Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 22

Under the Boardwalk

I’m not sure it is accurate to say that the four tracks of artfully mangled and repurposed tracks that comprise Boardwalk by Grey Tissue (aka Gabe Konrad) necessarily proceed from whisper to scream. Why, the very first track on the release, “Boardwalk I,” has a protracted feedback screech midway through that may keep some listeners from proceeding further, but doing so is highly recommended. There is, from “Boardwalk I” through the especially chaotic and boisterous “Boardwalk IV,” a persistent sense of consideration here, of sounds both sourced and utilized with particular ends in mind, more narrative than abstract, also haunting yet enticing. In the Drifters’s classic “Under the Boardwalk,” Johnny Moore sang, “From the park you hear the happy sound of the carousel,” and while quite different sounds are deployed on Grey Tissue’s Boardwalk, it is still very much a depiction of a place, a time, and a mood. The album was released by the Japanese label NEUS-318

On Repeat: Schulz, Monome, Downes

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Jeannine Schulz has an approach to releasing music that I’m still wrapping my head around, a mix of singles and albums and EPs that mark her as prolific but are also so understated that they feel less like a torrent and more like a steady trickle. A note at the end of the release page on Bandcamp reads: “Please make sure you download the music after the purchase as the musical content of the site sometimes changes. Tracks or albums are occasionally removed from the catalog.” Her latest, two tracks under the title All Is Found, is absolutely perfect for this mode, as it sounds like music being erased as it is being recorded. Schulz is based in Germany.

▰ I am a sucker for works in progress. I probably listen to more half-finished music than to mastered commercial releases. This video is an early-stages work (turn up the volume, as it’s quiet), a “a realtime performance processor and synthesizer” currently under development, using two Monome-made devices, the Grid and the Arc. It’s by Element433 (aka Pere Villez), based in Brighton and Hove, U.K.

▰ Archival listen: Enemy — actually all caps, ENEMY, apparently — is a trio consisting of Kit Downes, piano; Petter Eldh, double bass; and James Maddren, drums. I’ve been getting deep into Downes since hearing him on Breaking the Shell (my favorite album 2024), the trio record he recorded (playing organ, not piano) with electric guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Andrew Cyrille. I like a lot of the Enemy album The Betrayal, in particular the first track, which does this thing Robert Glasper, among others, does, where the piano sounds as if it had been sampled, the way the lines are fragmented and repeat little snippets frequently. The idea of a pianist simulating the sound of a seam in an audio loop makes me ecstatically happy. This is “post-MPC jazz” (the MPC being the sampling instrument made by Akai). Downes appears to split his time between London, England, and Berlin, Germany.

Scratch Pad: Wah, Autechre, Attenborough

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ A Chinese restaurant, not a guitar pedal shop

▰ Obsidian-headz: is there a detriment to deleting files from the Finder folder (I’m on a Mac), versus deleting them within the app itself (right click -> delete)? Thanks. I ask because I often have a dozen Bebop files and it’s easier to delete a group rather than one by one. (And I got replies, including one from someone who works on Obsidian, that indeed, this is OK. No detriments, no issues.)

▰ Imagine working on a product where everyone cheers when it goes down and talks about how much more they’re getting done

▰ Hyper local, but I just gotta take a moment to say that the vegan coconut at Polly Ann Ice Cream in the Outer Sunset (San Francisco) is insanely fluffy and tasty

▰ As I mentioned in the email containing the instructions for this week’s Disquiet Junto, the weekly process of these projects is like a biological clock for me, somewhere between the two processes — the “physiological” and the “behavioral” — that provide this week’s theme. And if I bungled the science with this one, that’s on me — please just roll with the metaphor.

▰ The cash register at this cafe had a malfunctioning receipt roll, and after an extended period of failed attempts by the cashier, who had many other simultaneous duties, to rectify the situation, several customers went on YouTube to locate solutions, and one of those worked. Just remarkable.

