Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 19

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.

Data / Telecom

Tired: things that look like speakers

Wired: if this was the door to a recording studio

Disquiet Junto Project 0691: Un-Ravel

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 0691: Un-Ravel
The Assignment: Make a recording of a string quartet fall apart.

Step 1: Download the first movement of the Ravel string quartet at this URL: https://bit.ly/un-ravel

The original source is the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/3-capet-sq-col-d-15057-60-ravel-1928-mov-3/

Step 2: Listen to the track closely.

Step 3: Create a new piece of music by employing the provided recording as source material. The goal for your piece is that it should make the Ravel sound like it is falling apart — that is, like it is unraveling, or un-Ravel-ing.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0691” (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-0691-un-ravel/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, March 31, 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 691st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Un-Ravel — The Assignment: Make a recording of a string quartet fall apart — at https://disquiet.com/0691/

LSDJ 2025

New toy, blank slate

Trouble

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

Time Check

Mark your calendar. Our quantum future has arrived. It’s possible for your interlocutor to have liked a message of yours that was never delivered.

In the Lab

I’ll assume this place is getting a lot of work these days.

Scratch Pad: Trios, HVAC, Themes

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.

▰ Afternoon trio for microwave, idling truck, and passing jet plane

▰ Sort of ironic, last night, having my Kindle fail — a rare occurrence, maybe second time in the years I’ve been using one — at bedtime while I was reading a book about Zen. It was like a test of what I was engaged in reading and thinking about. Could I remain calm in the face of sudden digital adversity?

▰ I’m fairly certain the car’s air conditioner, when on high, temporarily lowers in intensity when I use voice-to-text for an outgoing message or a reply to an alert.

▰ Because my schedule is fairly routine, I often find myself walking into the same big box store at roughly the same time every few weeks, and invariably the Cardigans’ “Lovefool” is playing (perhaps because the in-house playlist also adheres to a strict schedule). I’ve come to think of the song as the theme music when my character makes his occasional appearance on whatever sitcom I keep accidentally wandering into.

▰ The Detectorists theme song, by Johnny Flynn, is my favorite 16th-century song of the 21st century

▰ An excellent San Francisco evening hearing Alexis Madrigal yap with Laurene Markham at Green Apple Books (the one on the other side of the park from where I live) about the former’s new book, what it means to be Oaklandish, the containerization of commerce, the deep research to get that one fact right, disparities between how Detroit and Silicon Valley celebrate their workers, and (as I managed to get a question in) how a nine-year book-writing gestation process unfolds.

▰ Research on creating “audible enclaves” that enable private sound transmissions in public spaces — that is, “localized pockets of sound that are isolated from their surroundings”

▰ I’ve been playing early (roughly mid-1990s) video games, listening for diegetic sounds (that is: environmental, in contrast with music), and I particularly dug the bird song and bells at the start of Chrono Trigger (1995). I love how they’re digitally generated, so they fit right in with the music.

▰ Barbershop trio for snoring dog, electric razor, and passing bus.

▰ As with last week: Ton of reading underway (mostly Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and an Alan Watts book), didn’t finish reading anything.

I Am STTing in a Room

I use speech-to-text (or STT) a lot when I go for walks, in order to record stray thoughts and have them converted automatically into typed-out words, but I guess last night down by the ocean was windier than I thought it was, because this morning when I looked at what had been transcribed, I was greeted by incomprehensible Beat poetry:

At the base of these five, at least five cranes over there would clip us. We’ve got nothing stuck to it. So more gestation over there. We’re trying to track our rails. The birds seem to have had real times. They seem to be trying to do it. And they look more like they are. How about this coming in for a while? It’s like they’re about to go out of the way. They’re going to have an upside down or a little peak up towards the stop. We think they were paid like nothing so much is. More than one plongers or something. It’s something we’ve got to mention here. Neither is going to take the other down. It’s like they want to come at each thing and exercise. They never will. Just for payment. It’s for what? What?