Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 214
November 7, 2020
Friday Night Lights
Electric guitar layers in single Ditto looper, via Fulltone overdrive and HardWire RV-7 reverb, with a few lines played on EBow
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Marc Weidenbaum (@dsqt) on Nov 6, 2020 at 6:51pm PST
November 6, 2020
The Voice of the Beat
In the Basement of 83 Men by Machine Woman
The new Machine Woman album half-tells stories with bits of spoken conversation, slivers of memoir, fragments of verbiage, sometimes as if overheard, often as if directed at the listener, and then as if the listener were, in fact, a close confidant — and sometimes that conversation is buried deep in the album’s sounds themselves. A warped tape of what seems like voice mail opens “Telephone Calls From Milan to New York (Featuring The Nativist).” A garbled anecdote partially explains the subject of a track titled “Man at the Bus Stop.” These voices that permeate In the Basement of 83 Men seep into our heads, so much so that even on the tracks where they’re not as prevalent, the sounds of Machine Woman’s rhythms seem made from voices. A beat on “The End of Last Year Always Be Beautiful” feels like it was shaped from a breathy vowel. A synth on “Frankfurt Glitch Machine” that moves like a broken Slinky toy blurts as if someone were struggling to say something. And quite clearly (at least to my ears), aspects of “Petrol Sounds I Hear Outside My Window” were certainly clipped from spoken language and reworked into another sort of communication, one built on the common language of techno. Percussive ingenuity and a storyteller’s imagination guide this excellent collection.
Album originally released at machinewoman.bandcamp.com. Machine Woman is Anastasia Vtorova, based in Manchester, U.K.
November 5, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0462: Vade in Pace
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, November 9, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 5, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0462: Vade in Pace
The Assignment: Write a short piece of music that gets slower and slower as it proceeds.
Step 1: Consider the way pace (tempo, speed) is experienced, represented, and accomplished in music.
Step 2: Consider the way stasis is experienced, represented, and accomplished in music.
Step 3: Write a short piece of music that gets slower and slower as it proceeds. If possible, have it end with a sense of outright stasis. Fading out is fine, too, certainly.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0462” (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 “disquiet0462” (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-0462-vade-in-pace/
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, November 9, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 5, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0462” 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 462nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Vade in Pace (The Assignment: Write a short piece of music that gets slower and slower as it proceeds), 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-0462-vade-in-pace/
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 Josh Levinger, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (flipped and cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
November 4, 2020
Space for Context
Yesterday I noted a new feature on SoundCloud. Listeners reposting a track from another account can now annotate the repost. That’s great, in that it adds context and may even reduce the number of rote (un-annotated) reposts. However, the space allotted for comments is quite small, just 140 characters, diminishing the utility. Over three years have passed since Twitter acknowledged that length as insufficient, and went ahead and doubled it. Ironically, as the two posts here show, even the explanatory text that SoundCloud itself uses to explain how to comment when reposting is longer than the limit the company has set. It’s 142 characters.
Here’s the pop-up that appears when the feature is introduced to users:
Here’s that announcement text placed (unsuccessfully) into an attempt to repost a fine ambient track from the prolific Kyoto-based musician Michiru Aoyama:
The feature is a great addition to SoundCloud, but a little more space would be helpful. (And, yes, the same could be said for the number of accounts a user is allowed to follow. It remains capped at 2,000.)
November 3, 2020
The Context of SoundCloud Context
There’s a new feature on Soundcloud, the prominent audio streaming and distribution service. Listeners have long been able to “repost” tracks by other users. Now when reposting, they can add a comment. The length is up to 100 characters, even shorter than an old-school tweet, which seems like an esoteric choice, but so be it. Context is always better.
This upgrade correlates with Bandcamp’s long-running feature that let’s a purchaser of a release choose a track and comment on it. Those comments selectively appear on the webpage for the release:
The new SoundCloud repost upgrade also connects to Twitter’s recent tweak that encourages retweeters to add a comment before posting. Again, context is always better.
There was a time when the soundcloud.com/stream page on was the default for a logged-in user. There’s still a /stream page, but the default is the soundcloud.com/discover page, which is a mess: a few things relating to your own listening, followed by endless generic lists, so bad as to make you miss your algorithmic overlord.
This expansion of the repost feature may be a sign that SoundCloud is re-emphasizing /stream, which shows things have been posted (or reposted) by accounts you follow, in simple, reverse-chronological order. If so, it’d be nice to have a toggle option for reposts, because they can clog up /stream. I’ve unfollowed some repost-heavy accounts.
