Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 195

Q: Why Blog? A: Blogs Are Great.

This is my occasional request that if you (1) have a focused interest and (2) post regularly about it on social media, then please start a blog. Please read both points again before proceeding. And, no, I’m not saying cease social media. I’m saying your thoughts deserve their own plot of virtual land. Starry skies above, and all that.

I had fun this past week on Twitter, resulting in a long thread on why blogs are great. I’m repurposing much of it here, lightly edited, so it’s in one place, true to my sense that Twitter is best as a public notebook.

Don’t sweat the digital undercarriage. Don’t worry about if you should use WordPress, or SquareSpace, or a whole new internet protocol I don’t myself understand, or some other service. Just choose one for now and start a blog. You can always output your blog’s content at a later date and upload it into a new service down the road. I’ve seen plenty of people get so focused on tweaking their CMS (content management system) that they never actually get around to publishing.

I’ve written something along these lines before, which I collated in a post titled “Bring Out Your Blogs” back in 2019, which marked the 20th anniversary of the word “blog.” The main points are simple:

Have a topic focus
Try to post at least once a week
If you use social media, treat it as your public notebook
Write for yourself first and foremost

And to be clear, I’m not just talking about or to folks who are focused on sound or music. Those just happen to be my interest. Start a blog whatever may be your yum: knitting, regional history, arcane professional expertise. (Though, should you ponder, in your writing, some sonic aspect of your topic, please do let me know.)

And please, if you’re all “I hate the word ‘blog'” then get in line. I started Disquiet.com three years before the word “blog” existed, and have been saddled with it ever since. Just ignore the word and do it.

Q: Why would I blog if I get more feedback on social media than I do whenever I’ve blogged?

A: It’s in the terminology: Social media is “social.” Blogs are “web logs.” Social media expects feedback (not just comments, but likes and follows). Blogs are you getting your ideas down; feedback is a byproduct, not a goal.

Q: But I don’t have a focused topic, so what do I do?

A: This post was written primarily for people who have a focus, and who already talk about that topic regularly on social media. However, if you still want to blog, then just start using your brand new blog as a public diary of things that are of interest to you in general, and when posting be sure to share those things of interest and say something about them. A theme will surface.

Q: What if I don’t think I’m a good writer?

A: Don’t leave writing to good writers, because one result is a lot of bad ideas that happen to be well-written. And you’re probably better than you think. And you’ll get better by doing it regularly.

Q: What about that software everyone uses to get people to pay $5 a month for a newsletter?

A: Nothing here says don’t do something else as well. Do ponder how many newsletters people will eventually be willing to pay for. And newsletters = broadcasting. Blogging is different.

Q: Aren’t blogs an old idea?

A: For context: newsletters rule, too. I started a Tower Records email newsletter in 1994 that ran for a decade. Newsletters are big today. No one taints them as being “old.” Just get over these secondhand perceptions and blog.

Q: I want to start a blog and I have no idea what to write. What do I do?

A: Begin your first post “I want to start a blog and I have no idea what to write and” — and then keep going from there.

Q: Where do I find the time to blog? I already write so much in email, and on Slack, and on social media.

A: It is 100% fine that your blog posts repurpose material you first write elsewhere. In fact, that’s often the way it should be. Try ideas out. See where they go.

Q: What do I do? I can’t write by myself. All my best stuff happens when I’m texting or tweeting back and forth with this friend of mine.

A: Start the blog together. There’s no rule that says one person per blog, or one blog per person.

Q: Any last thoughts before you log off for the night?

A: Yes. I’m reading Kay Larson’s superb biography of John Cage. There are many Buddhist stories in it, most of which come down to doing the same thing forever with no response and then suddenly all is well. That is blogging.

Q: Was that really your last thought?

A: No, but I do need to make dinner.

Q: You said “pick a topic.” Do I need to stick to a topic?

A: No. Things you post that are apart from your main topic help your readers know more about you. If you write a blog about being a paramedic and occasionally post recipes, that’s very interesting.

Q: Wait, I’m a paramedic. Are there really blogs by paramedics?

