Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 2

Disquiet Junto Project 0714: Remix Yourself

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 0714: Remix Yourself
The Assignment: Rework your own music as if someone else had.

Step 1: Think of a musician whose remix work you appreciate.

Step 2: Select a track of your own.

Step 3: Remix the track in Step 2 as if you were the musician in Step 1.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0714” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0714-remix-yourself/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Is it an extended remix, or a radio edit?

Deadline: Monday, September 8, 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 714th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Remix Yourself — The Assignment: Rework your own music as if someone else had — at https://disquiet.com/0714/.

Amstel x Kronos

I previously mentioned the Amstel Quartet, all saxophones, doing “Grandmother and Kimitake” (actually “1934: Grandmother and Kimitake”), a piece from composer Philip Glass’ score to the 1985 Paul Schrader film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, originally recorded by Kronos Quartet, all strings. This is Amstel doing another piece from the same score, though I’m not entirely clear on the track. On the video channel, it’s listed as “1962: Blood Oath” but there is no such track on the movie soundtrack release. The album does have a “1957: Award Montage,” which is roughly the same length as this, and a “1962: Body Building,” which is not, and two other tracks that actually include the word “blood” in the title: “Kyoko’s House (Stage Blood Is Not Enough)” and “Runaway Horses (Poetry Written with a Splash Of Blood).” Making the situation all the more complicated — though also pretty much confirming my sense that it’s the “1957: Award Montage” piece — is that on the album titled Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass (Brooklyn Rider is a string quartet), there’s a track titled “1957: Blood Oath,” also roughly the same length. Such discographical issues aside, Amstel’s is a great performance, just rich with subtle interplay, and it’s another fine video from ConcertLab, which is staking out an interesting realm of video-specific audio recordings of new music.

When Is Techno Not Techno?

When is techno not techno — or barely techno, or so ambient as to maybe not quite be ambient techno? When with each hint of a beat it declines to push things particularly forward, when it maintains its pace like a heartbeat, which is to say: a steady double thump, so human that you think of it less as a beat and more as a necessary presence, natural despite, here, its machine origins. When additional lonesome sounds appear akin to cloud formations, and other instances of the weather, not tethered to any rhythm, low level as that rhythm may be. When you have difficulty tapping at a pace to gauge the BPM, and find yourself double- and quadruple-timing just to make sense of what is happening. This is “Ballade,” a wonderfully understated track by Nay Seven, who is based in Rennes, France. I’d file this under what I’ve been coming to think of as “sound design techno,” at its more atmospheric extreme. (Track found thanks to a repost by Petrus Major.)

My Vibe

Roger Glenn & Co. & Keys

Another weekend, and apparently another organ trio, this time Roger Glenn’s (vibes, flute, sax) with Wayne De La Cruz (B3 organ) and Mark Lee (drums). A lot of fun, and now I can’t get Oris Mays’ “Don’t Let the Devil Ride” out of my head.

Scratch Pad: Lovett, Kimball, Focus

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.

▰ Love when a new game console is unironically referred to as a “game-changer”

▰ Listened to Lyle Lovett’s third album, Lyle Lovett and His Large Band (1989), for the first time in a long time, straight through, and (1) it really holds up and (2) in retrospect it was tailor-made for Gen X listeners raised on Schoolhouse Rock.

▰ Ah, dang. RIP, Jim Kimball, drummer with Mule, a band whose self-titled debut album I was heavily addicted to for much of 1993, the year it came out. He was half of the duo that went by the Denison/Kimball Trio. Also played with Jesus Lizard and Laughing Hyenas. A powerhouse. I think I only saw him live once, with Mule in 1995.

▰ When a maker of fancy stereo consoles for the retro-modern living room provides a list of recommended ambient albums: wrensilva.com.

▰ I pick an Oblique Strategies card at random every morning. Been a while since I got this banger.

▰ Something special about Craigslist ads for photography equipment in which the photos of the equipment are out of focus

▰ I finished reading five graphic novels this week. My favorite of the bunch was The Knives, which is in the long-running Criminal series by writer Ed Brubaker and illustrator Sean Phillips. The Knives is one of the best from them in a while. If you’re not familiar with Criminal, it’s a fantastic modern noir that never flinches — never forgets that the nature of the sublime in noir is that sometimes the violence comes to the surface, that it’s not all shadows and cigarettes — and that often has elements of comics creation as part of its stories, as this volume does. ▰ The Authority is one of my favorite superhero subjects, and I was happy to see there is a new collection about the Authority figure (so to speak) Jenny Sparks, titled simply Jenny Sparks, written by Tom King and drawn by Jeff Spokes. I came for King, who has a well-deserved reputation for cerebral superhero tales, and stayed for Spokes, who broke the page into stark panels and did well by King’s penchant for repetition. It was perfect that I started reading this book the same day I got the Oblique Strategies card “Repetition is a form of change.” Could any statement better sum up genre fiction to those who read it over and over? My favorite moment in Jenny Sparks was a toss-away one, when Sparks complains that fellow Authority member Jack Hawksmoor (who doesn’t appear in this series) talks too much about his intimate relationship with urban sewer systems (if you know the Hawksmoor character, then you get it). ▰ I had started watching Butterfly, the new TV series starring Daniel Dae Kim and Reina Hardesty, and then came to understand it was based on comic books, so I paused the series and read the collected volume. ▰ Having read the first two volumes in DC Comics’ Absolute Universe series of alternate versions of classic heroes, I picked up the third, Absolute Superman. Absolute Wonder Woman remains the one in this series that I recommend. Relative to Absolute Superman, one thing the Wonder Woman volume did was to not foreground the origin story. ▰ I subscribe to the Marvel digital subscription service, Marvel Unlimited, so I read most current Marvel graphic novels an issue/month at a time, and check them off when I complete the final issue contained, as with The Ultimates: Volume 2: All Power to the People. Tracking this is more complicated than it may seem, but if there’s one thing I’m pretty good at, it’s systems.

City Listening

Disquiet Junto Project 0713: Airwave Workout

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 0713: Airwave Workout
The Assignment: Record exercise music for an imaginary broadcast.

Many thanks to Junto member Atom Raiff for having proposed this very fun project.

Step 1: Radio exercises are a century-old type of broadcast programming. The concept is self-explanatory, but do read up if it’s unfamiliar. In Japan, they’re known as Radio Taisō.

Step 2: Record a piece of music with the intent of other people performing radio calisthenics to it. While there are various potential paces to radio exercise programs, keep your recording to 70 bpm.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0713” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0713-airwave-workout/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How do you rate your stamina?

Deadline: Monday, September 1, 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 713th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Airwave Workout — The Assignment: Record exercise music for an imaginary broadcast — at https://disquiet.com/0713/.

Science Fiction x GitHub

I’m trying to figure out which science fiction authors of note* have GitHub accounts. I’ve only found four so far, though I imagine I’m missing some.

Max Barry github.com/maxbarry

Greg Egan github.com/nagegerg

qntm (aka Sam Hughes) github.com/qntm

Robin Sloan github.com/robinsloan

*Vague but so be it

When Is a Trio a Quintet?

When is a trio a quintet? When the violist doubles as a vocalist and the saxophonist keeps one hand at the ready to adjust the Indian bellows instrument called the shruti box. Those would be, respectively, Gareth Lubbe and Hayden Chisholm, complemented by cellist Susanne Szambelan for a slow, considered piece titled “Spectral Awakening.” This live performance is a production of the Netherlands-based ConcertLab, which specializes in audio-visual studio recordings of musicians. This mission is no small thing. The way the camera moves through the trio is part of the performance. What begins with Chisholm alone for well over a minute expands as Szambelan’s elbow and cello scroll come into view, just as her playing enters the piece. This experience culminates later, toward the end, when all three musicians are simultaneously eking out sympathetic drones, the viewer’s eye primed to itemize who is responsible for what sounds. This video is ConcertLab’s 97th recording on YouTube I’m excited to hear what they’ll have for the 100th.