Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 201
February 26, 2021
Livestream Reviewstream
I live-tweeted this livestream this evening. Here it is, lightly edited:
Lesley Flanigan is performing live (at 8pm East Coast, 5pm here in “we make the future but we live in the past” San Francisco).
I highly recommend tuning in. She’s looping her vocals, creating beading layers of choral intensity.
There are also sine wave generators in the mix.
I noticed she’d donned headphones at the start, despite the space, Roulette, being devoid of a live audience.
Explanation from the video note: “Though Flanigan will be performing live at Roulette for this event, there will be no sound amplified within the performance space. Why should there be? There is no audience to hear it.”
Also: “Playing with the closeness, directness and stereo image of the headphone space, Flanigan brings the intimacy of performing alone with her headphones to the solo listener at home.” (A livestream that is cognizant of its livestreamness.)
I love drones. All the more, I love music that takes drone as the foundation, and grows from there. That’s what Flanigan is up to here, singing atop and amid the hovering clouds she has patiently summoned.
The beading has hardened, has been focused into something pulse-like now, the minimalist of minimal techno, underlying some ancient folk hymn.
This may not be the exact model of audio generator she is employing, but it’s close. She’s using two of them, and adjusting during the performance.
I always say Twitter is my public notepad. This may be the most true that statement has been. Aside from Google image search, these are the sorta notes I’d be taking in a notepad if we were all sitting in the audience. And you might complain about the scratch of my pen on paper.
And now the glitch is on.
And now the glitch is off, supplanted by a hybrid of classic minimalism and early polyphony.
Presumably, roughly 40 minutes in, it’s coming to a close now, though perhaps not. The density has softened considerably, reduced virtually to a hum, maybe just one vocal line and one oscillator now.
This is so beautiful, both rapturous and restrained, deliriously so in both cases.
These aren’t exactly the notes I’d be writing down in a live auditorium, because they’re in full sentences and have fewer spelling errors, and are entirely legible. But this is an interesting experience, using my public notepad as a public notepad during the performance.
I’ve reviewed several livestreams during the pandemic. I just submitted a review for publication in The Wire this week. This, though, is the first reviewstream I’ve written.
Speaking of spelling errors, here’s a circuit diagram of a progenitor of the brand of audio generator, a solid state oscillator, that Lesley Flanigan employed a pair of during the concert.
And here’s one more shot from the ancient manual, this one of the “waveshapes” produced by the audio generator, of the sort Flanigan used in the show.
And that’s it. The concert has ended. And thanks to the magic of livestreams, I can immediately go do some dishes without having to bother with public transportation.
February 25, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0478: Collage of Collages
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, February 29, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 25, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0478: Collage of CollagesThe Assignment: Make a collage that will become part of a larger collage.
Step 1: Create a “musical collage,” however you might define it, likely using the equivalent of cut and paste. When doing so, consider the sense in which your collage might itself become part of a subsequent collage.
Step 2: If you’d like your piece excerpted for a broadcast on the Austrian community radio show Kopfkino (translated: “cinema in the head,” and also available as a podcast) by Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka, make sure your track is set for download when you post it.
Background: Margarethe has offered to produce an online segment in collaboration with the Disquiet Junto. The theme of the Kopfkino episode will be “collage.” The episode will itself be a collage of tracks produced in this week’s Junto project.
More on Kopfkino at: https://cba.fro.at/series/kopfkino
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0478” (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 “disquiet0478” (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-0478-collage-of-collages/
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, February 29, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 25, 2021.
Length: The length is up to you. (With collages, relative density is arguably as important as length.)
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0478” 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 478th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Collage of Collages (The Assignment: Make a collage that will become part of a larger collage.) — at:
The project is a collaboration with the radio show Kopfkino, initiated by Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka. More on Kopfkino at:
https://cba.fro.at/series/kopfkino
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-0478-collage-of-collages/
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 the late Jeffrey Melton (a very early Junto participant), and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
February 24, 2021
A Pair of Sloths
Got labels prepped for when the modules arrive
February 23, 2021
Live, if Mechanized
It’s simply plastic, wood, and metal, with the midday world just outside a clear plate of glass, and yet the sound is that of a welcoming place, perhaps a fictional one, perhaps one in a sonic terrarium, structured just right, so as to have the desired effect — peaceful, inviting, blood-pressure-reducing — but a place nonetheless. This is Tobias Karlehag’s 12-minute automated recording, a synthesizer set to work and not once intruded upon by human hands. There’s depth here, tiny sounds echoing space while in the near we hear textured washes and melancholy tones. Though this is a live, if mechanized, performance, it could virtually be a still image were there not occasional bits of movement: a passerby, a light going on and off and on again, a small display dimly registering change. But change happens, in the music and the visual alike, more often than it might initially appear.