A: I have no idea. And even if there are, you should do one yourself. I’d sure as heck read a blog by a paramedic. And a forensic accountant. And a beekeeper. And a poetry editor.

Q: Can you help? I’m not sure what to do. I write a blog but some of the ideas I’m not so sure about.

A: I’m certain our world would be a better place if over the past few years people had posted fewer ideas they weren’t sure about, and if doing so acknowledged they weren’t so sure about those ideas. Write that way: to find out what you think.

Q: How can I write about something if I don’t know what I think yet?

A: Only people who don’t write think you need to know what you think before you write. You write to learn what you think.

Q: Can I really blog if I don’t know what any of these things mean: RSS, CMS, CSS, SEO, HTTP, FTP?

A: Yes, and you can, in fact, still lead a very long and full life. (For what it’s worth, I did define CMS earlier on in this document.)

Q: Dude, who are you, anyhow?

A: Hi. My name is Marc. I write about sound in various forms (ambient, sound studies, creative coding, homebrew instruments, etc.) at Disquiet.com, which I founded in 1996.

Q: There was an internet in 1996?

A: Yes, and it was paradise.

Q: You seem really into this stuff. What’s your most extreme — to the point of being almost absurd — idea about blogs?

A: I think the U.N. should compel Google to bring back Google Reader.

Q: How do I ever get past writing blog posts that are just lists of things?

A: Remove the numbers before each item in your list. Turn each item into a short paragraph. Write an introductory paragraph about what we’re about to read. Write a conclusion about what we just read.

Q: Aren’t you supposed to be cooking dinner?

A: It’s simmering.

Q: You’ve been doing this blogging thing for almost 25 years and you’re not done yet?

A: What is this “done” of which you speak?

Q: OK! I’m gonna start a blog. What one thing would you ask me to do?

A: Here are two, since you’ll likely repost stuff: (1) Don’t repost something without having fully read/watched/etc.’d it. (2) Don’t repost something without saying something about it; lend it some context.

Q: Clearly you had fun writing this thread on Twitter. Why spend time blogging instead?

A: This was fun, and clearly I’m not saying get off social media (though I do have thoughts on the topic), but a fun tweet thread is nothing like the steady pace of a blog well attended to. I promise.

Disquiet.com Elsewhere

It’s been recommended to me that on occasion I drop a note in the feed with a quick overview of where else I hang out online in public. This entry doesn’t quite count as quick, admittedly.

▰ I tweet weekdays at twitter.com/disquiet. I take weekends off. I usually note this at the end of Friday, because occasionally people get offended if I don’t reply to something on the weekend. Yes, Twitter can be a nightmare. I’ve found that with a few simple tactics, it can be quite like it was way back when. First: mute words and accounts vigorously. Second: set your location to a country where you don’t understand the language or, for that matter, the characters in which that language is written, thus rendering the toxic Trends virtually innocuous. I consider Twitter my public notebook. I’ve recently made a habit of taking much of what I post there, collating it, and summarizing it here on Disquiet.com on Saturday mornings. I’m a strong believer in thinking twice before posting. Rereading at week’s end is the bookend of that approach: reflecting back.

▰ There’s at least one new image a week at instagram.com/dsqt, and sometimes quite a few more (/disquiet is taken up by someone who hasn’t posted since around 2012, so if you happen to know how I could trade out for that address, I’d appreciate it). To a degree, I sometimes think of Instagram like how I used to have a single image taped to my locker or to the door of my dorm room. One difference: my Instagram posts are almost always annotated. They also generally end up here on Disquiet.com.

▰ I spend a lot of time at youtube.com/disquiet, occasionally posting videos, regularly updating playlists (primarily my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music). My main streaming music service is music.youtube.com. It comes free with my YouTube subscription, a worthwhile expense because it eliminates ads. The streaming music service has no apparent social component.

▰ My soundcloud.com/disquiet has an almost absurdly high 10,500 followers at this point, though my sense is a lot of those are dead and fake accounts, and in any case the company’s switch from /stream to /discover as the default landing page has, in my estimation, adversely affected the service. The Disquiet Junto projects largely happen there, primarily because that’s where they began, but also because Bandcamp doesn’t have a playlist function and YouTube (in addition to other issues) makes it just difficult enough to upload audio (in contrast with video) that it’s a hassle, almost certainly by design.

▰ A lot of my listening also happens on Bandcamp, so you can see what I’m listening to at bandcamp.com/disquiet, and if we follow each other we can keep abreast of such activities. It’s low-level social, and somewhat useful.

▰ There’s a great online discussion group called Lines at llllllll.co, where I spend a lot of time. If you make music, especially if digital tools mediate your creative process, I recommend the community. The Disquiet Junto projects have for a long time been co-hosted and co-posted there, at the invitation of one of the site’s founders, Brian Crabtree, of Monome Grid fame.

▰ That about covers it. My Facebook is mostly friends and family. I find I post less about my some of my interests on Facebook than I do on Twitter. As I’ve said previously: Facebook is where you realize how little you have in common with people you know and Twitter is where you realize how much you have in common with people you don’t know. My Reddit activity is curious, yet remains cursory. There are some Slacks, in particular the Disquiet Junto one, but most aren’t public in the primary sense of the word. Likewise, I’m on some Discords, as well. Other services intrigue me, haven’t become habitual, plus Keybase and Telegram for some specific projects. Ultimately, “social” is as much a function as a foundation. If you post regularly at a particular blog, then it’s social. GitHub is social. Email is social (especially many-to-many group email lists), etc. Above are just my main hangs.

twitter.com/disquiet: Museum Dreams, Lawnmower Jam, Atwood x Anderson

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.

▰ Weirdest side effect of getting my first shot of the Moderna vaccine on Saturday morning was that for the rest of the weekend I found myself daydreaming being in various rooms at SFMOMA.

▰ Ooh, the upcoming Disquietude ambient music podcast episode will have its first entirely original piece of music (that is, first heard on the podcast).

▰ Lawnmower jam: Saxophonist Jeff Coffin (Dave Matthews, Bela Fleck) noticed his neighbor’s lawnmower was in A flat, so he decided to accompany her. (Thanks, Brian Biggs!)

▰ A trick to navigating the modern internet, one that’s even more addled with targeted ads than anything Neal Stephenson imagined when the ‘net was young, is to regularly search for a few things you already own and love. Then you’ll be inundated with reminders of them.

▰ I love this detail in this piece (nytimes.com) by writer Max Gao on the upcoming Kung Fu TV series: ubiquitous actor Tzi Ma has no children, despite having “played the father figure for a bevy of Hollywood talent” (e.g., in The Farewell, Meditation Park, and the live-action Mulan).

▰ “So, 1981. We had the radio on while cooking dinner, when an eerie sound came pulsating over the airwaves.” Because we’ve been good, we get Margaret Atwood writing about Laurie Anderson: theguardian.com. “Do you want to be a human being any more? Are you one now?”

▰ I’m pretty enamored of wind chimes. As I wrote about in my book on Selected Ambient Works Volume 2: If as Brian Eno has said, repetition is a form of change, then wind chimes can show that change is a form of repetition.

▰ The first track is up on the latest Disquiet Junto project and it includes the sentence “I added a phaser effect to the dishwasher track” and this is how I know I’ve found my people.

▰ RSS 4 Life

▰ It’s cool to have some new Twitter followers following yesterday’s lengthy thread about the benefits of blogging, and I should note for the record you’re now following someone who gets excited about: refrigerators humming, doorbells, silence, TV captions, hold music.

▰ OK, have a good weekend. Listen to some poetry. Read some TV. Seek out some birdsong (while masked). And if you’ve got time and interest, play a recording of wind chimes on a speaker and record how it interacts with your own environment: disquiet.com/0484. See ya Monday.

This Must Be the Place

Just a post to say yes, if you read that lengthy Twitter thread I committed Thursday evening on the hows and whys of blogging, this is that same person’s blog, which is to say it’s mine. I may collect those tweets into a post at some point. Much of it appears, if you’re looking for a handy reference, in slightly different form, in a 2019 post I wrote, titled “Bring Out Your Blogs.” I didn’t reread the post before tweeting, but it was on my mind, for sure.

