Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 215
October 31, 2020
Change of Venue
Disquiet.com has changed hosting companies as of yesterday afternoon, October 30. If you notice anything that’s gone missing or haywire as a result of the transfer, please contact me. Thanks. So far, it seems to be running faster.
October 30, 2020
Modular Renewal
Pretty sure this is the first time I’ve repurchased a synthesizer module I had previously owned and sold. When I sold it I was working entirely in mono, but then my fledgling experimentation with percussion got me interested in stereo, and lately I’ve been applying stereo to things other than just percussion. Big learning experience.
A 2020 Montréal Time Capsule
Time Capsule is a new compilation album intended as a “DIY memory box” of tracks from the Montréal music community. The variety is quite wide, with several pieces standing out in particular: Joni Void’s “Triste Marker” combines a mechanized shuffle beat with shifting drones, the source audio apparently recorded early one morning at the city’s Jacques Cartier Bridge. Markus Floats’ “So Far” moves mallet-instrument tones across the stereo spectrum. The rhythm gains speed just as a slower, much more patient tonal field joins in, the combination leading to a tense, rewarding sense of balance. And saxophonist Ida Toninato’s “Organs” is drone-like music that’s almost orchestral in its scope at times, often as threatening as a horror score.
Also on the compilation are tracks from Stefan Christoff, Skin Tone, Maya Kuroki, Sarah Pagé, Joël Lavoie, YlangYlang, and Sam Shalabi.
Album available at everydayago.bandcamp.com.
October 29, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0461: Goldilocks Zone
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 2, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 29, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0461: Goldilocks Zone
The Assignment: Navigate a sonic space between the hospitable and the inhospitable.
Step 1: Familiarize yourself with the concept of the Goldilocks Zone. In interstellar terms, this is the zone of planetary orbit that, to oversimplify things, is neither too hot nor too cold to support life.
Step 2: Record a piece of music that moves back and forth between two inhospitable zones before finding one, à la Goldilocks and the Three Bears, that is just right.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0461” (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 “disquiet0461” (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-0461-goldilocks-zone/
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 2, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 29, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0461” 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 461st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Goldilocks Zone (The Assignment: Navigate a sonic space between the hospitable and the inhospitable), 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-0461-goldilocks-zone/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project is from Wikipedia, and use thanks to a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Estimated…
October 28, 2020
“Parallel Normal”
Another experiment with electric guitar loops. The main difference between today’s and yesterday’s (“Passing Waves”) is that yesterday’s was recorded serial, so anything coming from the first loop also appeared in the second loop. That gave it a certain density, but, well, it also gave it a certain density. This was recorded in parallel, meaning whichever looper was recording at a given moment was only recording what was being played by the guitar, not what happened to be coming out of the other looper. This means the density took quite a while longer to achieve, but also that the individual segments are much more distinct, even after density has accrued. Also, the loops here are quite a bit longer. Recorded from stereo speakers into a phone (yesterday was from a mono amp), though I’m not sure if the separation is particularly apparent. Major noise reduction in Adobe Audition, and a tiny amount of reverb.
Loraine James and the Art of the Remix A/B
There’s nothing quite like a remix A/B, one of my favorite forms of listening pleasure: comparing the before and after when one artist reworks another. It’s all the better if the experience of the transition is reversed: if the original track is unfamiliar, and you hear it only after first witnessing a remix of it by someone whose work you already admire.
Such is the case with British club/IDM musician Loraine James, who has grabbed the track “Lincoln” from the quintet Lunch Money Life (off their new album, Immersion Chamber), and as if with so much Silly Putty reshaped it to match her own vision.
The original is exceptional groove-heavy electronic jazz. The band (Stewart Hughes, drums; Sean Keating, guitar; Luke Mills-Pettigrew, bass; Jack Martin, electronics and trombone; Spencer Martin, electronics and saxophone) finds new life in the genre, the key being how reworked the music sounds even in its first iteration. The track breaks frequently as it moves from phase to phase, different instruments taking prominence, digital effects adding glitches, echoes, and other treatments in unpredictable maneuvers.
And that’s before Loraine James takes hold of it. She removes any concessions to a live-band vibe, in favor of something that is very much in her own mode. She locates especially tasty rhythmic elements from the original and sets them on repeat. The tweaks she introduces then gather a more immediate sense of remove from the source material — and like so much sugar on top, bits of pachinko-parlor melodies get drizzled on throughout. And because it’s James, the track must come with a challenge. Eventually that dependable rhythm is encouraged to fall apart, to flail and jitter like Max Headroom after a particularly wild LAN party. In the process, James both helps the listener locate what makes the Lunch Money Life original so strong, and also manages to produce something that is very much her own.
Album and remix originally posted at lunchmoneylife.bandcamp.com.
