Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 197
April 1, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0483: Type Set
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 5, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 1, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0483: Type SetThe Assignment: Use a recording of yourself typing something as the underlying rhythmic track for a piece of music.
Step 1: You’re going to use a recording of yourself typing something as the underlying rhythmic track for a piece of music.
Step 2: Give some thought as to what you’re going to type. You might re-type something that already exists. You might type freeform, just associating ideas. You might type randomly. Arguably, the best thing to do is to think of something you want to write about, and then type that: Typing something you’re writing in your head will lead to momentary pauses where you consider things, and that will be infused into the cadence.
Step 3: Record yourself typing the text you decided upon in Step 2.
Step 4: Use the unedited recording from Step 3 as the rhythmic and underlying percussive element of a piece of original music. It’s preferable that you retain the recognizable sound of the typing.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0483” (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 “disquiet0483” (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-0483-type-set/
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 5, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 1, 2021.
Length: The length of your finished track will be as long as the story you choose to tell.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0483” 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 483rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Type Set (The Assignment: Use a recording of yourself typing something as the underlying rhythmic track for a piece of music) — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0483-type-set/
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, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
March 31, 2021
Sound Bites: Pandemic Playlists, Disliking Dislikes, Martian Noise
These are the sort of items I’d usually put in the This Week in Sound email newsletter, but I’ve been super busy, too busy for a new issue, and so at a friend’s suggestion I am initially noting some here.
▰ It’s good YouTube experiments with hiding dislikes. I’m not sure it’s just about creator ego or hate mobs. The interface is flawed. We’re used (post-Netflix) to dis/liking things to nudge the algorithm. Hiding lets users register taste without offending. (I wrote about this two years ago in “Speaking Privately to the Algorithm.”)
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358992/youtube-hiding-dislikes-experiment-creator-review-bomb
▰ “Getting ‘vaxxed at moscone and they’re literally playing Here Comes the Sun on the PA and I’m shaking,'”: Peter Hartlaub quotes local food critic Soleil Ho at the start of this piece about the playlist at Moscone Center, one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s major vaccination centers. Her tweet was the first I’d heard of the music there, as well. I’m still ineligible for vaccination, but have been following along as folks tweet (and otherwise share) their shots. The playlist originated, interesting, not for patients but for administers: “it was initially created for staffers arriving early for their first day of work.” (via Daniel Raffel) https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Here-s-the-story-behind-the-amazing-Moscone-16061677.php
▰ Robocalls have altered our relationships with phones, both household and mobile. Good news: The FCC has been taking action. Less good: “A fine, even the biggest in the agency’s history, is unlikely to rein in robocalls. In fact, there’s evidence to suggest they haven’t been effective at all.” More good: “If there’s good news, it’s that the FCC isn’t limiting itself to fines. In a separate announcement, the agency detailed its new anti-robocall agenda. Acting Chair Jessica Rosenworcel has established a Robocall Response Team. Made up of 51 FCC members across six offices, the team will coordinate the agency’s anti-robocall efforts and develop new policies for it to put in place.”
https://www.engadget.com/fcc-225-million-fine-194419208.html
▰ We’ve been back on Mars barely a month and already introduced noise pollution: “It’s so noisy that Dave Gruel, the lead engineer for the EDL (entry, descent and landing mic) system, said he’d pull over and call for a tow if he heard these sounds while driving his car.” (And, yes, I first read that as Dave Grohl, too.)