In addition, SoundCloud has grown over the years. What hasn’t grown is the number of accounts you can follow. The number remains capped at 2,000, which is low. SoundCloud also provides no practical tools to efficiently cull the accounts you do follow (like, say, see who hasn’t posted in x number of years). Any time I want to add a new account (I follow 2,000, and am followed by five times that number), I have to first delete one.
All things said, I do hope people take advantage of the new comment option for reposts of tracks on SoundCloud, to provide some framing context for why they’ve reposted. I also hope the new feature leads some repost-happy accounts to chill out a bit.
Postscript: When I first posted this, I neglected to link to the track depicted up top in the screenshot detail. It is “Fog” by Abstract Machines (aka Andrzej Koper
of Wroclaw, Poland): soundcloud.com/abstract-machines.
조용한
It’s always a good day to change your Twitter location to a country where you can’t read the language. Bonus points if it’s an alphabet you find aesthetically pleasing.
I’m riding out the election with my “trends” all in Korean (with the exception of whatever single promoted tweet shows at the top of the list).
November 2, 2020
Mike Dayton Communes with the Void
Exploring the Void by Mike Dayton
In these tense times, a lot of time is spent listening to music that offers the psychic equivalent of palliative care (the ambient material that is the main content of this website), or to music that provides pounding catharsis (Fugazi, Metallica, and Karen O’s cover of Led Zeppelin are always at the ready).
And then there is Mike Dayton’s new album, Exploring the Void, as exemplified by the wandering, swirling morass of synthesizer motion that is the track “Everything Dies Even the Stars.” It is sound in a constant stage of agitation. It is a portrait of the void from which the album takes its title. Elsewhere on the record, the volume, the intensity, the vivid confusion, takes a less direct approach, as with the ebb and flow of “Refracted Diamonds in the Night Sky,” or the echoing percussive shimmers of “The Barren Ice Planet.” None of this music sounds like it aims to comfort, except to the extent that it does: by providing camaraderie, evidence that someone else is processing the unshareable combination of stress, chaos, and solitude of our historical moment into something that is shareable.
Album originally posted at mikedayton.bandcamp.com on Halloween 2020. More from Dayton, who is based in Minneapolis, Minnessotta, at twitter.com/dayton_mike and soundcloud.com/mikejdayton.
November 1, 2020
Current Listens: Recent Retrospect
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. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)
I listened to plenty of new music this week, from Autechre’s surprise Plus to Patricia Wolf’s remix of material from Fadi Tabbal’s new album to ioflow’s ambient workout on the Elektron Digitone, but I wanted to highlight in this edition of Current Editions some music I’ve written about over the past month or so that’s really stuck with me. The emphasis on the new can create a false impression of constant new. Even the recent new can linger in ways that change one’s initial impression, often for the better:
▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰
NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases
▰ The patzr radio art-sound podcast of Jimmy Kipple’s musique concrète (music constructed from field recordings and pre-existing recorded sound) is a font of textural pleasure, especially the recent two-parter. Here’s the second half:
▰ Loraine James’ remix of Lunch Money Life’s “Lincoln” reveals key moments of the source material before artfully falling to deliberately challenging pieces.
▰ Lloyd Cole recorded an economical little album of modular synthesizer music with one little noise source, from which the record takes its name, Dunst, as its focus:
▰ “Suite pour l’invisible” was the first track made available from Ana Roxanne’s forthcoming Because of a Flower album. I’ve gone back and listened frequently. It was followed up by the beat-machine-backed, almost Sade-like “Camille.” The full release, with five additional tracks, comes out on November 13.
October 31, 2020
Grace Notes: Zoom Protip + AI Coughs
Some tweet observations (twitter.com/disquiet) I made over the course of the past week, lightly edited.
▰ Zoom protip: Just imagine it’s a free stream of a David Mamet play being workshopped.
▰ 40 weeks until the 500th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project
▰ Geographic visualization of Wikipedia edits running on a side monitor (service: http://lkozma.net/wpv/)
▰ There’s a lot in Agatha Christie’s novel A Murder Is Announced that could have been written by J.G. Ballard. (That’s intended as a compliment to them both.)
▰ “CD in card wallet packed in outer wallet”
▰ Almost signed off an email “Best from San Franciscos” and wondered if I’d woken up in a Lavie Tidhar or China Miéville novel.
▰ Why, of cough: “an AI model that distinguishes [Covid] asymptomatic people from healthy individuals through forced-cough recordings.” There was news about such a thing back in mid-April, and I had been wondering if anything had come of it. (mit.edu)
▰ 89-96-[]\878uiool;’;’/
*-63+6′-
9-=\g0h12.3/+”
9*-yuiop[]\hjkl;’
nm,./
Your next password is what appears as you wipe off the water you accidentally spilled on your keyboard.
▰ Boarded-up corner store makes the most of the situation
