Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 190

Bridge

Keeping taBs on the wind, heaRd as an agent, a potency: metal chImes aloft, anD parched leaves rustling, or a low, enGulfing humfrom vibrant stEel miles away

Disquiet Junto Project 0490: In Conversation

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, May 24, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0490: In ConversationThe Assignment: Compose a piece of music structured like dialog.

Step 1: Think of someone to have a conversation with. It could be a friend, or it could be someone who is gone, or it could be someone you actually don’t want to talk to, or it could be someone entirely fictional. It’s up to you. Who do you want to be “in conversation” with?

Step 2: Compose a piece of word-less music that takes the form of a conversation, of a dialog, with the person you identified in Step 1. Your piece of music will move back and forth between the two “speakers,” who also may occasionally interrupt each other, or pause for thought. Those individuals may be represented by individual instruments (I’m a cello, while you’re a Buchla Music Easel), or by some subset combination of sounds.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0490” (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 “disquiet0490” (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 tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0490-in-conversation/

Step 5: Annotate your tracks 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.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 24, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Is this a quick chat or a long debate?

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0490” 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 490th weekly Disquiet Junto project — In Conversation (The Assignment: Compose a piece of music structured like dialog) — at: https://disquiet.com/0490/

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-0490-in-conversation/.

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is by Suzie Blackman, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

https://flic.kr/p/7Uv7uq

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

Norah Lorway’s Lockdown Loops

anotherworld I by norah lorway

Birth rates may have declined during the pandemic, but a year of quasi-seclusion has yielded a lot of music. Norah Lorway just released her latest entry in that phenomenon, anotherworld I, which she characterizes as “lockdown sound loops”: “repetitive, insistent, ever present.” Harsh noise is muffled to gaseous effect; soft sounds are shredded to sharp objects. The music revels in such contradictions over the course of the album’s four tracks.

Album published at xylemrecords.bandcamp.com. It was released by Xylem Records. More from Lorway at norahlorway.com.

Remote

And afterR finishing with dinnEr, and tidying up, it is tiMe. Settle in, turn On a film, and leT a far away placE, sound and sight, merge with this one.

Joe Colley’s Locked Grooves

"Trance Tapes" (NORENT031) by Joe Colley

Veteran noise artist (and fellow former Tower Records employee) Joe Colley has a new two-tape collection out on the No Rent label. There’s a five-minute taste of its slow-motion, error-message, machine-rhythm pace on YouTube, and all four lengthy tracks (each just under 20 minutes) are streaming on the release’s Bandcamp page. The sounds vary from cicada-like chittering to lawnmower overdrive to distant-fire-alarm ambience, all with a robotic intent and the motoric uncertainty of a locked-groove record played with a particularly dusty needle. All of which is intended as a high compliment.

More details at norent.bigcartel.com. Colley is based in Oakland, California. No Rent is out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Current Favorites: Büşra Kayıkçı, Vitiello x Quiet Club, Circuitghost

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.

▰ The Turkish musician Büşra Kayıkçı is the latest musician featured in the excellent Project XII series from Deutsche Grammophon. Her new single, “Bring the Light,” is a propulsive, athletic take on Philip Glass’ arpeggio-heavy minimalism. Listen for how she carves out space for individual notes amid the flurry. It’s tremendous.

▰ There’s not much in the way of liner notes for That Which Remains, a new EP by Circuitghost, but over on the llllllll.co message board, it’s explained to be remnants from a previous EP, All That We Lost. It’s a beautiful amalgam of small sounds in which textures are put to percolating, rhythmic use.

That Which Remained by circuitghost

▰ This 2017 collaboration between the Quiet Club, an Irish collective, and Stephen Vitiello, the American sound artist, just popped up on Bandcamp. Titled Black Iris, it’s an ever-changing assortment of sound objects, from bells to scifi wiggles, borrowed audio narrative to dramatic creaking, footsteps to feedback, just to name a few, improvised live.

Black Iris by The Quiet Club & Stephen Vitiello

twitter.com/disquiet: Breakfast and the WebEx Soundmark

I do this manually each Saturday, collating recent tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet, my public notebook. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form or otherwise, which happened several times this week) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ A sunny-side-up egg over a piece of jalapeño cornbread is not a bad way to start the week.