https://www.engadget.com/perseverance-driving-on-mars-sounds-063118359.html
▰ Geeta Dayal surveys the past and future of music at Mills College, which has been home to such musical mavericks as Pauline Oliveros, Darius Milhaud, John Cage, Fred Frith, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Laetitia Sonami, and Roscoe Mitchell, in light of the institution ceasing to grant degrees.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/arts/music/mills-college-music.html
▰ You know how with each successive generation, ties to ethnic and cultural heritage diminish? It’s true of birds, too. “As the population of the critically endangered regent honeyeater plummeted over the years, some young birds could no longer find older ones to teach them to sing, a new study reports.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/science/bird-honeyeater-australia.html
▰ The Foghorn’s Lament: The Disappearing Music of the Coast, a new book from Jennifer Lucy Allen, is due out in later this year (May in the U.K., where she is based, and July in the U.S.). Allen received her PhD, with a thesis titled Fog Tropes: The social and cultural history of the foghorn 1853 to the present day.
https://www.hachette.com.au/jennifer-lucy-allan/the-foghorns-lament-the-disappearing-music-of-the-coast
▰ Whale song can be used “to map undiscovered faults through tectonic sound recordings of the sea,” Geoff Manaugh notes from paper in Science.https://www.bldgblog.com/2021/03/cetacean-surroundsound/
David Wingo’s New Mayans M.C. Theme
I’ve been enjoying the new season of Mayans M.C., the first following the exit of co-creator Kurt Sutter. The fourth episode aired last night. The show continues under the stewardship of Elgin James, its other co-creator. Part of the new tone is due to the arrival of composer David Wingo, replacing Bob Thiele Jr. That new tone is set from the start by the new opening credits, which have gotten attention for their political imagery, not just the real-world source material, but the historic scope.
Wingo’s theme music is just as big a shift from the earlier seasons. Gone is the song co-written by Thiele and Sutter, sung initially by Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo, and then the second season by Diana Gameros. In its place, Wingo has crafted a compact, moody instrumental track that lingers just below 70BPM. It’s all atmosphere, built from layered guitar parts, moaning group background vocals, and plenty of percussive elements, all rendered as slow-burn drone rock. While not quite as diffuse as, say, the ambient folk and country of groups like Boxhead Ensemble or SUSS (the latter of whose Gary Leib died last week), it sits well alongside them.
Wingo’s name wasn’t immediately familiar to me, but as it turns out, I’ve heard a lot of his music in the past. He composed material for Soundtracker, the excellent documentary on field recording artist and acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, co-author of the book One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet. We discuss material from Soundtracker most semesters I teach my “Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds” course. He also wrote music for Manic, the (pre-500 Days of Summer) pairing of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel that made excellent use of some Aphex Twin music, as I wrote about in my book on Selected Ambient Works Volume 2, for which I interviewed its director, Jordan Melamed. Wingo has worked on the scores for Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults, Barry, Mud, The Report, and numerous other productions, dating back to David Gordon Green’s 2000 debut feature film, George Washington. He also led the Austin, Texas, band Ola Podrida.
More from Wingo at david-wingo.com.
March 30, 2021
Corruption Is Back
After a bit of a SoundCloud dry spell, when Japanese musician Corruption seemed to spend much of the time posting collections of older tracks at Bandcamp, the steady stream is back, from ragged video game exotica (“Amuse Myself”), to elastic drones (“Worm Fat”), to jagged metallic noise (“Outdoor Indoor Edit”). Corruption is incredibly prolific, with well over 1,100 tracks to date on the account. Tune in at soundcloud.com/corrption. A particular recent favorite is “Khakkhara,” named for the noise-making zen Buddhist staff, yet here sounding like a empty train barelling through a science fiction movie.
March 29, 2021
Algorave Review in The Wire
Yeah, that typeface means something. I’ve got a new piece in the Wire magazine, the issue with (musician) Warren Ellis on the cover. It’s a review of a livecoding livestream from February 13, 2021, of Chiho Oka (Tokyo), Kindohm (Minneapolis), and AFALFL (Paris), hosted by Alex McLean as part of the No Bounds Festival. There’s something quite digitally native about a livecoding livestream. Had algorave not already existed, Covid-19 certainly would have engendered this cultural variant.
McLean posted the full review at slab.org. The concert is archived on YouTube:
March 28, 2021
Disquietude Podcast Episode 0005
This is the fifth episode of the Disquietude podcast of ambient electronic music.