October 27, 2020
“Passing Waves”
Separate lines on two different loopers, sometimes recording the same thing, generally not, all notes played on guitar, all with especially slow attack accomplished with the guitar’s volume knob, most notes closing with a natural decay. Recorded to phone from amp, live in the room. Post-recording: harsher high-register overtones removed with extreme prejudice in Adobe Audition, with some reverb added because why not?
Track posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
When Jo Johnson Met Hilary Robinson
Antenna Echoes by Jo Johnson & Hilary Robinson
Jo Johnson and Hilary Robinson’s album Antenna Echoes has its origins in chance and error: a meeting in a shared neighborhood, and a broken piano. The result of those external influences is a Covid-era collaboration of deeply interior music, all cavernous echoes and warm feedback. Piano is the near constant through the album’s three tracks (“Maze Echoes,” “Antenna Gain,” “Fresh Air and the Usual Low-grade Hedonism”), but it would be inaccurate to claim its presence necessarily grounds the plush synthesizer and pervasive sound-design drones. Quite the contrary, what makes the piano so central is just how ambiguous is the place where its familiar physicality meets the ethereal context in which it is heard. The piano bleeds into the broader sonic construct of the recording, in part due to its repair status. As explained in the album’s liner note, the piano suffers from “a faulty pedal mechanism, which sustained the notes long after they were played.” Or perhaps not suffers. More to the point it is, in fact, a blessing. As one Bandcamp listener said, “Please don’t ever fix that piano.”
The record, which is available at jojohnson.bandcamp.com, was released in early July. More from Johnson at soundcloud.com/werkhouse and twitter.com/werkhouse. More from Robinson at about.me/hilaryrobinson.
October 26, 2020
2,000 Days of #DailyBleeps
Todd Webb has, over the past roughly 2,000 days, posted roughly 2,000 #dailybleeps tracks online. They have populated his YouTube and Twitter accounts, but their primary home on the internet range has been Instagram. There, bite-size videos playfully themed around squash (the fruit, not the sport), and going outside (as determined by an Oblique Strategies card), and frogs, among numerous other topics, feature micro-compositions of what feel like the sonic equivalent of a zine aesthetic: either minor-key chipper, or up-tempo maudlin, and utterly delightful. And like all good things, they must come to an end. Webb will post his final daily bleep this coming Wednesday, October 28, two days from now.
Here’s a recent one, the theme of which is fog on the water. Gurgling beats provide the score for a view over the side of a road and into a deep bright miasma from which the track takes its title:
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Todd Webb (@toddbotdotcom) on Oct 24, 2020 at 6:32pm PDT
Some 40 of Todd’s daily bleeps fill out the the second of a two-CD Oahu set released last year. A personal favorite of mine is track 15, “Not That I Mind (Simple Sounds 10),” which is like if Michael Nyman had been commissioned to record a lilting gamelan interstitial cue for a Nintendo video game. (The other half of Oahu, the first five tracks, collectively titled “Slow Waves,” are built from “mysterious sounds” from Deerhoof’s John Dieterich.)
Slow Waves & Simple Sounds by Oahu
The record is a great object, but arguably the best way to appreciate Webb’s daily bleeps is in situ, as tidy little audio-visual spectacles on Instagram. And since Halloween is just a few days away, here, in closing, is one about “tree skeletons”:
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Todd Webb (@toddbotdotcom) on Oct 9, 2020 at 6:20pm PDT
More from Webb, a cartoonist and illustrator, at toddbot.com. He lives in Virginia. (Full disclosure: I edited a comic of his in an early issue of the children’s magazine Illustoria.)
October 25, 2020
Current Listens: Halo Live + Aphex-ish Mansell
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.)
▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰
NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases
▰ Mike Weis translates grief into the beautiful, moving 49 Days (Music for a Transition), two quarter-hour tracks of bell field recordings pushed nearly beyond recognition. This is a record I hope to get around to writing about more soon, but I wanted to get a mention in sooner still, because I’ve been returning to it daily.
49 days (Music For A Transition) by Mike Weis
▰ Lush and ambient all the way through, this 20-minute live solo performance by Laurel Halo was recorded at the Monastery of São Martinho de Tibães near Braga, Portugal.
▰ Fahmi Mursyid, based in Bandung, Indonesia, ekes ripe atmospheres from a tape loop. The actual original tape is priced at $99. Four tracks derived from it comprise the album Satu, the digital version of which is set at whatever price the buyer wishes to pay.
▰ There’s a lot of beauty in Clint Mansell’s score to Ben Wheatley’s new film version of Rebecca, much of it devoted to expertly old-school thriller grandeur. One standout track, “Côte d’Azur,” is to Aphex Twin’s solo piano “Avril 14” what Wheatley might have hoped his film would be to Hitchcock’s Rebecca: alternately hinting at and veering from the original, and offering its own pleasures entirely.
▰ Also, covered with a bit more depth: Fadi Tabbal’s fifth solo album, Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions, + the Yumi Iwaki / Ryan J Raffa split Living Distances.
