Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 216
October 24, 2020
Wave Form
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Marc Weidenbaum (@dsqt) on Oct 24, 2020 at 4:42pm PDT
The ocean provides a useful generative sample. The Instagram interface turns it into a loop. (Darn. That’s only the case within Instagram. The embedded version here doesn’t loop. Check it out at instagram.com/dsqt.)
Grace Notes: DeLillo’s Silence + RIP, Kondo
Some tweet observations (twitter.com/disquiet) I made over the course of the past week, lightly edited. I’ll mention: I really enjoy Twitter. There’s a lot wrong with it, but if you mute assiduously, block when necessary, monitor your hours, and stick to a few topics, you can have some great back and forths with people. My refrain about social media: Twitter is where you learn how much you have in common with people you don’t know, and Facebook is where you learn how little you have in common with people you do know.
▰ RIP to the great Toshinori Kondo (December 15, 1948 – October 17, 2020). Sad sad day. The Japanese trumpeter was a master of space and sound, and an essential collaborator of DJ Krush and Bill Laswell, among others. His 1996 collaboration with Krush, Ki-Oku, is a great starting point, as is Nate Chinen’s obituary at npr.org.
▰ It was nice with physical library books, when returning them, to wonder when and by whom they’d next be picked up. With digital ones, it’s nice to return something early, see the waiting list, and know you’ve made someone’s evening somewhere across the city. Or perhaps next door.
▰ It was a foregone conclusion that reading the new Don DeLillo novel digitally would yield meta moments, including his awareness of the inevitability. Still, I was struck to find a wistful phrase about the discontents of over-connectedness evidently highlighted by fellow readers. (And yes, the book is titled The Silence. Yes.)
▰ Exactly how long is this Ninja Tune video?
▰ Yeah, it’s sorta creepy to send a (seemingly) personalized email follow-up saying you’d noticed I’d opened a recent email about your record and wondered if I’d want to cover it, especially because I’d already taken the time to tell your publicist I wasn’t interested.
October 23, 2020
Premiere: Lebanese Musician Fadi Tabbal’s 5th Solo Album
Today marks the release of Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions, the fifth solo album by Lebanese musician Fadi Tabbal. From the pointillist delays of “On the Escape Boat” to the lush, cavernous drone of “Triptych Photography,” it’s a beautiful collection of music that at once is emblematically peaceful and yet also vibrates with an undeniable substratal energy.
This post is a premiere, thanks to the invitation of the Portland-based label Beacon Sound, which has co-released the album with Ruptured Music, a label in Beirut, where Tabbal lives. Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions is structured around a trio of tracks, each titled “The New and Improved Guide to Birdwatching” (“Vol. 1,” “Vol. 2,” and “Vol. 3”). They take as their source material for transmuting not birdsong but a human voice. The voice belongs to Julia Sabra of the band Postcards. Instead of dreamy pop music, though, here her singing is pure dream: sweet, ethereal syllables that Tabbal each time through contorts with textural processing.
A deeper voiced, and more choral, approach energizes “Ceremony by the Sea,” which introduces a gorgeous melodic line: part French horn, part fog horn. If there is a palpable intensity to the music overall, that may be owed to a doubling of pressures. The record was created by Tabbal during the period of Covid-19 self-quarantine, and done so in a city that suffers from untold external and internal political and economic forces.
Album available at beaconsound.bandcamp.com. More from Tabbal at faditabbal.com.
October 22, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0460: Creative Destruction
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, October 26, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 22, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0460: Creative Destruction
The Assignment: Show how you got to a tortured sound.
Step 1: Through some multi-step process, arrive at a complicated, tortured sound. Keep track of how you got there.
Step 2: Record a piece beginning with the end result: that complicated, tortured sound. Then transition to the start of the process and build back up to the end result, slowly repeating how you got you there.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0460” (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 “disquiet0460” (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-0460-creative-destruction/
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, October 26, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 22, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you. The sound should be torturous, not necessarily the experience of revisiting it.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0460” 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 460th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Creative Destruction (The Assignment: Show how you got to a tortured sound), 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-0460-creative-destruction/
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 Chris Smart and used via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
October 21, 2020
“Wednesday Loops”
Wednesday night, playing with loops, one seven beats long, the other eight, then layering occasional accent notes. Fade in and out just turning the knob on the amp once the loops were left to their looping. Recorded to phone put in front of the amp. Not sure why the eight-beat loop is more prominent than the seven-beat one, except perhaps that it’s in 4/4 so the brain registers it more easily. Also not sure about that one hiccup at :46 seconds. Something suddenly went out of alignment and then came just as suddenly back into alignment. The bit at the very end isn’t a tape cassette stopping. It just sounds like that.
Maximum Patch Point Capacity
This newly arrived synthesizer module appears to have achieved maximum patch point capacity. It may also test the thesis that you can never have too many VCAs. And, indeed, that many unadulterated waves will benefit from attenuation.