The goal of the Disquietude podcast is to collect adventurous work in the field of ambient electronic music. What follows is all music that captured my imagination, and I hope that it appeals to your imagination as well.
All five tracks of music are featured with the permission of the individual artists or record labels. Below is the structure of the episode with time codes for the tracks, the spoken annotation of the tracks, an interviews with one of the musicians (Lesley Flanigan), and a brief essay about reading waveforms.
02:15 Lesley Flanigan’s “Headphone Space”
08:09 Dave Seidel’s “For LMY and MZ”
15:51 KMRU’s “Figures Emerge”
23:34 Celia Hollander’s “5:59 PM”
26:55 John Hooper’s “Underwater Stream”
29:20 Annotation Begins
32:39 Lesley Flanigan Interview
39:53 “Reading Waveforms”
42:00 Credits
42:59 Closing Music
43:26 End
Thanks for listening.
Produced and hosted by Marc Weidenbaum. Disquietude theme music by Jimmy Kipple, with vocal by Paula Daunt. Logo by Boon Design.
March 27, 2021
twitter.com/disquiet: Alias, 8:01am, music lessons
I do this manually each week, collating the tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet (which I think of as my public notebook) that I want to keep track of. For the most part, this means ones I initiated, not ones in which I directly responded to someone. I sometimes tweak them a bit here. Some tweets pop up on Disquiet.com sooner than I get around to collating them, so I leave them out of the weekly round-up. It’s usually personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. They’re here pretty much in chronological order. Looking back at the tweets makes the previous week seem both longer and shorter than it was. The cadence is a way to map how time progressed. The subjects are another map of the same territory.
▰ Began a dinner-time 20th-anniversary re-watch of the TV series Alias (2001-2006). Never finished the final season the first time around.
▰ This morning’s Gmail relief note: if I rename a folder/label, any rules I set up for filtering inbound email to it seems to continue to function.
▰ 8:01am sounds: dog barking several doors down; thud of car door being shut; another car’s tires responding to a driver’s sudden awareness of the stop sign at the corner; the house’s final creaks as it reaches furnace-enabled daytime temperature; no birds, no planes
▰ When you can’t seem to delete a hyphen and then you realize it’s a piece of dust on your laptop screen
▰ I don’t recall where I put my glasses before bed last night, but I do now recall that at the time it seemed like it was an unusual and creative option.
Update: under the couch
Current status: Aerosmith’s “Back in the Saddle”
Tired: My dog ate my homework
Wired: I lost my glasses
▰ Just said “My ear is salivating” out loud, and I’m alright with it.
▰ There’s a moment in the day when I start looking ahead to practicing guitar after dinner. It’s a good moment.
▰ Street music
▰ When many years ago I started to look into taking music lessons, first with piano false starts and, finally, four years ago, settling into guitar, I told myself if I could just play “All of Me” I’d be happy enough to do so for hours at a time. That has turned out to be true.
My favorite “finding a good music teacher” story: The piano teacher who during the trial lesson asked, in what was intended as a rhetorical question, “Which is more important, melody or harmony?” When I sat there quietly for some time, we both realized we were not a good match.
In contrast, on the first day, my guitar teacher asked, “Which guitar players do you like?” And I said, “I think you mean who do I wanna wish I could sound like in 40 years, and I’d say Jon Hassell, even though he plays trumpet.” And we were off to the (slow, steady) races.
▰ Fun fact: if you like drones and own a Stratocaster, all you have to do is turn the guitar on and the amp up.
