted the following four thoughts about the Disquiet Junto music community, which is based around weekly composition prompts. I am reproducing them here (from the llllllll.co message board) with Marty’s permission:

It creates a weekly rhythm in the creative process — even when I can’t participate, I think about where I would take the challenge upon release of the prompt.

It forces me to use equipment and technology that I might not otherwise try, and I am always happy to move past the barrier of new approaches

It forces me to publish/produce which is really the only way to get ideas out of my own head and into another medium. Ideas are easy, producing them is hard – and material only gets better when there is a persistent effort to build a volume of work.

It provides an audience of unlike-minded artists having vastly greater talent and with so many different approaches to the same challenge who listen and thoughtfully comment on the work — even if the listening is only the first 15 seconds, it means that I should make the first 15 seconds worth hearing.

If Marty’s name is familiar, it may be because he proposed the Carillon Quotidian project we did back in April: disquiet.com/0487.

Gaseous Shimmering Ambience

There is gaseous shimmering ambience, and there there is gaseous shimmering ambience, and few things shimmer like “Solitaire,” a new track from Yreil, aka Christian Yreil. It is a massive billowing orchestral pause, like someone caught in bullet time a split second of the tuning-up just before a symphony gets underway, and then managed to extend it, lingering in its luxuriant spaciousness for well over five minutes.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/yreil. Yreil, who has a second SoundCloud account, soundcloud.com/liery-zanmu, is based in Tokyo, Japan. Found via a repost by Marco Lucchi.

Lock

The whoLe device tO be swapped, ending an era, I Console myself with a few final Key clicks.