Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 2

Disquiet Junto Project 0725: Rack It

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 0725: Rack It
The Assignment: Change the “focus” of a track as it plays.

Step 1: There is a concept in photography and filmmaking called “rack focus,” which can be understood as the process of altering depth of field so as to draw attention to one or another element.

Step 2: Record a track in which you apply the concept of “rack focus” to sound.

Approach: You might, for example, take a preexisting track for which you already have the various layers separated, and then at any given moment, put all but one through a low-pass filter. That’s just a suggestion.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0725” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0725-rack-it/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, November 24, 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 725th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rack It — The Assignment: Change the “focus” of a track as it plays — at https://disquiet.com/0725/.

Plex … and Then Again

Inevitably, right after I decided to mention here how I like Plex as a platform for a personal jukebox, I went and had problems with Plex. It’s a basic fact that these systems are far from perfect, and while they’re designed for consumers, they require a certain amount of not only technical orientation but also patience — and perhaps the sort of tinkerer’s mindset, which is to say that the tinkering is a feature, rather than a bug.

What happened was I updated my Mac mini to macOS Tahoe 26, and suddenly the way I used to be able to screen share to it from my MacBook Pro (also running Tahoe) didn’t work seamlessly anymore.

Why do I need screen sharing? Because the whole point of having the Mac mini server is that it’s “headless”: it just sits on/in my living room console with my speakers and amplifier and turntable and so forth, and though while it’s wired into all that, it’s also, of course, networked (locally and when I’m out and about). But for some reason, the networking suddenly doesn’t work the way it used to.

I was able to find a vnc:// URL I can use to access the mini, and now everything seems to work fine, but the hassle does make the whole system feel sort of fragile. Which didn’t keep me from ordering a larger hard drive. We’ll see how this goes.

And then again, of course, nothing’s quite as fragile as an LP record that I watch slide across the floor after I accidentally drop it — not that I’ve done that since my teens.

Virtual Synthesis

A gorgeous, slow-moving, haunting stretch of virtual synthesis, courtesy of the musician who goes by Nvra. There’s a growing category of online footage of tracks documented underway in real time using the VCV Rack software platform. VCV is a software emulator of modular synthesizers, meaning one can, affordably, patch together multiple instances of modules that, in the real/physical world, would add up to a pretty penny. Instead, there’s a pretty visualization of what’s happening. The developer of VCV has commented that despite it being an audio production tool, the graphics challenge is in some ways the greater one, due to the sheer amount of elements that might be shown at a given time. As the tool has matured, it’s provided more options to stylize the way the modules appear, and that has, no doubt, helped encourage people to post videos of their work online, and in public. Nvra’s track, titled simply “Collider,” is a lush, carefully paced series of swells, some tonal, some seemingly vocal, and then occasionally highlighted with little sonic glints and melodic snippets.

Otsubo Kazuhisa on Drone(s)

Another live performance, this one an extended synth drone, by Otsubo Kazuhisa, who’s based in Japan. It’s a thrumming, compelling performance, with multiple layers of whirring and humming all going at once, ranging from a high shimmer, to a husky foundation, with gleaming pulses somewhere in between. At times, especially around three quarters of the way through, it sounds like voices are emanating from the void, and those voices make some of what came before sound almost glottal and gutteral in retrospect. Per its title, the track was recorded on November 9, 2025, though only released as of November 17. More at instagram.com/otsubo.

Home Jukebox Report

If you have a sizable collection of MP3s (and equivalent — I mostly use ALAC, which is Apple’s lossless file format), and whether your files are from Bandcamp or are rips of your CD collection, or whatever/wherever, I can’t really recommend a tool more than I do Plex (see: plex.tv; despite the site’s emphasis on video, it has a solid music-services offering).

I trust there are solid alternatives to Plex, maybe even some such tools that are superior (and certainly, don’t hesitate to recommend them to me), but for my purposes, Plex has provided much of what I’ve been looking for when it comes to having a home jukebox that I can access from, essentially, anywhere.

I have an old Mac mini — running an M1 chip, the first stage of Apple’s own chips, which are now up to M5 — that I purchased used on eBay. I can easily drag MP3s to it via a home network, and those files are then automatically, almost instantly, processed by Plex, and added to a searchable database. I can then listen to those files from pretty much wherever I want. There’s a Plex app on my laptop and the television, and there’s one on my phone that works great. The phone’s app even shows up in the car’s dashboard, so I can listen there. (The image up top is a screenshot from my phone, an iPhone 13 Pro, the first iPhone I ever owned, and which may be due for an upgrade.)

Could Plex do what it does better? Sure. Does moving files sometimes get clogged up in ways I don’t understand? Yes. But eventually it works.Do .wav files in particular tend to get screwy when it comes to metadata, splintering albums into odd little multiple sub-albums? Unfortunately, yes, in which case I find converting them into another format does the trick.
Does Plex’s emphasis on video make it feel like the audio services are vestigial? Kinda. Yeah.Do publicists and musicians generally share audio that doesn’t even have metadata? Yes, but complaining is sort of obnoxious on my part, since I’m getting the music for free.
Does the system every once in a while require a software update that I’ve yet to sort out how to manage when I’m not at home? Yes, but not that often.
What’s next? I suspect I am not making the most of Plex, and I need to spend more time on whatever Reddits, and Discords, and etc.’s where Plex heavy users congregate.