▰ Wasn’t expecting the first episode of the new season of Reacher to have a Thee Headcoats song playing during the end credits. (I’m wondering if a music supervisor just did a lyric search for a song talking about something context-specific, in this case a young girl.)

▰ I have no idea the extent to which this makes me an economic boycott scab, but I did manage to jump over various e-commerce hurdles to purchase a ticket to attend the Autechre / Mark Broom concert in a little over seven months. It’s at the Regency. Last show I saw there was the Atarashii Gakko! concert.

▰ I entered a tiny bathroom stall at the back of a bar, only to be greeted by a voice. The voice belonged to David Attenborough: a recording of him from Life on Earth. As I flushed, I Iearned that the “identity of species is proclaimed by the plumage.”

▰ Reading: I finished reading my third novel of the year, which given that we’re two months into 2025 feels a little slow, but of course this third book was Neal Stephenson’s epic and fantastic Cryptonomicon, and I read its 900-plus pages at a particularly slow pace because, this being my fourth time through it, I really wanted to pay particular attention. And I have to say, it is better than ever. When it was published, in 1999, the end of World War II was barely a half century past, and now we’re more than a quarter of a century since the book came out. Its technology is now old, if not as old as the technology of the Second World War. The book also closes better than I had recalled; Stephenson is known for often falling short in how his books conclude, but this Cryptonomicon should not be counted among the failures in that regard. And this bit comes from close to the end:

I’m nearly done, meanwhile, with Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and well into Cory Doctorow’s Walkway, and making continued slow progress with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. And I somehow didn’t finish reading a single graphic novel this week, even though I’m in the middle of a few.

RIP, Gene Hackman (1930 – 2025)

Gene Hackman arrives at the Pearly Gates. Saint Peter welcomes him in without even looking up. Hackman asks, “How did you know it was me?” Saint Peter replies, “You have a certain way of opening up the door. Y’know, first the key goes in real quiet, and then the door comes open real fast, just like you think you’re going to catch me at something.”

I’m not sure there is a movie that took my head, and in particular my ears, and put them squarely on the rails they were meant to be on quite like the The Conversation did, in large part thanks to sound designer Walter Murch, and of course the embodiment of the fraught act of listening that is Hackman’s surveillance expert, Harry Caul. I’ve been uncovering the deep truths of this 1974 Francis Ford Coppola film ever since.

My attempt at a joke in the first paragraph above cribs directly from what Teri Garr’s character, Amy, says to Hackman’s Caul.

There is a lot of tragedy in this film, and for me the essential tragedy is Caul’s inability — and keep in mind, this is someone whose job is to discern people’s hidden truths by observing them — to recognize Amy as his soulmate. He gets outwitted several times in The Conversation, but his worst error of judgment is his lack of real appreciation for Amy. The fact that she catches him spying on her should be reason enough for him to see in her something special — countersurveillance as foreplay. But here, in this scene, she makes it clear that her ear is as good as, if not better than, his.

Whenever I watch the movie, I can’t help but wonder if Amy would have noticed the misunderstanding at the heart of the audio recording that Caul, fatally, doesn’t. If only Caul had let her in.

Disquiet Junto Project 0687: Applied Science

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0687: Applied Science
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that explores physiological and behavioral techniques.

Step 1: It is understood in biology that there are differences between the “behavioral” and the “physiological,” between an action or response a person makes by choice, and one that happens on instinct or involuntarily. (Please forgive these rough descriptions.) Familiarize yourself with the concepts.

Step 2: Consider various ways that some musical activities might be considered behavioral, such as consciously playing notes, and others might be physiological, such as maintaining a beat.

Step 3: Record a piece of music that combines a mix of some of the behavioral and physiological music activities you thought about in Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0687” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0687-applied-science/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, March 3, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 687th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Applied Science — The Assignment: Record a piece of music that includes physiological and behavioral techniques — at https://disquiet.com/0687/

Radio, Radio, Radio

I had a great time on Saturday night, the 22nd, at the Lab in San Francisco for a combination of lecture and music performance, a hybrid that may be my favorite format. The theme was radio. The lecture was by Rick Prelinger on the topic of “practical radio,” such as shortwave and CB, not to mention GPS and Bluetooth. The performance was by Anna Friz and Jeff Kolar, using real-time and prerecorded signals as the raw material for abstract atmospheric music.

