Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 200
March 6, 2021
twitter.com/disquiet: Autoplay, Debris, Green Shoots
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 of time progressed. The subjects are another map of the same territory.
▰ Making dumplings is my favorite new weekend activity. Made a batch on Saturday, froze 40 or so, and just boiled these for lunch.
▰ When writing email, I put M at the bottom to sign off. Email lingers in abandoned tabs or the drafts folder before I finish. Often the M trails offscreen when I go back to revise. I might “M” an email four or more times. I might not notice until after I hit send.
M
M
M
M
M
▰ Got the new John Pham comic and it was instantly the most beautiful thing in my home.
▰ It’s not lost on me that I ordered two synthesizer modules designed for maximized slowness (collectively they’re called Sloths, and I got the Apathy and Torpor, the third being Inertia) from Australia, so the longest waveform of all is the arc of the package’s journey to my home.
▰ Tired: The Anxiety of Influence
Wired: Laptop stand
▰ Finished season 1 of Wisting and recognized that when watching a subtitled show in a language I don’t know, when I first pick up an episode where I left off, I’m surprised it’s not in English: In my brain, the accent of the speaker and the words in the captions have merged. (That’s in contrast with, say, Shetland, which is a subtitled show in a language I reportedly know but in this case don’t remotely understand.)
▰ 1974, Robert Fripp: “the attributes of the new world: small, mobile, independent, and intelligent units”
2021, 2HP Modular:
When Fripp spoke of a “small, mobile, independent, and intelligent unit” he meant himself, following the (in retrospect temporary) end of King Crimson. As he put it at the time: “instead of King Crimson, you’re now getting me.”
Now instead of him, get a few millimeters of tech.
▰ On the one hand, the interface on this podcast publishing tool makes me feel like it’s 2005. On the other hand, that would mean 2020 never happened.
▰ I love a good waveform. This is from the Google Recorder app’s new web interface.
▰ Debris, episode 1: very X-Files (though more straight-faced), fairly Fringe (minus the humor), so far no evidently sonic clues, but given the subgenre provenance it seems inevitable.
▰ AI is everything we don’t yet recognize as AI:
ELIZA just repeated my words.
Netflix just sifted what I dig.
Waze just game-theoried a fast way home.
Google Docs just guessed my sentence.
The AI-seeing quantum consciousness just extrapolated evolution across the metaverse.
▰ Thursday night
▰ It’s not even 8am (in California), and Bandcamp emails have already surpassed Netflix stream.
▰ Sonic realism doesn’t especially concern me, but I was watching TV¹ last night. Two investigators entered a classic storage room with shelves of (empty, brand new) “evidence” boxes, and all I could think was this room wouldn’t sound this way if those boxes had anything in them. Part of it was, I think, that a show about investigating does, to some degree, prime its viewers to pay attention. In a better show, the fact that the room sounded that way would itself be a clue. Here, however, it was just production sloppiness.
¹After working, reading a ton, writing over my daily quota, exercising, making dinner, doing the dishes, and practicing guitar, so leave it be, you TV-haters. :)
▰ That thing where you have a nrw computwe kweboard and you;re stikk ajustinh to it evem though it;s the sane layout as yout prevopis keyboarf
▰ Green shoots
▰ Another reason to hate autoplay. The album that YouTube Music decided to play a split second after Prong’s Beg to Differ ended was easily twice as freakin’ loud.
March 5, 2021
Drumcorps’ Glitch-Mediated Metal
To say this isn’t ambient would be an understatement, and it’s noted here simply because I veer less and less in my writing about music from the quiet zone, whether unnatural or natural or hybrid environments. So, yeah, don’t sit too close to your speakers, and attenuate that volume if you’re using headphones. This is, on a Friday, exactly what I needed. It’s Drumcorps hitting hard with not just his trademark glitched-up drum’n’bass-mediated metal, but the raw thing, as well. It’s RIYL your fond memories of Prong, Slayer, Fugazi, and Godflesh processed by Max Headroom’s digital-native grandkid. The first track is a trick, a sleight of ear, in which the metal starts off without the seams showing, cut and plastered so suddenly that it could be mistaken for (heck, maybe it is) simply a break-neck live performance by someone capable of playing back in realtime what we once craved software to accomplish for us. Either way, the realism soon enough fades in favor of the computer-addled automatic mash-up that Drumcorps is so good at.
It’s interesting how songs like Prince’s “Dance On” and Prong’s “Prime Cut” (prime aesthetic examples to me of human-machine music interface) once seemed so intense, and now don’t. They broke norms at their time, but they’re more (easy) listenable now, the tension gone. What’s great about Drumcorps is it has some of the intensity those songs had when I first heard them. And he’s been at it a long time, and still keeps it fresh.
Drumcorps is Aaron Spectre, originally from Massachusetts and now based in Amsterdam. More at drumcorps.co.
March 4, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0479: Truck Radio Rain
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 8, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 4, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0479: Truck Radio RainThe Assignment: Locate three sound sources and make something with them.