Whenever I ponder these issues, I remind myself that it wasn’t terribly long ago that I had to deal with the fact that for a given artist, I might have LPs, and tape cassettes, and CDs, and 7″ singles, and EPs, not to mention box sets and odd formats, and I never had a system that let me organize those in a meaningful way. I just accepted the scenario as the way things were. Back in the late 1990s, when I first had a Palm Pilot, I kept a database of my album collection on it so that I could refer to the list when I went to record stores. Those memories help me maintain some perspective given whatever modern hassles I now experience.

I still occasionally buy physical music media, but not all that often. And I subscribe to one streaming service, YouTube Music, which I selected because it came free with ad-free YouTube. I’ve considered using another streaming service, perhaps Tidal or Apple, but can’t quite rationalize paying for another one when YouTube works fine.

Scratch Pad: Shazam, Candy, Onigiri

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.

▰ I love when you Shazam the music in a movie and it tells you the name of the cue in the score

▰ Based on recent personal experience, I would not recommend putting your AirPods case next to your Tic Tacs

▰ Been playing “dual Oblique Strategies” cards each morning. Here’s a sample set:

“Distorting time”

“The inconsistency principle”

▰ When the cover of the ancient paperback you’re reading begins to flake apart, you can make a bookmark of the piece that fell off

▰ A very San Francisco combination of speech-to-text and autocorrect: say “onigiri”; receive “on Geary”

▰ This is the third or fourth year I’ve done the n+1 “bookmatch” reading list questionnaire, and for the first time I received in my “personalized booklist” a book I’ve already read (in fact: two)

▰ I was reading way too many books at the same time, which is how I managed to finish three in one week: Rudy Rucker’s Software (a re-read for something I’m working on), Elmer Kelton’s The Good Old Boys (my second Kelton western this year), and David Greenberg’s biography of John Lewis.

Social Media Hiatus

I try, toward the end of each year, to pause a significant amount of my digital connection activity — social media in particular — and that’ll kick in at the end of Friday, November 14. I’ll be back at it around the start of January.

And if it seems unnecessary to announce such a thing, I’ll just say, from extensive personal experience, that skipping out on posting for an long period of time unintentionally invites a bunch of people to check in to see if you’re ok.

Surveillance Nocturne

I associate the sqsl account on YouTube as a demo zone for the always intriguing app output of seqsual.com. The seqsual product line consists of fascinating, design-forward, task-specific iPad apps for music-making. These include controllers, sequencers, and sample players. But this video is something different. Unless I’ve missed a detail, none of the synthesizer modules employed here — all hardware — are related to the seqsual catalog. (I do recognize this gear from another a video, one for the seqsual app Canvas, which interacts with physical modular synths, but that isn’t in use here.) This apparatus is a whole other realm, drawn from other music instrument manufacturers, and what’s happening is a delirious frenzy of signal swapping, all glitched and stuttered — a surveillance nocturne, as it were. Maybe it’s a hint at an upcoming seqsual release. The gestural reuse of existing sonic material certainly taps into seqsual’s overall activity. Great stuff, in any case. (I believe the name of the software developer, who I think is based in Finland, is Michal Macura, who also goes by Miso.)

Disquiet Junto Project 0724: Work It

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 0724: Work It
The Assignment: The year’s almost over. Do that thing you’ve been meaning to do.

This week’s project is timely and open-ended. The year’s almost over. Do that thing you’ve been meaning to do.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0724” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0724-work-it/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, November 17, 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 724th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Work It — The Assignment: The year’s almost over. Do that thing you’ve been meaning to do — at https://disquiet.com/0724/.

Julian Lage in Repose

As a longtime admirer of the guitarist Julian Lage, I’ve only wanted more from him in one area: more of him doing less. His is such a prodigious talent that, even with the casualness he emanates, even given his ease with his fellow players, his performances can sound not so much ornate or busy as, at some point, what might be described as additive, like an extra layer (or two) of complexity is eventually introduced where space might have provided another way to explore the given material.

Now comes “Opal,” the first track off a forthcoming full-length album, Scenes from Above, delivering exactly this sort of purposeful spareness — and wow does it deliver. The album, due out from Blue Note in late January 2026, features Lage’s new group: a quartet with keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder, and drummer Kenny Wollesen. The plainly stated melody at the heart of “Opal” never goes into overdrive. Where Lage might earlier have expanded on themes at length, here he strips them back and lets them enter a state of repose. He takes pauses, and not for another member to solo, but for the substrate of the piece to be given room and time. There are eloquent pauses and muted refrains.

The first single from Scenes from Above, “Opal” is up on streaming services, and better yet there is live video version, which is even less embellished than the album take, lacking the bits of fractured piano, and lingering instead on Medeski’s near-subliminal organ. Up above is the live video take, and here is the album version: