Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 19

On Repeat: archive.org, Shortwave, Glitch

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.

▰ The musician keinseier posted this gorgeous little ambient glitch recording on YouTube, and I had it running in the background for much of the week. He’s based in Hamburg, Germany. More of his music at keinseier.bandcamp.com.

▰ Tom Whitwell, the inventive London-based guy behind various music technological wonders — like the Turning Machine, the 8MU MIDI controller, and the Music Thing Modular Workshop System — posted nearly 60 short recordings of shortwave radio frequencies. Shortwave Scan May 2025, as the collection is titled, comes with a great licensing statement: “NO rights reserved, use these sounds how you like” (albeit with a qualifier: “Raw radio recordings include audio material that might be copyrighted by other people – no license to use that material is implied”).

▰ The Internet Archive (archive.org), about half an hour by foot from where I live in San Francisco, is now live-streaming its archival activities, and when it’s not business time, they put up archival footage. I vote for ASMR hours, during which they just put mics next to some of the equipment.

Scratch Pad: Obsidian, RSS, llllllll

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.

▰ The wind made it difficult to sort out from which direction the ice cream truck’s bell was coming.

▰ Happy 10th birthday to Lines, or llllllll.co, the online community I spend the most time on (it’s mostly about the making of electronic music, and especially about the making of the things that in turn are tools for making electronic music).

▰ Tired: AI, AI, AI

Wired: text-file databases in Obsidian

▰ As of Wednesday, May 21, at 11:20am, SoundCloud seems to be having technical issues. I hope this situation is cleared up soon and doesn’t mess up the Disquiet Junto project due to start in a little over half a day. (It cleared up.)

▰ From the trailer to the new Darren Aronofsky movie, Caught Stealing. How did this joke never occur to me before, and how was this not the natural successor to Google Reader?

▰ Anyone know if you can install the beta of Obsidian alongside the latest stable release? (Apparently the answer is no.)

▰ Read a bunch, finished reading nothing. Also wrote a bunch, which got in the way of reading, which certainly is ironic.

Three Stages

We’re just a week from the milestone 700th consecutive weekly project in the Disquiet Junto, but right now all my attention is focused on the closing phase of the (semi)annual three-part “trios” sequence, in which, over the course of three consecutive weeks, musicians around the globe collaboratively, and asynchronously, create trios one third at a time. I have fun each year sorting out a new way to use a simple image to depict this process, and I’m happy wiht how 2025’s turned out.

Disquiet Junto Project 0699: Third Third

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 0699: Third Third
The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio.

There are two versions of the instructions for this week’s project — one very short, the other very long.

Very short version (roughly 25 words): Select a track from last week’s duet project (disquiet.com/0698) and add a third part dead center between the left and right stereo channels to complete a trio.

. . .

Very long version of the instructions (about 550 words):

These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully.

Please note: While this is the third part of a three-part project sequence, you can participate in one, two, or all three of the parts, which have occurred over the course of three consecutive weeks. 

Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the third in a sequence that encourages and rewards asynchronous collaboration. This week you will be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0698). Note that you are finishing a trio: you’re creating the third part of what two previous musicians began, filling the space between them. Please keep this in mind.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record an original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to a pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by numerous musicians to choose from. The majority of these tracks, 55 at the time of publishing this post, are in this playlist:

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0698

And one is on Bandcamp:

https://ethanhein.bandcamp.com/track/ronroco-udu-disquiet0698

To select a track, you can listen through all those and choose one, or simply look around and select, or you can come up with a random approach to sifting through them.

When choosing a track, consider checking out the two previous projects’ discussion threads, as there may be additional information in them that could be of use, such as BPM or key signature:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0697-first-third

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0698-second-third

Step 3: Record a piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and it should be placed dead center between the left and right stereo channels. When composing and recording your part, do not alter the original piece of music at all. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.

Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it may be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.

Step 5:  In normal circumstances, Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. However, as with the preceding project that led up to this one, you can contribute more than one track this week. You can do up to three total this time. For your first, you can choose any track from the duets, no matter how many times others may have employed it. If you choose to do a second or third, please do a track no on else has used yet (it’s understood that between when you select a duet track and finish your trio, someone else may have popped up and used it, which is perfectly fine). Throughout the project I will keep an updated list in this Google Drive document of what has been utilized:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dSDNhH5KnB2YlSlmBQiuhKTpAQ0Ijl391OnSUE8r4SI/edit?gid=0#gid=0

The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. That, foremost, is the spirit of this project.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0699” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required).

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0699-third-third/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Stick close to the length of the track yours adds to.

Deadline: Monday, May 26, 2025, 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 699th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Third Third — The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio — at https://disquiet.com/0699/

I Mean, Seriously

The entrance to the bay was just showing off this evening.

More on the Upcoming Junto Talk

I’m looking forward to my little presentation I’m giving at Mission Synths in San Francisco about the Disquiet Junto on Thursday, the 22nd. I’ve done a bunch of Junto talks over the years. To date, the majority of them have been overarching descriptions of the now long-running music community. The main distinction among the talks I’ve given in the past is whether they were intended for audiences that are deeply into electronic and experimental music/art, or if they were for more general audiences, like when I spoke at SETI years back, just for one example. In contrast, the talk that’s coming up is more tightly focused, looking at particular Junto projects as a microcosm of Junto compositional prompts over the years, and emphasizing what these specific projects have to say about collegial online artistic communities — how one might foster and maintain them, how one might contribute thoughtfully as a participant in them, and what the artistic activity and online communications have in common.

The timing is especially good in that the event occurs at the start of the 699th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project, just one week from the milestone 700th project. The 699th will also be the final of the three-part trios project that’s currently underway. And this week marks the 10th anniversary of Lines, or llllllll.co, the message board where much Junto activity has been centered for many years.

Below are two slides from the deck I’m putting together for the talk. I’ll decipher these on Thursday. I’ll also be playing music from various Junto projects.

The event starts at 7pm on May 22. Mission Synths is at 3026 24th Street in San Francisco. It costs $15, but on one will be turned away for lack of funds. I’m pleased to share the bill with three other presenters: Naomi Seyfer (@sixolet), Jonathan Snyder (@iasekenighter), and Thadeus Reed (@creativecontrol).

Settings

This is the 15th 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 hannes.papernoise.net.

Junto Trios Extension

I mentioned this over on the llllllll.co bulletin board, and will here, because news travels in various patterns, and often the best communication strategy is repetition. So:

There have been fantastic works this week in the second project in the Disquiet Junto sequence in which we build trios asynchronously over three weeks. I love hearing these trios take shape as time progresses. I feel torn, because at the heart of it, I want to hear every solo become at least a duet. And yet, on the other hand, some of my favorite musical experiences are listening closely as an individual solo becomes a variety of duets, thanks to the intervention of different asynchronous colleagues — and in turn, I find myself imagining the hypothetical trios that might yet emerge.

To that end: of the original 43 solos from the first phase of this three-week sequence, just 11 (as of this blog post) have yet to become duets — so, I’m going to ask that, for those who have the time to put in, and the interest do do so, please do select one of the remaining solos (the ones highlighted in yellow in the shared spreadsheet), which I’ve been updating manually for the past two weeks, and go for it — even if that means you’ll have done a third (or even fourth) duet.

To be clear: don’t rush it; only elect to do a duet with one of these if you can engage with the source material. Also, feel free to extend the deadline up until the start of this coming Thursday’s third and final phase of the project, just to fit these in.

Thanks, everyone. And as always, let me know if you have any questions.

Junto Talk at Mission Synths (May 22)

There’s a cool event at Mission Synths (in San Francisco) this Thursday, May 22, at 7pm. I’ll be giving a little talk about asynchronous musical collaborations (e.g., the Disquiet Junto community) as part of it. There’s sure to be a bunch of interesting work (technology, performances, theory, practice) being shared by the participants. There are two posters, one with the lineup as it stands, and the one that announced the event in the first place:

Shoo-Out

We’re well into spring, even if seasons change on a dime in San Francisco. That means lots of baby birds. This one somehow made it into the garage. It was so tiny a breeze might have brought it inside. I heard what sort of sounded like a chirp, and thought maybe the car or water heater were making noises. I approached cautiously, but the thing was either too young to recognize danger of the approach of a larger animal (i.e., me) or too petrified to do anything. I shooed it out. It couldn’t fly. It just sort of hopped with the aid of its fledgling wing power. I imagine it may have literally just fallen out of its nest.