Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 219
September 30, 2020
Colorful Conversation
Always keeping an eye out for how TV captions evolve. This one was, I think, new to me: different colors signifying different speakers. White is retained for the narrator. The still image is from the BBC TV series This Farming Life, which as (1) urban and (2) American I’d otherwise find utterly unintelligible.
September 29, 2020
Mexican Audio Damage
You’ll need to check your speakers. Edgar Medina, who goes by Alejandro Morse, so damages the sounds that constitute the base level of the track “(Splendid View to) an Artificial Lake,” off the forthcoming album Aftermath, that you’ll wonder if something has gone haywire with your audio system. Even after being told, still you’ll find need to check your speakers, to make sure wires haven’t frayed, to make sure a cat hasn’t gotten in the house and scratched at your cones, to make sure water hasn’t taken its toll. None of those things have happened — well, not to your speakers. As for the audio on “(Splendid View to) an Artificial Lake,” it has been scraped like barnacles off the hull of a boat, like paint from an old bench, like unwanted truths from a Wikipedia page. In posting the track to SoundCloud, the releasing record label, Dragon’s Eye, attributed the tag #ambient to it, but that seems more like provocation than categorization. The mix of happenstance field recordings and genteel tonal elements is bonded under shared scrubbing, the disparate elements united as the objects of Morse’s destructive, exploratory intent.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/dragonseyerecordings. More from Medina/Morse, who is based in Mexico, at alejandromorse.bandcamp.com. Aftermath is due out this Friday, October 2.
September 28, 2020
Benediction for a Synthesizer Kit
If you follow YouTube musicians’ live recordings, you get a sense of their gear, and even occasionally register changes: new additions, sudden absences, swapped-out arrangements. Heck, even changes to the draperies and a new paint job. Sometimes such evolutions are announced in the form of “first patch” sessions or mini-tutorials of hard-won tips. Less frequently you’re alerted in advance, as is the case with this benediction from Michigan-based musician Orbital Patterns. A new central processing unit for his synthesizer is due imminently, and this video is, apparently, his last set with the current setup. It’s a beautiful, sprawling mix of melodic patterning and peculiar noises, elegiac drones and sonic coarseness, at once cinematic in its breadth, and at others as personal as a closely mic’d hush.
Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from Orbitan Patterns, aka Abdul Allums, who is based in Rochester Hills, Michigan, at orbitalpatterns.bandcamp.com.
September 27, 2020
Physical Graffiti
It was a pleasure to write liner notes (full text: “Palimpsests All the Way Down”) for Nathan Moody’s new album, de/Still, a “musical score” that he created as an aural interpretation of TJ Norris’ photography. All the more so, because the album was a proper physical release. My copy of the CD just arrived from the record label, Flag Day Recordings. Get the album at flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com.
Current Listens: Varied Pianos, Archival Afrobeat
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
▰ Erika Nesse makes music with fractal algorithms, in this case applied to the sounds of a piano. Get lost in the patterning.
▰ Film composer Matija Strnisa slows the pace of the piano on “Tender Loneliness” to a near standstill, and then fills the spaces in between the notes with a drone that’s like cozy warm wool. A cue from the score to House of Hummingbird (벌새), from director Kim Bora (김보라).
▰ The label Comet Records is reissuing classic albums by the late Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, including this pairing of two extended takes with Fela’s Afrika 70 ensemble. No Accommodation for Lagos was recorded in 1978. Allen passed away April 30, 2020.
No Accomodation For Lagos by Tony Allen
▰ The form of Matmos’ The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form is 99 musicians’ tracks layered into an ever-shifting collage, the commonality being the tracks were all recorded at the same speed (99 BPM, naturally). The three-CD set comes with a map of the contributions, and that may be the best way to experience it — watching and listening for transitions and studio-yoked collaborations.
The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form by Matmos
▰ Ten tracks of sublime instrumental music: fragile surfaces that cover depth, tension, and resolve. This is the album Out of the Valley from composer n-So (aka Nick Angeloni). Music for slow mornings — or perhaps better yet, meditative music for anything-but-slow mornings.
Out of the Valley by n-So
September 26, 2020
Grace Notes
Some tweet observations (twitter.com/disquiet) I made over the course of the past week, lightly edited:
▰ When you join a Zoom call a couple minutes early and everyone has their cameras off and they’re typing and it sounds like rain
▰ “In his lap, Yeats’s Collected–the yellow-jacketed Macmillan edition–and in the CD tray Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina, long hushed by the time Bachelor found the body, but its lingering silences implicit in the air, settling like dust on faded surfaces.” The minder of a network of elderly informers in Mick Herron’s novella The List comes upon a dead body. I already dug the series (Slough House), and this line sealed the deal. (Bachelor is the last name of the story’s protagonist.)
▰ It’s at 1:43:46 that Miles Davis appears in this 1987 footage of Prince performing live. Everything to that point is tremendous but that bookmark is where to start: the smile on Prince’s face, how he conducts the band to make space for the trumpeter:
https://youtu.be/v_aAug_PpUM?t=6227
▰ Kinda crazy that the new company combining Rolling Stone, Billboard, Vibe, and other publications is called PMRC, same initials as the Parents Music Resource Center, which gave us parental advisory stickers back in the 1980s.
▰ “Waiting for the host to start this meeting”
▰ I am fairly certain that I will at some point today no longer have “Interplanet Janet” running through my head. I am almost equally certain that it will immediately be replaced by another Schoolhouse Rock song.
▰ “Host is not in the meeting yet”
▰ Last night I watched the TV series The Repair Shop. Just as stuffed-animal vets were fixing the voice box of a WW2-era Irish teddy bear, the shofar bleated from a synagogue down our street, and I briefly thought that was the teddy bear’s sound. Had to mute the TV to sort it out. It was an especially confusing mundane synchronicity because at that very moment, the show’s host noted that the voice box sounded less like a bear growling and more like a lamb baaing.
▰ That amazing, mournful live three-hour Questlove set of dubbed-out, chopped and screwed Radiohead tracks has shuffled off the mortal coil that is YouTube, so I’ll go back to listening to the Tenet score backwards.
September 25, 2020
In the Name of Corruption
ミジンコdaphnia emotions by CORRUPTION
While the SoundCloud account of Tokyo-based noise-maker Corruption remains mothballed, the musician’s Bandcamp account has another archival update. ミジンコ daphnia emotions is 31 tracks recorded between 2013 and 2019. They range from what might be a video-arcade field recording (“emwrec#msl”) to lounge-tempo pop techno (“pole”) to sequenced white noise drones (“cold wind”) to especially Aphex-y melodic sweetness (“pause”), just for starters. And of course, the most unclassifiable tracks are where it’s really at, notably “mga,” in which what sounds like a breeze running through a tunnel is transformed into a squelchy melody. The variety gives a sense of the range that Corruption has been up to for years over at SoundCloud, where nearly 1,000 tracks have been collected. Presumably these are favorites culled from that expanse.
Album originally posted at corruption-music-drugstore.bandcamp.com.
September 24, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0456: Line Up
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 Monday, September 28, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 24, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0456: Line Up
The Assignment: Interpret a painting by Agnes Martin as if it were a graphic score.
Step 1: Look at the work of painter Agnes Martin, best known for her parallel lines.
Step 2: Select an individual work that suggests itself to you as a musical score.
Step 3: Record a short piece of music that interprets the painting selected in Step 2 as if it were a musical score.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0456” (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 “disquiet0456” (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-0456-line-up/
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 Monday, September 28, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 24, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0456” 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 456th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Line Up (The Assignment: Interpret a painting by Agnes Martin as if it were a graphic score), 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-0456-line-up/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
September 23, 2020
Fripp: 21 of 50
A reminder that Robert Fripp is making good on his promise of 50 weekly solo instrumentals. The series is titled “Music for Quiet Moments,” and this has been week 21. The tracks are often archival, the current one dating back to June 2004, and recorded in Oslo, Norway. That appears to be when Fripp was touring as part of the unlikely G3, which teamed him with the more flamboyant Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. A post at Fripp’s official DGM Live website, dgmlive.com, humorously notes the audience’s disinterest in his ambient soundscapes.
Video originally posted at youtube.com.
BYOB(AEC)
Bring your own batteries and extension cords.