October 20, 2020
Iwaki/Raffa Split
Living Distances by Yumi Iwaki & Ryan J Raffa
There’s a lot to recommend the new split release by Yumi Iwaki and Ryan J Raffa, Living Distances (on the Muzan Editions label, out of Nara, Japan). Start with Iwaki’s “April,” a thick bed of throbbing, pulsing tones plus Cheshire Cat choral vocal effects appearing here and there in the mix. Then go for “Correlation,” Raffa’s combination of rattling metallic effects and fragmented field recordings. There’s much much more to the album’s 10 tracks, some more challenging (Iwaki has a thing for fractured dream-state sound design, notably on “Spiral Flow”), others welcomingly lulling (Raffa closes things out with an artificial landscape the listener will be hard put to exit; fortunately it’s the longest track on Living Distances).
Album originally posted at muzaneditions.bandcamp.com. More from Iwaki at soundcloud.com/iwakiyumi and from Raffa at rjraffa.net. Both are based in Tokyo, Japan.
October 19, 2020
Freak Flags
The frequent employment of makeshift address labels on doorbells generally comes across as just that: a quick, easy, vaguely stable response to a specific need. The specific need is to align a given residence (or business) with a push button. The vaguely stable part is that those labels are sure to be rubbed down, ripped off, or otherwise damaged by the elements over time (humans count as elements, alongside rain, wind, and heat). The two such labels shown here are in different states of disrepair, and their non-alignment briefly brings to mind the manner in which opening credits for films starring dual leading actors use techniques to suggest neither is truly more prominent than the other: one may come first, for example, but the other is positioned higher. But what if these seemingly temporary labels are hiding their actual purpose in plain sight? What if they’re temporary precisely because the people who use them harbor some sort of fever-dream conspiracy groupthink that their street address can, in the future, be changed whenever they darn well please? Why, all that stands in their way is casting off the shackles of government overreach. In which case, what if such cheap labels aren’t just purposeful hedges in advance of that simultaneously imminent yet elusive utopia, but visual dog whistles: post-truth freak flags left for fellow travelers to acknowledge with a slight, knowing nod while out for a stroll?
October 18, 2020
Current Listens: New Autechre, Textile Music
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.)
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NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases
▰ The ensemble Third Coast Percussion teamed up with modular synthesizer musician Bana Haffar for a nearly 20-minute performance of “Shed,” inspired by the textile art of Anni Albers. And as a side note, how amazing is it that Haffar’s own website, banahaffar.com, is simply a Google Sheet with bits of information and outbound links? More on the piece at blackmountaincollege.org. (Thanks, Kim Rueger, for the recommendation.)
▰ Another fine, dramatic yet gentle patch from Michigan-based Orbital Patterns.
▰ Grassy Knoll has a new EP due out at month’s end, and one of the preview tracks, an instrumental, is a strong crunch of noir-detective electronica. The track is “Into Your Mind,” and the EP is EP01. It’s due out October 29.
▰ Autechre is back with Sign, its first album in over two years, though that doesn’t count over two dozen live sets released in between, not to mention a lengthy NTS archival broadcast. It’s more sedate, less brutal, than much of their recent music.
▰ Noise album from the duo of Chinese musician Yan Jun (更多) and Bani Haykal, who I believe is based in Singapore. The record, Rats in the Bright Southern Sky, came out a year ago this month, but I’m just beginning to explore its spartan mix of rapid-fire loops, industrial drones, snatches of voices, and invigorating feedback. (Thanks, Grzegorz Bojanek, for the recommendation.)
rats in the bright southern sky by yan jun & bani haykal
October 17, 2020
Grace Notes: Organs, House Style, Endless Now
Some tweet observations (twitter.com/disquiet) I made over the course of the past week, lightly edited:
▰ Watched an old British TV mystery in which the damning evidence turned out to be the church organ was heard without use of pedals, meaning some kid had been asked by the organist to unwittingly provide an alibi during the murder. For the record I discovered the plot while watching the episode. I didn’t watch because someone had told me the plot. That said, had someone told me the plot, I almost certainly would have watched.
▰ Pretty sure that’s the last time I’m gonna all-caps the title of the new Autechre album
▰ Chrisjen Avasarala from The Expanse books gets our current moment. (This is from Babylon’s Ashes, volume six in the series.)
▰ “The host has another meeting in progress” (Who can’t relate?)
▰ This tweet will have a small audience, but I’ll mention it was a letdown in the final episode of Fast and the Furious: Spy Racers that right after one of the characters names an op Operation Mindcrime the song we hear isn’t by Queensrÿche but instead by Age of Menace. There was a fun little Hamilton/@reneegoldsberry
Easter egg (she plays Ms. Nowhere) toward the end of the episode. (Probably a lot more of those that I missed.)
▰ Me: Kinda wish we could push fast forward a bit.
Star Trek: Discovery: How’s 950 years sound?
