Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 191
May 13, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0489: The Prestige
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 17, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 13, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0489: The PrestigeAssignment: Apply some magic to ABA form.
Thanks to Disquiet Junto member rbxbx for proposing this.
Step 1: There’s a now famous quote from the opening of the 2006 film The Prestige. It goes as follows. Give it a read:
“Every magic trick consists of three parts — or acts. The first part is called the Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird, or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it — to see if it is, indeed, real. You know: unaltered, normal. But of course … it probably isn’t. The second act is called the Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now, you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call the Prestige.”
Step 2: This arc, moving from Pledge to Turn to Prestige, can be read as a take on the classic ABA structure, in which a theme is introduced, then something else occurs, and then the piece returns to where it began.
Step 3: Compose and record a piece of music that takes the process described in The Prestige as its blueprint.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0489” (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 “disquiet0489” (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-0489-the-prestige/
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 17, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 13, 2021.
Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Listening can be deceiving.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0489” 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 489th weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Prestige (Assignment: Apply some magic to ABA form) — at: https://disquiet.com/0488/
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-0489-the-prestige/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
May 12, 2021
Lee Yi on Thesis Project
Lee Yi’s self-titled album is due out on the Thesis Project label at the very start of June. Three of its seven tracks are up as part of the preview. Hovering strings and granular, shifting atmospheres, along with muted horn, combine with more grounded piano to produce works that are both recognizable and challenging, the elements suggesting structures that never quite congeal, Yi leaving much of it to the listener’s imagination. This is the first Thesis release that will be a solo album. Previous records in the series, which is highly audio-visual, were all collaborations, by the likes of Julianna Barwick and Rafael Anton Irisarri, Dustin O’Halloran and Benoît Pioulard, and Takeshi Nishimoto and Roger Döring, just to list a few. It’s clear from listening to Lee Yi why it sits so well beside these other records, because its spaciousness, its breadth, feels like more than one intelligence is at the helm.
More on the Thesis Project at thesisproject.us. More from Lee Yi, who is based in Málaga, Spain, at leeyi.bandcamp.com and soundcloud.com/leeyiproject.
May 11, 2021
The Hitman’s ASMR
Hitman 3, the latest from the long-running video game series, counts Dartmoor in England as among its numerous international locations. A gamer ASMR account on YouTube has set out to produce documents of each of the settings, this one moving from graveyard to abandoned conservatory of flowers to the interiors of a grand home. (There’s also another video up already for an Italian locale.) Notable in the game is that because of its remote places, in contrast with, say, largely urban fare like Grand Theft Auto and Cyberpunk 2077, when voices are overheard, as they are here, they don’t pass as background noise. They stand out like fluorescent paint might against a sodden British hillside.
Video originally posted to YouTube.
May 10, 2021
Motor
From a Whisper to a Whisper
Much of the beauty of this “lofi ambient track” by Tatami-ya Music is what doesn’t happen. About 30 seconds in, after an opening sequence of tones as spacious and cloudy as the image superimposed in the video on the music equipment, a harder beat kicks in, only to be repeated at such a slow pace that each time it’s as if it might not even have returned.
In different hands, the song would have proceeded from whisper to, if not a scream, then a bludgeon, but the hard beat never does more than it does from the start. It doesn’t ramp up. It doesn’t accelerate. It doesn’t populate the track more than it does initially. The restraint leaves room for not only the sparsely accumulated sounds to be heard, but for the listener to experience a lingering sense that it might, in fact, yet go in a different direction.
Track originally posted at YouTube. Tatami-ya Music is Hidenari Nozaki, who is based in Aukland, New Zealand. More at instagram.com/ghiden and soundcloud.com/tatamiya-music.
May 9, 2021
Current Favorites: Unreal Real Birds + Video Game Birds
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.
▰ Jason (Bassling) Richardson posted this remarkable video he shot of a lyrebird doing its thing. The variety of sounds, which really do bring to mind a synthesizer, are all the more striking in the context of the bird’s dance.
▰ I spent much of a morning this week listening to just wind chimes, occasional distant thunder, and intermittent bird chatter — all from the video game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. (Thanks, Naxuu!)
▰ Jesse Goin & Nathan McLaughlin team up on Earth Tones Miniatures, a time-slowing mix of acoustic guitar and deep, soothing drones.
Earth Tones Miniatures by Jesse Goin & Nathan McLaughlin
▰ Yoshio Machida’s Modulisme Session 041 is an exploratory album of synthesizer music: part minimalist patterning, part brutalist industrial noise-making
May 8, 2021
twitter.com/disquiet: Theater Anxiety and Media Ambience
I do this manually each week, collating tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet, my public notebook. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.
▰ The sequel to A Quiet Place, a film about a society in which survivors of a worldwide catastrophe take extreme caution whenever leaving their homes, will apparently be available “only in theaters.”
Which is to say, the bar for the cinema sensorium has been lowered as a result of the pandemic. Simply entering the movie theater exceeds whatever Sensurround had ever been hoped to accomplish.
▰ I enjoy buying downloads. I also feel a threshold-breaking new utility (app/device/service/protocol) remains necessary for doing so to become mainstream, mainstream being necessary for downloads to pass a threshold at which they will become financially meaningful for musicians.
▰ Me at 6:45am: Yawn.
Me at 7:15am: Oh, yeah, it’s May the 4th. I’ll watch Bad Batch, but it’s not like I’m gonna be celebrating Star Wars all day. C’mon.
Me at 9:00am: Oh wow, this Star Wars Biomes audio-video feature is awesome and I’m going to play it on loop until dinner!
Pretty much the only shortcoming of these Star Wars Biomes videos is they don’t entirely ditch the music. Fortunately, the environmental sound of the various locations is prominent most if not all the time.
▰ Netflix needs a third button for “I really enjoyed this and I never want to watch it or anything like it anytime again in the near or foreseeable future.” Pondering what that hand gesture is.
▰ That thing where you’re looking at Goodreads and you go to click the “Want to Read” button and, just as you do so, the advertising banner finally slides into place, thus pushing down the rest of the page, leading you to instead trigger a full-page view of the book’s cover.
▰ Really enjoyed the dense environmental sounds of Cyberpunk 2077, so rather than just watch recordings on YouTube I got a copy. Somewhere a database is registering the machine language equivalent of “This player simply wanders around town and then stands still for a half an hour.” … Somewhere another machine on the network replies, “The player’s digital signature resembles that of someone who did the same thing in Pikmin 20 years ago.” … Further down the stack comes a whisper on the wind from an ancient BASIC subroutine: “I know that kid. Used to carry a binder of floppies around with him in high school.”
▰ I think I need to add “Loitering in video games” to the Disquiet,com profile.
▰ The phrase “panting sibilantly” was one of the first descriptions in the captions for Mayans M.C. this week.
▰ And on that note, have a great weekend. Listen to one of your favorite TV shows. Admire the emotional heft of the word balloons in a favorite graphic novel. Record the outside and bring it inside. See you Monday. Or maybe Tuesday.
A Pox on the Inbox
If I haven’t replied to your request for coverage, this screenshot from Gmail is why. I do want to hear your music — but I also want to hear other people’s music, and the less time I spend in correspondence, the more time I can spend listening. Thanks.
I set up filters in Gmail by email account (labels and PR firms, and for some artists, too). They’re in declining order of likely interest. I have them automatically bypass my inbox.
And to further clarify: No way I’ll read them all. I take a peek in declining order, and occasionally clean them out. I search for “http://bandcamp.com/yum” and mostly pay attention to level 0 and 1. A search in others (“soundtrack,” “ambient,” etc.) might yield something.
Not shown, simply because it’s much further down in the list of my email folders/labels: the 11,811 that automatically bypassed my inbox because they’re from Bandcamp.
I feel bad about complaining, because there’s tons of great stuff in there. As burdens go, it’s an embarrassment of riches. What’s not great is (1) people who re-add me to their subscriptions lists after I unsubscribe and (2) people who check back repeatedly.
What’s also sometimes burdensome is the natural sympathy one acquires for musicians who put all their time into releasing albums and tracks, only for them to face so many hurdles for it to get much an audience.
May 7, 2021
Loitering in Video Games
The Uncanny Valley gets all the press, but there is another valley nearby, a Hyperreal Valley located in the Goldilocks Zone between the discomforting and the mundane, the failed experiment and the all too familiar. In place of the awkwardness of some neural network’s syrupy, glitchy, pixel-flesh puppetry, there is the sprawling atmospheric environment of broad-geography video games, places where you can stroll and get to know not only the neighborhood but a semblance of a world.
Here are two more sequences from Cyberpunk 2077, one shot by day, the other at night, in both cases the position of the sun having nothing to do with astronomy and everything do to with a game-state variable deep in the code. In contrast with some of the others I’ve posted recently, these are motion-intensive. They aren’t records of loops shot from stationary corners. They are half-hour walks through fantastic imaginings of urban places. We don’t only hear the layered elements — traffic, conversation, machinery, advertising, etc. — but we hear them in relative position to each other, and from various vantages.
At 15:15 in the daytime video, there is a deep surge, part whale song and part industrial drone. What there is is a giant freighter hovering overhead. Then another comes into view, followed by a similar guttural utterance that veers on the atmospheric in scale. The taken-for-granted facts of the narrative are well beyond our own humdrum reality, and yet the result in the videos is disarmingly natural, very much the opposite of the Uncanny Valley. In fact, if you turn down the streaming quality to 480 on one of these and on a real-life walk around Tokyo or Manhattan, the differences would become even less recognizable.
May 6, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0488: Reverse Delay
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 10, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 6, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0488: Reverse DelayAssignment: Do something you’ve been putting off.
Step 1: Think of something music-related you’ve been putting off: finishing a track, starting a track, fixing a piece of hardware, updating a piece of software, trying out something one last time before discarding it. Whatever comes to mind. Preferably something that’s been bothering you.
Step 2: Make a piece of music that checks off the list whatever it was you recognized, in Step 1, you’d been putting off.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0488” (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 “disquiet0488” (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-0488-reverse-delay/
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 10, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 6, 2021.
Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Maybe the length is the issues — you’ve been meaning to do something very long/short for a long time.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0488” 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 488th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Reverse Delay (Assignment: Do something you’ve been putting off) — at: https://disquiet.com/0488/
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-0488-reverse-delay/
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 Conrad Bakker, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