This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music. Video originally posted on YouTube. More from Tobias Karlehag, who is based in Gothenburg, Sweden, at tobiaskarlehag.tumblr.com and instagram.com/tobias_karlehag.
February 22, 2021
OK, Giggle
Voice AI mini-nightmares are common enough to be generic, yet each can be a marvel when experienced firsthand. I was driving, using Google Maps to advise me where to go. (I say “advise” because Google Maps seems to think unprotected left turns are a breeze.) Then this happened:
While driving, I had an audiobook playing. At some point, the voice actor / narrator said someone giggled. That was the word: “giggle.” For whatever reason (can’t imagine why), the voice AI in the phone experienced this word as a trigger, paused the audiobook, and asked me what I wanted help with. The AI eventually got the clue that I hadn’t summoned it, and the phone returned to the audiobook. One great thing about this system is when the audiobook came back, it had backed up a bit. Except (yeah, you see this coming, ’cause you’re smarter than the AI) what happened was:
It had rewound, so to speak, to just prior to word “giggle” so the whole thing repeated: The AI thought it was a call to attention, asked how it could make my life easier, and then I waited. Then it got the hint and the audiobook started all over: giggle, prompt, silence, repeat.
giggle, prompt, silence, rewind
giggle, prompt, silence, rewind
giggle, prompt, silence, rewind
giggle, prompt, silence, rewind
giggle, prompt, silence, rewind
giggle, prompt, silence, rewind
giggle, prompt, silence …
Ok, maybe not that many times.
I kept thinking: maybe at some point it’ll rewind a little less far, and this won’t happen. Nope. So, I got, yeah, a tad frustrated. I took slow, deep breaths. I reflected on the glories of our age. I pondered Roko’s Basilisk. And then I said, angrily, “I can’t stand this.”And then Google Maps said it could help. Having misheard (miss-machine-listened-to, or is it machined-listen?) the word “stand,” it offered to reroute me to a dry cleaner that could deal with the “stain” I had mentioned.
At least when the audiobook started up again, somehow it had jumped past the giggle, so I was out of that three-second Groundhog Day. As for me, I’m still learning to laugh at the situation.
February 21, 2021
Current Favorites: Synth, Cello, Code
A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.
▰ Jostijn Ligtvoet’s “Twilight and Fire” combines live cello with synthesizer accompaniment, the blinking lights matching his four strings drone for drone.
▰ I caught Chiho Oka’s set during the recent No Bounds Festival event (a livestream), hosted by algorave figure Alex McLean, and several of the pieces she performed then are on her forthcoming album, Manipulating Automated Manipulated Automation. The record isn’t due out until February 28, but four tracks are already streaming, and they evidence the combination of rigor, humor, and pathos she brings to her work.
Manipulating Automated Manipulated Automation by Chiho Oka
▰ Omri Cohen’s Meditation Spores is deep-synthesis ambient, brimming with digital artifice, and vibrant in its doleful melodic lines and tonal processing.
February 20, 2021
twitter.com/disquiet: Slough, pentatonic, Stravinsky
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.
▰ Yes, I’m enjoying the new Mick Herron novel, Slough House (seventh in the Slow Horses series).
▰ Close-up of the speaker grate on the back of a battery-operated alarm clock. The speaker grate is 7 millimeters in diameter. (Insert grating joke here.)
▰ As someone who lived in New Orleans for four years, I appreciate that Mutable Instruments released a new module named Beads on Fat Tuesday.