Q: But what if you like drones that are a different pitch than 60 Hz? :-p (from Nathan Moody, @noisejockey)
A: I put a capo on the power line out front
▰ And, yes, we’re now 18 weeks from the 500th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project
▰ The haiku is, at Marcus Fischer’s suggestion, a structure we can apply to sound itself, and not just to words. This week the Disquiet Junto music community explores that potential, as these waveforms suggest:
▰ And on that note, have a good weekend, folks. Write something you hear. Listen to something you see. Tip those livestreamers, pay for some of that Bandcamp goodness, and why don’t you post something yourself, while you’re at it. (Oh, and wear a mask when out and about.)
March 26, 2021
9 Ds
I went for a walk last night after work, for the hour before dinner. When I got to the main drag, I found myself next to a longtime sausage shop. I was drawn to (reminded of) the typography due to my unplanned adjacency. This is some of my favorite in our neighborhood.
A short time later, another D called out to me, and I decided I’d look for Ds on my route.
This one is from a large outdoor advertisement that’s been scrawled on and ripped over and over and over again.
Many years ago, when Instagram first began, I tagged along with a group after hours, walking downtown in San Francisco, wandering around and taking pictures. (This one is from a laundromat.)
I don’t know if the person leading it was an employee, a hired hand, or a proto-influencer. The point was to encourage us to take pictures of the everyday, which I was attuned to, having grown up in a Nikon household with a basement darkroom. (Donut shop.)
I don’t know if such outreach was necessary for the then fledgling social media company, or if the outing (were there others?) was deemed successful within the company. The incident does seem like a memory from a distant and, yes, more innocent time. (Water Department cover.)
This morning, the first thing Instagram showed me was a mashup of Charlie Brown and Heavy D, the D looming large, like the overnight algorithm both got me and didn’t. And yes, it was freakish. Note to self: don’t go numb; don’t deny the eeriness. (From sticker affixed to sign.)
As for me yesterday evening, I needed the walk, the stretch, the exercise, the change in scenery, the time outside (I’m very very much a city mouse), an audiobook in my ear lending another layer to the stroll’s inputs and overlaps. (Graffiti on cover to a fire alarm.)
And even more so, I apparently needed this engagement with the written world of our neighborhood, both the seemingly semi-permanent and the presumably (though not always particularly) temporary. (Construction sign warning of work ahead.)
I didn’t intend to document these nine Ds on my walk. I just went for a walk after a particularly interior day. I think now about how Instagram’s grid didn’t so much shape as guide my route, a grid layered on the city’s grid.
March 25, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0482: Exactly That Gap
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, March 29, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 25, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0482: Exactly That GapThe Assignment: Make a musical haiku following instructions from Marcus Fischer.
The following is lightly adapted from instructions by Marcus Fischer titled “Sound Haiku and Constraints in Composition.”
Background: Sound can be descriptive, emotional, and transportive or it can also be abstract when edited to be disconnected from a recognizable source and recontextualized in a composition. Michael Welch, an Adjunct Poetry Professor at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, states that the haiku “gains its energy by the intuitive or emotional leap that occurs in the space between the poem’s parts, in the gap of what’s deliberately left out. …The art of haiku lies in creating exactly that gap, in leaving something out, and in dwelling in the cut that divides the haiku into its parts.”
Instructions: Construct a Sound Haiku from a series of two-second “syllables” made from recordings you have captured. A traditional haiku is a poem written in three sections of five syllables, seven syllables, and then five syllables. Only seventeen syllables in all. Your audio recordings should be arranged into three sections of ten seconds, fourteen seconds, and then ten seconds, with each section separated by a pause of four seconds of silence.
Once you decide on a theme, try to focus each section of your haiku around aspects of that theme with noticeable contrasts in between each each two-second syllables. Keep in mind that gap between the parts and the power of that pause.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0482” (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 “disquiet0482” (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-0482-exactly-that-gap/
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, March 29, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 25, 2021.
Length: The length of your finished track will be, per the instructions, roughly 42 seconds.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0482” 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 482nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Exactly That Gap (The Assignment: Make a musical haiku following instructions from Marcus Fischer) — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0482-exactly-that-gap/
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 Marcus Fischer, used by permission.