Step 1: Locate online (freesound.org, for example) or record by yourself the following three sounds: a vehicle driving speedily, static between radio stations, and rain.
Step 2: Make an original piece of music using those three sounds. Do what you want with them, but only use those three sounds.
Background: “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating,” John Cage said in his 1937 lecture, “The Future of Music: Credo.” He continued: “The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sound effects, but as musical instruments.” In this week’s Disquiet Junto project, we take the proposition literally.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0479” (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 “disquiet0479” (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-0479-truck-radio-rain/
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 8, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 4, 2021.
Length: The length is up to you. Yes, 4’33” is a not inappropriate length.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0479” 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 479th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Truck Radio Rain (The Assignment: Locate three sound sources and make something with them) — 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-0479-truck-radio-rain/
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 janwillemsen, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
March 3, 2021
This Is What It Sounds Like When Dunes Groan
George Vlad reports from the desert of Namibia, where he recorded this hour of what sand dunes sound like. He identifies the locations as Dune 45 and the Skeleton Coast, and explains that the audio was taped both above- and belowground. The extended length of the document suits Vlad’s experience, which he says involves the ears adjusting over time to the environment and recognizing detail that at first is invisible:
“Spend a little time letting your ears become accustomed to the sparse soundscape though. After a few hours you’ll start hearing more and more detail where previously there seemed to be none. There’s a constant low frequency energy caused by the movement of air and sometimes by the sand dune itself resonating. The wind ebbs and flows at various speeds, occasionally spraying sand on to the hard crust of the sand dune. The insects flying by offer a sense of scale and immediacy.”
Two thirds of the recording was accomplished with microphones designed for use underwater, what are called hydrophones, here pushed deep into the sand. The result is, as he notes, often “abstract,” the wind muted at the surface, and the audio less immediately identifiable. Where above there is air and texture, below there is an ever-threatening churn, what Vlad likens to a “groan.” On his website, mindful-audio.com, he explains that these are a subset of audio captured at almost a dozen sites around the country.
Audio posted at George Vlad’s YouTube channel. He’s based in Guildford, England.
Above and Below the Dunes
George Vlad reports from the desert of Namibia, where he recorded this hour of what sand dunes sound like. He identifies the locations as Dune 45 and the Skeleton Coast, and explains that the audio was taped both above- and belowground. The extended length of the document suits Vlad’s experience, which he says involves the ears adjusting over time to the environment and recognizing detail that at first is invisible:
“Spend a little time letting your ears become accustomed to the sparse soundscape though. After a few hours you’ll start hearing more and more detail where previously there seemed to be none. There’s a constant low frequency energy caused by the movement of air and sometimes by the sand dune itself resonating. The wind ebbs and flows at various speeds, occasionally spraying sand on to the hard crust of the sand dune. The insects flying by offer a sense of scale and immediacy.”
Two thirds of the recording was accomplished with microphones designed for use underwater, what are called hydrophones, here pushed deep into the sand. The result is, as he notes, often “abstract,” the wind muted at the surface, and the audio less immediately identifiable. Where above there is air and texture, below there is an ever-threatening churn, what Vlad likens to a “groan.” On his website, mindful-audio.com, he explains that these are a subset of audio captured at almost a dozen sites around the country.
Audio posted at George Vlad’s YouTube channel. He’s based in Guildford, England.
March 2, 2021
Sound Ledger¹ (Atypical Speech, Tokyo Noise, Virtual Synths)
7.5: The number of people, in millions, living in the U.S. who have difficulty using their voices.
30: The percentage rise in Tokyo noise complaints to police between March and April 2020, after schools were closed due to the pandemic.
2,217: The number of free synthesizer modules (out of 2,504 total, the others requiring a one-time fee per user account) in the module library of the free VCV Rack virtual emulation of a modular synthesizer (vcvrack.com). Other modules are available outside the library, as well.
▰ ▰ ▰
¹Footnotes: Voices: wsj.com. Tokyo: nytimes.com. VCV: vcvrack.com.
Originally published in the March 1, 2021, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet).
Magenta Haze
If you’re familiar with the work of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, then the color alone of Dave Seidel’s video is a dead giveaway right from the start. The dreamy magenta is the duo’s signature color, a common theme in their wardrobe and installations alike. Here the magenta is a pale shadow cast on Seidel’s equipment as he unveils ream after ream of raga-like drones. The performance is titled “For LMY and MZ” (note the initials), and he explains in an accompanying text that it draws inspiration from some central works of theirs. This is both deeply beautiful and deep work, the beading, undulating patterns shifting and cycling in slow motion.
This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music. Video originally posted to Seidel’s YouTube page. More from Seidel (aka Mysterybear) at mysterybear.net.