▰ Today in guitar class pentatonic education. (Jeff Rona joked in reply: “A potentially great companion to my upcoming book ‘5 Things I Like About the Pentatonic Scale'”)
▰ Alternately alarmed and amused by (while also trying to focus on some still hazy metaphorical meaning to) the idea that it is mid-February 2021 and my phone claims to not recognize this word
▰ Nothing says “frictionless user experience” like a button that reads “Sign up with SAML SSO”
▰ 8:12am sounds: hour and a half in, the house still creaking as it warms; mechanical whir in the distance; interior echo of something a neighbor has dropped; white noise of cars passing in opposite directions (clearly one ignored the stop sign); hum of refrigerator two rooms away
▰ That moment when you’re using an online tool to sign something and the automated signature looks like Ralph Steadman scribbled it while under the weather
▰ “Random method generates the same numbers” is my kinda first thread to read on a music message board in the morning over coffee
▰ Today I learned that the modernist squiggle that’s always featured on the cover of the journal Perspectives of New Music was a scribble by Igor Stravinsky. (And they all look like Alexander Girard sketches to me.)
▰ Favorite Yoko Ono factoid: she was apparently Kobo Abe’s translator the first time he visited America. Happy 88th birthday to her.
▰ The new TV series Debris (starting March 1, at least in the U.S.) looks like someone sneaked in at night and asked me while I was sleeping what I wanna watch once a week. Which means that like Counterpart, Intelligence (the one with Ian Tracey), and Travelers it’ll have a short run. Maybe it’ll last as long as Fringe, which it most resembles.
▰ Just proofread some liner notes I wrote. Very excited for when this physical object is released into the world.
February 19, 2021
Fleming’s Automated Fantasia
Femi Fleming’s is a YouTube channel to keep track of. It’s regularly updated with electronic music that pushes at different areas, some noise, some beat-oriented, a lot of atmospheres. In another era something like this, which falls in the atmosphere zone, might have been titled “Minuet for Cello and Piano,” but the year is 2021 and the available instrumental colors have broadened considerably. So instead, this is “Ambient Live Looping Drone with Eurorack and Elektron Octatrack.” Illuminated by a cathode-ray tube TV set to glitchily stun, the devices do all the work while Fleming remains off camera, having set it up, pressed go, and removed himself from the mise en scène. Dense tones collide like nothing so much as a fantasia of big city traffic, all muted honking and the echo of tall boulevards. It begins and ends suddenly, suggesting both it’s part of a bigger work, and also that the segment is of something automated that Fleming determined showed the overall setup in its best light.
This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music. Video originally posted at YouTube. More from Fleming, a student at RISD, at instagram.com/femifleming.
February 18, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0477: Flying Blind
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, February 22, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 18, 2021.
Tracks will be added to the playlist for the duration of the project.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0477: Flying BlindThe Assignment: Record a piece of music in which some substantial portion is performed without looking.
There is just one step this week.
Step 1: Play something blind. That is to say, record a piece of music in which some substantial portion is performed without looking.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0477” (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 “disquiet0477” (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-0477-flying-blind/
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, February 22, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 18, 2021.
Length: The length is up to you. (You’re closing your eyes, not holding your breath.)
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0477” 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 477th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Flying Blind (The Assignment: Record a piece of music in which some substantial portion is performed without looking.) — 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-0477-flying-blind/
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 Rachel Fox, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
February 17, 2021
Fire or Ice, Peace or Limbo
Patricia Wolf ventured out into the cold of Portland, Oregon, where she lives, and brought some of it back with her. She then located a choice minute and a half, set it to fade in, so as not to shock the listener with a bright hard start, and then to fade out, so as to bring it to a natural-seeming close, and then she uploaded it to her SoundCloud account under the title “Snow Falling on Rough Horsetail and Dead Oak Leaves,” which is as evocative as could be.
Without the title, the crackles might suggest fire. If you’ve settled in for the day, removed from pandemic-era life, the fire or ice of the sound — either one — might provide some comfort, a different background sound ported to the confines of your own home. If, however, you’re suffering the brutal winter that parts of the world are, especially if you’ve lost heat, then the sense of fire could be a mocking illusion, and the sense of ice a cruel reminder of what lurks on the other side of the wall.
In other words, this, to me, placid rendering, this gentle document, might harbor other meanings for other ears. For even nature is a blank slate, framed not just by Wolf’s microphone and editing choices (I must have played it 20 times before I took note of the bird cawing at the beginning), but by our own experiences and circumstances, as well.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/patriciawolf_music. More from Wolf at patriciawolf.bandcamp.com.
