Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 217
October 16, 2020
Marker Marker
I went for a long walk this afternoon, two-plus hours, and spotted this on the side of a laundromat. I’m not sure if this is a remnant of previous signage or if it is an especially low-key graffiti tag, but either way I really dig it. Philip Shelburne expertly joked in reply on Twitter that it’s La Jetée fan art, and while the walk was easily four times the length of the Chris Marker film, the vibe was definitely spot on.
Between the Lines: The Connectors
I found myself making a mental playlist of albums by the musicians who were the connectors between the albums in my Exquisite Personnel Corpse playlist I did for The Wire magazine this month. The result is the Between the Lines: The Connectors playlist. These artists appear below in the order in which they initially figured.
Robert Musso: Absolute Music (Mu)
Bill Laswell: Means of Deliverance (Innerhythmic)
King Britt: Adventures in Lo-Fi (Instrumental) (Barely Breaking Even)
Julianna Barwick: Will (Dead Oceans)
Ikue Mori: Obelisk (Tzadik)
Fred Frith: Step Across the Border (RecRec)
Theresa Wong: Venice Is a Fish (Sensitive Skin)
Ellen Fullman: Change of Direction (New Albion)
Pauline Oliveros: The Wanderer (Lovely)
Stephen Vitiello: Buffalo Bass Delay (Hallwalls/Room40)
The OO-Ray: Tiny Fugues (Audiobulb)
Marcus Fischer: Collected Dust (Tench)
Simon Scott: Migrations (Touch)
Mike Weis: 49 days (Music for a Transition) (Granny)
October 15, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0459: From a Distance
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 19, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 15, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0459: From a Distance
The Assignment: Make music intended to be heard from afar.
Step 1: Music sounds different from across the room, in the next room, from outside, from down the block. Consider how distance changes how we experience sound.
Step 2: Record a piece of music intended to be listened to from afar. When posting the track, mention the circumstances in which you imagine it might best be experienced (terrain, distance, volume, etc.).
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0459” (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 “disquiet0459” (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-0459-from-a-distance/
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 19, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 15, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0459” 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 459th weekly Disquiet Junto project, From a Distance (The Assignment: Make music intended to be heard from afar), 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-0459-from-a-distance/
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 Billy Wilson and used via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
October 14, 2020
October 13, 2020
Exquisite Personnel Corpse
At the invitation of the magazine The Wire, I put together a playlist for the 411th issue, the one with a poolside William Basinksi on the cover (October 2020). Playlists in The Wire can take any theme the submitter desires, so long as 15 albums (or tracks, etc.) are listed. While opening a recent issue for a refresher course, I had thought, “Maybe I’ll make a list of records I play while doing cooking and the dishes” (which is pretty much Keith Richards’ Talk Is Cheap 14 times, plus whatever audiobook I’m into at the given time slotted in at number 15), and lo and behold, someone had done just that (Matt from CHEWn! Zine in the September 2020 issue).
I thought about other options, like my favorite records on the prolific Tzadik label, or select favorite Morton Feldman performances (I remember when it was easily achievable to own every Feldman CD), or my favorite records with augmented cello, or my favorite full-length hip-hop records that I’ve managed to find instrumental versions of (most gray market, some official).
In the end, I opted for a favorite game: connecting albums I like a lot individually by shared personnel in sequence, retaining a fairly consistent overall vibe throughout. The result was the Exquisite Personnel Corpse 15, which starts with the WordSound label compilation Crooklyn Dub Consortium, Vol. 1: Certified Dope, and ends with Scott Tuma’s Dandelion. The playlist space in The Wire is tight, so below I’ve listed the personnel who connect the dots between records, and added some observations that surfaced during the process.
1: Various: Crooklyn Dub Consortium, Vol. 1: Certified Dope (WordSound)
via Robert Musso ->
2: Ginger Baker: Horses & Trees (Celluloid)
via Bill Laswell ->
3: Various: Panthalassa: The Remixes (Columbia)
via King Britt ->
4: Mary Lattimore: Hundreds of Days Remixes (Ghostly)
via Julianna Barwick ->
5: Julianna Barwick & Ikue Mori: FRKWYS, Vol. 6 (Rvng)
via Ikue Mori ->
6: Death Ambient: Drunken Forest (Tzadik)
via Fred Frith ->
7: Gregg Kowalsky: Tendrils in Vigne (Root Strata)
via Theresa Wong ->
8: Ellen Fullman & Theresa Wong: Harbors (Room40)
via Ellen Fullman ->
9: Deep Listening Band & The Long String Instrument: Suspended Music (Periplum)
via Pauline Oliveros ->
10: Stephen Vitiello, Pauline Oliveros, Joe McPhee: SV+PO+JM (UbuWeb)
via Stephen Vitiello ->
11: Robert Donne, Stephen Vitiello, The OO-Ray: Nuvole (Geographic North)
via the OO-Ray ->
12: Marcus Fischer & The OO-Ray: Tessellations (Optic Echo)
via Marcus Fischer ->
13: Marcus Fischer & Simon Scott: Shape Memory (12k)
via Simon Scott ->
14: Simon Scott & Mike Weis: Thesis 15 (Thesis)
via Mike Weis ->
15: Scott Tuma: Dandelion (Digitalis)
A few things occurred to me as I put it together, among them:
▰ Liner notes are how I learned to listen to music, connecting the dots between records. While digital releases have to a degree removed such information from albums (the paucity of notes on Spotify, etc. is criminal), the internet fills in the blanks.
▰ An individual record is often a synecdoche of a scene, sometimes local, sometimes virtual. Great record labels are often scenes unto themselves. To make this a little more complex, I didn’t allow myself to mention the same record label twice.
▰ If it weren’t for Covid-19, I’d call them superspreaders, but the point is, there are certain musicians whose artistic gregariousness makes them, for a game like Exquisite Personnel Corpse, the equivalent of ABBA to makers of crossword puzzles. (Brian Eno is popular with Exquisite Personnel Corpse and crossword puzzle-makers alike.)
▰ Remixers and producers are essential connectors.
▰ If I’d wanted to level up the difficulty of this, I would have connected pairs of albums that each shared only one musician in common. That would have taken a lot more time. Several of the above pairings have multiple musicians in common.
▰ Connecting by personnel is only meaningful, I think, if there’s some aesthetic through-line to the end-result playlist. Also, I don’t think it would be as rewarding if, just to make the effort easier, you start including records you don’t actually enjoy.
▰ Music releases are way more singular than they used to be. A substantial portion of my current listening is solo records, and has been for years. Solo artists are nothing new. It’s just that albums by “solo artists” used to often include backing bands. The resolute solo-ness of so many musicians today makes connecting records more difficult, and also isolates many musicians from being connected at all. In some cases, the only connecting point would be whoever masters the record. Or, ironically, whoever wrote liner notes.
October 12, 2020
Musique Concrète Monday
The excellent patzr radio art-sound podcast persists with reworked field recordings, episodes 202a and 202b each consisting of 140 seconds of birdsong and rain, squelched conversation and sirens, wind and unidentifiable noises, the source audio all reduced to snippets that are then moved constantly between speakers, flipped this way and that. It’s musique concrète in its truest form: small chamber works hewn from nothing but the everyday noise, easily ignored sounds turned into something inherently memorable. The series is the long-running work of Jimmy Kipple.
Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/patzr-radio.
October 11, 2020
Current Listens: Jóhannsson Tribute, Cole’s Synths
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
▰ Paul Hillier in this three-minute video talks about the work he and his fellow musicians in Theatre of Voices did with the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, notably on the film Arrival:
▰ When Lloyd Cole refers to his “day job” in the liner notes to his latest album, what he means by it is writing songs. Better known for the well-crafted British rock and pop filed in record stores under Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, he’s also a deeply engaged employer of synthesizers. For this album, recorded in June, he focused his efforts on a single module, the Dunst from Ieaskul F. Mobenthey, which emits chaotic yet nuanced noise (other modules were utilized as well, of course).
▰ The company ModBap has released a new synthesizer module, Per4mer, intended to appeal to hip-hop musicians. Among the demos is this psychedelic beat from Ali the Architect. (Found via Synthtopia.)
▰ Three field recordings from Dublin, Ireland-based composer Linda Buckley, including birdsong after the rain, and a prayer echoing in public (presumably in Astoria, Queens, based on the track’s title).
▰ Also, covered with a bit more depth: harp player Mary Lattimore’s classical/ambient Silver Ladders, produced by Neal Halstead of Slowdive, and the dense drones of Havdis, aka O.A. Jensen
October 10, 2020
Grace Notes: Oxford Junto, Ono Fly, Standing Piano
Some tweet observations (twitter.com/disquiet) I made over the course of the past week, lightly edited:
▰ 2020: the year we continuously told each other you’re on mute
▰ And it’s out! There’s a full chapter (by
Ethan Hein), “The Disquiet Junto as an Online Community of Practice,” in the just published Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning. Edited by Janice L. Waldron, Stephanie Horsley, Kari K. Veblen (oxfordhandbooks.com).
▰ A friend made this as we got excited about the score for the upcoming David Fincher movie, Mank:
▰ Dave Brubeck, time-signature maverick as well as a father of the standing desk. Note the black piano on the right: “The tall upright by the wall was designed for him so he could stand while playing to relieve stress on an old back injury.” (Vaguely timely because the house is now up for sale: realtor.com; photo from 2019 coverage at townandcountrymag.com.)
▰ RIP, Eddie Van Halen (1955-2020). I always loved his playing on “Finish What Ya Started.” It’s like he was auditioning for a John Mellencamp album or something.
▰ And as always, Yoko Ono was ahead of the times. (And John Lennon, of course.)
Friday Night
Friday night, running the electric guitar through the new script, Glitchlets (github.com), for the Monome Norns. That’s a Fates in the picture. It’s a DIY build of the Norns.
October 9, 2020
Friday Ambient Harp Drop
Silver Ladders by Mary Lattimore
Right in time for another pandemic weekend, the great harp player Mary Lattimore has released a Friday drop, a full album of music that is at once lush and austere, fragile and full-bodied. Such are the wondrous contradictions in her hypermodern (improvisational and digitally enhanced) employment of an instrument generally associated with dusty antiquity. The seven tracks are quite varied. Some, like “Silver Ladders,” sound like gentle machine augmentation of the familiar harp sound, while others layer in pronounced additional instrumentation (notably the heavily delayed guitar on “Til a Mermaid Drags You Under”), or suggest the sort of complexity only a much larger ensemble could accomplish (“Sometimes He’s in My Dreams”). That guitar part comes courtesy of Neil Halstead, best known as a member of the band Slowdive. Halstead hosted Lattimore at his Newquay, Cornwall, studio for over a week and produced the resulting album, which is titled Silver Ladders.
Get the record at marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com. More from Lattimore, who is based in Los Angeles, at marylattimore.net.