▰ Taking momentary break from Sounds “Я” Us coverage to confirm, yeah, the smell of fire is with us, this now being what what has come to be called “fire season.” Not sure if the nearby Pacific Ocean breeze is keeping it inland or saving us from the worst of it.

▰ New-to-me pandemic soundmark: Waiting to be the last to sign off of a Webex meeting, so you can enjoy the cascade of beeps as others exit before you.

▰ When the owner of the banh mi place recognizes you despite your mask and absurdly long pandemic hair a year-plus since you were last there

▰ And on that note, have a great weekend, folks.

Reviewing Jennifer Lucy Allan’s The Foghorn’s Lament

I love when I get to write in this typeface. My review of Jennifer Lucy Allan’s splendid new book on the history of the foghorn, The Foghorn’s Lament, is out in the latest issue of The Wire magazine (issue number 448, June 2021, the one with Van der Graaf Generator on the cover, appropriate since her book includes a bit about Michael Faraday).

The Prestige Quote

So, about the quote from The Prestige that inspired the week’s Disquiet Junto project. In brief: transcribing it is complicated. I love the description that opens the movie, which was directed by Christopher Nolan. I’d listen to Michael Caine read the phone book. Better yet for him to intone sagaciously on the trappings of magic. Listen here in this clip of the film’s first few minutes:

The thing is, the quote is widely mis-transcribed. A lot of transcriptions insert the word “great” early on. I hear it quite clearly as “Every magic trick consists of three parts.” But there are numerous instances in which it’s presented as “Every great magic trick consists of three parts.” Most of these seem copied and pasted.

Weirder still, a large number of these appearances online of the quote attribute the overall statement not to the 2006 movie, but to Christopher Priest, who wrote the novel, published in 1995, that inspired the movie. The text spoken by Michael Caine does not appear in the book. There is a sequence like it in the book, but it is worded quite differently.

Here is the movie version of the “Prestige quote” on Goodreads, which is a website of books, not of movies, nonetheless attributed to Priest: goodreads.com. (While not as egregious, the mistake feels a bit like Costanza’s failed end run around actually reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s.) And here’s an explanation about TED Talks that uses The Prestige as a model, and attributes the quote to Priest: medium.com. I suppose the tweet thread where this post originated was my TED Talk. :)

So, Priest didn’t write the text, and “great” doesn’t even appear in the movie where the text is spoken aloud.

It’s very Christopher Nolan that there would be an error within an error in plain sight around the world.

Again, I’d listen to Michael Caine read anything, and listening to him speak this text is a masterclass (as distinct from a TED Talk) in making someone else’s text one’s own (in this case: someone else’s text based on someone else’s text). When I re-transcribed it for this week’s Disquiet Junto project, using the widely re-posted “Goodreads version” as my template, I paid attention to each pause, each transition. Some of the pauses signaled em-dashes, one an ellipsis. Distinctions needed to be made for how Caine speaks, versus how Nolan breaks up the speech with brief snippets of imagery. Some are pauses of utterance, while others are more akin to hitting pause.

And sometimes I really couldn’t quite tell what was said. That’s the thing about speaking. It’s like a trick, like magic. You can say two words at once. You can say a word in a way that suggests another word, layers them. You can hint at a word, and then change direction. You can say a familiar word, but mean it different from how it appears on the page. You and I might do these things by instinct as much as by mistake. When Michael Caine does it, it’s … well, it’s just amazing, right? It’s a mastery of phrasing. The way he pauses before “or a man” is mastery. Had Caine done nothing else in his career, I think that pause would have earned him his knighthood. (Not that I’m into knighthoods or regal pageantry, which is why I haven’t called him Sir here.)

So, do listen through the audio. Listen to the micro-utterances, the granular nuances. While doing so 20 or 30 times over the course of a day and a half, I thought a lot about Ethan Hein’s writing about the tuning of voices in rap, the expressiveness of tiny shifts and pauses.

You may hear the text different from how I do. You might transcribe the opening speech of The Prestige differently to match what you hear. For example, I’m not sure Caine says “unaltered.” He may say “not altered.” I’m pretty sure it’s “unaltered.” It’s sort of both. That’s the art of it. In other words, that’s the magic of it.

Drip

After Doing the pots and pans I Rest my feet on the couch In the next room and wonderwhether the Pace is slowing