March 1, 2021
Reading Waveforms
I spent a lot of time over the weekend editing audio and I never got sick of looking at waveforms. If anything, these guides for my work became distractions from my work. This particular image was barely a blip in a lengthy expanse of signal and noise. It signified a near-silence that I felt was necessary to silence further. There were other silences, as well, silences of differing sorts, clusters of which came to represent shared characteristics, subsets, a typology of silences. If individually the beautiful images distracted me, the patterns they suggested in combination helped me get my work done, served as guideposts: an atlas of the quiet. I could tell which silence, for example, was room silence and which was still-mumbling human silence. I noticed that “um”s looked like goldfish, and that when someone said the same word twice, the second time somehow could overlap the first, as if for an instant they were saying two words at once — well, one word, the end and the start of it simultaneously, a snake eating its own tail. If words were repeated as a verbal tick, I could sometimes tell from looking at them which was right. Not which was right objectively, but which was right in the context of the words around it. The silences were especially interesting. There’d be a silence between words, and I’d cut it in half, and it’d still feel longer than half the original length. I’d cut that in half, and it continued to feel long. Trim and trim, and still I had to cut hard to get it right. It’s as if the measure of silence between words isn’t about length of time at all. It’s about a particular threshold, under which is natural speech, and beyond which is noticeable hesitation. And in the waveform I could see the hesitation. And in the editing tool, I could excise it. And the most beautiful waveforms — some spare, elegant curves, others little squashed and distended curlicues — were invariably the ones representing audio that never made the final cut.
February 28, 2021
Disquietude Podcast Episode 0004
This is the fourth 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 six tracks of music are featured with the permission of the individual artists. Below is the structure of the episode with time codes for the tracks, the spoken annotation of the tracks, interviews with two of the musicians (Jeff Rona and Patricia Wolf), and a brief essay about voice assistants.
02:07 Belly Full of Stars’ “Pattern 5”
06:20 Christian Carrière’s “Sacred Acoustics T004”
08:02 Femi Shonuga-Fleming’s “Ambient Live Looping Drone with Eurorack and Elektron Octatrack”
15:50 Jeff Rona’s “Vapor 6”
23:37 Jostijn Ligtvoet’s “Twilight and Fire”
32:02 Patricia Wolf’s “Snow Falling on Rough Horsetail and Dead Oak Leaves”
33:28 Annotation Begins
35:25 Patricia Wolf Interview
43:23 Jeff Rona Interview
46:11 “OK, Giggle”
48:11 Credits
49:10 Closing Music
49:36 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.
February 27, 2021
twitter.com/disquiet: Mars, Chernobyl, Nothing
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, especially these days, when a week can feel both like a year and like nothing whatsoever has happened or changed.
▰ Most excited I’ve ever been in my life to hear a fluid pump
▰ Judging by the moon’s brightness tonight, it has heard the news about Mars and it’s determined to remind us it exists.
▰ It’s not a “todo list.” It’s a “you’ll log.”
Bwa ha ha ha.
Yeah, a bit stir crazy today.
▰ RIP, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021). Impossible for me to encapsulate what he and City Lights have meant to this city, and around the world.
▰ Just happened to see my automated Tuesday tweet right at noon (the one mentioning that the Outdoor Public Warning System siren is on hiatus for repair), and experienced the strangely intense absence of sound that is Tuesday at noon right now in San Francisco, if you’d long since become accustomed to the Tuesday noon siren. It is like a vacuum, a vertiginous void.
▰ Not gonna bother to try to screenshot it, given Netflix’s arduous restrictions. I’ll just note it’s delightful when Benedetta Vitali comments in Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat that listening to the dough-rolling process is an essential and pleasure-rich phase of pasta-making.
▰ On the one hand, I am a functioning adult.
On the other hand, I more than occasionally type things such as “thonk plinky” into my browser’s search engine.
(Don’t worry, it’s fully SFW.)
▰ When I first saw this, it made me think of those sad tadpoles that had the misfortune of growing up near Chernobyl. Now I’m wondering about balanced tadpoles versus unbalanced tadpoles, and the impact of radiation on granular synthesis.
▰ 7:41am sounds: buzz of modest traffic a few blocks away; muffled hum of person talking on phone across the street; thud-infused whir of car passing house; and the house, as it warms, producing crackles, like nothing so much as a piece of paper gently being crumpled
▰ If there’s a badge for falling asleep while practicing guitar and then waking up a split second or two later fairly certain that you continued to play while asleep then I unlocked that badge last night.
▰ 1968 Apple Records
1976 Apple Computers
2001 Apple iPod
1992 Nothing Records
2020 Nothing (.tech)
202? Nothing Something
▰ The cover image of this week’s Disquiet Junto project, 0478, is by the late Jeffrey Melton, a very early participant in the Disquiet Junto whose photos remain on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
▰ – – – mental palate-cleansing tweet – – –
▰ And on that note, have a great weekend. I just may be able to get a new episode of the Disquietude podcast out. We shall see. The tracks are more or less set, and I even may include audio from one or more of the musicians talking about their work. Baby steps.