Seefeel x Autechre

Rupt and Flex (1994 – 96) by Seefeel

Update: When I first posted this, I misstated the release date of the remix (as 2003, when it was released, instead of 1994). I then received a clarification from none other than Autechre’s Sean Booth, who wrote as follows. Reprinted with his permission.

that seefeel rmx is actually from 94, it was done in return for their remix of basscadet but for some unknown reason warp never put it out, then mark eventually put it out in 2003 (i think cos he felt guilty or something)

some trivia: it was done on a rainy afternoon in april in the same room we made amber in (my bedroom at the time) just before we finished doing the tracks for amber, so it’s part of that era

it was a live take hence the stupid runtime

To highlight a slate of reissues from the band Seefeel, Warp Records this week posted an Autechre remix of “Spangle,” the original from the classic 1994 Artificial Intelligence II compilation that featured Autechre as well, along with Scanner, Richard D. James (in Polygon Window guise), Richard H. Kirk (of Cabaret Voltaire), and many others. In the remix, an extended bout of genteel ambience, all quavery sine waves, eventually — far later and less organically than the original — gives way to a slowly emerging , deliciously gated beat and a heavenly bit of vocal from Seefeel’s Sarah Peacock. The other members are Mark Clifford, Daren Seymour, and Justin Fletcher.

The remix dates from 1994, but wasn’t released until 2003. Here’s the original for comparison:

Artificial Intelligence II by Seefeel

Get the collection featuring both tracks, Rupt and Flex (1994 – 96), at seefeel.bandcamp.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0484: A Movable Heart

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, April 12, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 8, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0484: A Movable HeartThe Assignment: Transplant the sounds of Chris Kallmyer’s wind chimes to a new location.

First, some background: Artist Chris Kallmyer’s “Two hearts are better than one” is a pair of wind chimes, one of which is depicted in this week’s cover image, crisscrossing Los Angeles at the height of the pandemic. Installed at homes for week-long listening sessions, the chimes formed a duet across a city and provided intimate experiences with sound for 16 families sheltering at home. (More at chriskallmyer.com.)

Step 1: Chris has provided us with a recording of the wind chimes, a little over five minutes long. The audio was cleaned up by Alex Hawthorn to maximize the clarity of the chimes themselves, removing much of the background sound, thus situating the chimes in what might be thought of as a platonic space. Access the wav file at dropbox.com.

Step 2: You’ll be continuing the journey of this wind chime. You’ll do this by playing the wav file recording out loud somewhere you choose, and recording the sound of the wind chime in that environment.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0484” (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 “disquiet0484” (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-0484-a-movable-heart/

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, April 12, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 8, 2021.

Length: You’d likely keep your track to the original length, but vary as you see fit.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0484” 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 484th weekly Disquiet Junto project — A Movable Heart (The Assignment: Transplant the sounds of Chris Kallmyer’s wind chimes to a new location) — at:https://disquiet.com/0484/

More on Chris Kallmyer at:chriskallmyer.com.

Major thanks to Alex Hawthorn for support:alexhawthorn.com

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-0484-a-movable-heart/

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

Image associated with this project is by Chris Kallmyer, used with his permission.

Hold Music

Sometimes it seems tHat the Only breaks we aLlow ourselves are the ones we’D rather had never happened. My instinct is to listen throUgh the Sound on the other end of the lIne for some Clue, some presence.

Rhodes + Synth

Beautiful, nearly 12-minute live performance by Minneapolis-based Midera, playing Rhodes piano along with another bit of old-school hardware, the Sequential Prophet 10. Not surprisingly, the latter provides the lush, sustained pads, while the Rhodes provides a simple solo that occasionally emerges when the waves of the Prophet ease. According to the accompanying note, this is a sideways view because the other camera failed to record. Arguably the placidity of a single vantage is to the production’s benefit, even if it was achieved by accident.