Disquiet Junto Project 0687: Applied Science

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0687: Applied Science
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that explores physiological and behavioral techniques.

Step 1: It is understood in biology that there are differences between the “behavioral” and the “physiological,” between an action or response a person makes by choice, and one that happens on instinct or involuntarily. (Please forgive these rough descriptions.) Familiarize yourself with the concepts.

Step 2: Consider various ways that some musical activities might be considered behavioral, such as consciously playing notes, and others might be physiological, such as maintaining a beat.

Step 3: Record a piece of music that combines a mix of some of the behavioral and physiological music activities you thought about in Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0687” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0687-applied-science/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, March 3, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 687th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Applied Science — The Assignment: Record a piece of music that includes physiological and behavioral techniques — at https://disquiet.com/0687/

A First?

This is the cover image of a single, “Ritual,” from cellist Peter Gregson’s forthcoming self-titled album. I’m trying to think of another release from a major classical music record label that features a Eurorack synthesizer on its cover, as this one, from Decca, does. Peter Gregson is due out April 11. (And yes, the 1968 Switched-On Bach, by Wendy Carlos, featured a giant Moog on its cover, and it was released by Columbia Masterworks, but that’s over half a century ago, and a totally different synthesizer format.)

And if you’re not familiar with Gregson, I highly recommend his Bach album in the Recomposed series from the Deutsche Grammophon label — the same series as Max Richter’s excellent Four Seasons.

Ouch

Back in the early 1990s, I was in a small car accident, and the passenger-side door was damaged just like this, and just like this, I had a friend — the cartoonist Justin Green, best known for Binky Brown, and whose comics I edited at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine — paint a comic-book sound effect on the side, complete with the little lines showing the action and/or sound of the impact. I wish I had a photo of my long-ago car door. This one here isn’t my car. I stumbled on this modern-day version in my neighborhood over the weekend.

On Repeat: Post-Classical, Modular, Frippertronics

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Tryptych by Symbion Project (aka Kasson Crooker) is three 10-minute-plus not quite ambient, maybe “romantic ambient” / post-classical, excursions. Richly evocative.

▰ I always keep my eye on what’s new from a synthesizer module maker called Djupviks. A module called the Bunker Archeology, which I have, takes the source audio here and “smears it all up,” per the description. No doubt. It’s like the Blade Runner vibe filtered through a rougher industrial aesthetic.

▰ Archival recommendation: I picked up this live 1981 Robert Fripp solo Frippertronics set (use that link, as there is no embeddable player) based on a recommendation from John Diliberto, host of the Echoes radio show. It’s really great, very simple, austere even by Fripp standards, maybe even more musical than atmospheric. You can hear the loops as they accrue, the seams as he stitches and layers. Bonus points for the bit of conversation with Joe Strummer (yeah, of the Clash) in the liner notes. (And if that interview is of interest, here’s the full text. The conversation was moderated by Vic Garbarini, and originally published in the June 1981 issue of Musician magazine. Here’s a great snippet: Strummer: “Now, I’m not a born musician like maybe Robert is…” Fripp: “Not at all! I was tone deaf and had no sense of rhythm…” Strummer: “… I got kicked out of the choir…” Fripp: “…they wouldn’t even let me join the choir!”)

▰ Somewhat less archival recommendation: here’s a saxophone foursome, Multiphonic Quartett, performing a piece (“Mishima/Closing,” originally written for Kronos) from Philip Glass’ score for Paul Schrader’s film Mishima, shot in a massive concrete industrial space. (This video is the source of the “radicalization” joke I posted here yesterday.) The video is from roughly three years ago. (And a side note for those chasing virality: despite this video having over 200,000 views, the group’s Instagram account has well under 600 followers, and its YouTube channel a mere 1,500 subscribers.)