More from Midera at mideraartist.wordpress.com

Soundbites: Deaf Bell, Social Sound, Venue-less Gigs

A lightly annotated sound-studies clipping service, collected in advance of the next issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet):

▰ The mother of the father of the telephone was deaf. Alexander Graham Bell’s own father developed a system called Visible Speech to facilitate communication. Bell eventually himself married a woman who had lost her hearing in childhood. And now, Katie Booth, in her new book, The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness, traces this throughline in Bell’s life and work: “his creative genius and his misguided efforts to eradicate Deaf culture,” as Valerie Thompson puts it in a review. Here’s a particularly damning statement from Bell’s wife: “You are tender and gentle to deaf children, but their interest to you lies in their being deaf, not in their humanity.”
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/books/2021/04/06/the-invention-of-miracles/

▰ LinkedIn is reportedly looking to add an audio chatroom feature, which makes sense, given how much of Clubhouse, the “audio social network,” has been professional conversations. This feature expansion would be part of a broader range of changes LinkedIn is making to flesh out its social capabilities.
https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/linkedin-confirms-that-it-is-working-on-a-clubhouse-like-audio-chatroom-feature-9483741.html

▰ Miss live music? Then I recommend this Gabriele de Seta essay on Hong Kong’s “no-venue underground” (a term credited to Rob Hayler), drawing from personal experience (2012-2016) playing in a city with few places to perform experimental music in the first place: “It is somehow ironically appropriate that, in this city without ground, experimental musicians find themselves relegated to a precarious underground actively carved out of fleeting spaces strewn across the upper floors of post-industrial peripheries. These precarious venues appear and disappear following the inexorable inflation of property prices and the investment decisions of landlords, leaving local show organizers to work in the present tense with whatever space is available at the moment.” It’s a timely, applicable piece during our moment of place-less livestreams. The essay is from the new book Fractured Scenes: Underground Music-Making in Hong Kong and East Asia, edited by Damien Charrieras and François Mouillot, both professors at universities in Hong Kong.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-5913-6_7

▰ Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis and a friend of mine since college, writes about taking guitar lessons for the first time since high school. I myself started taking weekly lessons a few years ago, and can relate to this distinction he draws: “Rather than playing guitar, I am practicing with it. I don’t mean rote exercises — though I do some of those — but something more like meditation practice: a daily commitment to disciplined method and unpredictable encounter, to emotional exploration and deconstruction, to attention and listening as much as to performance or ‘doing.’” Likewise, he talks about trying to reconsider the role of recording in his efforts: “I want the recording device to become part of practice rather than ambition, no longer a staff sergeant of the Productivity Regime but a challenging feedback friend, breaking the spell to deepen it.”
https://www.burningshore.com/p/open-tunings

▰ News of Google’s Project Wolverine goes back a month, but I don’t want to lose track of it. It’s reportedly a supercharged earbud. According to a summary by Ashley Carman, “[T]hey’re currently trying to figure out how to isolate people’s voices in a crowded room or make it easier to focus on one person when overlapping conversations are happening around you.” Carman compares this with Whisper (whisper.ai), and others to the lamented, defunct Doppler Labs. As David Pierce put it in his overview of Doppler’s fall back in 2017, it “had the bad luck of being a hardware company at a time when the biggest players in tech — Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook — are all pouring billions into developing their own gadgets.” Now Google appears to be pursuing the endeavor.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/4/22313421/alphabet-project-x-wolverine-hearing-aid-project

Sound Ledger¹ (Regional Lifespans, Songbird Implants, Nature Sounds)

13: The disparity, in years, of life expectancy for individuals living in Denver, Colorado, based on where they live, due to factors including noise pollution.

14.4: The weight, in grams, of a tiny, wireless, battery-free device that can be implanted in songbirds to aid scientific study

184: The percentage increase in overall health of individuals exposed to the sounds of nature

▰ ▰ ▰

¹Footnotes: Denver: denverite.com. Songbird: nature.com. Nature: smithsonianmag.com.

Originally published in the April 5, 2021, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet).