Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 23

Scratch Pad: EV, Theremin, Doom

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.

▰ Afternoon trio for … a trio of electric vehicles (two autonomous, one driven by a device called a human) whirring by at once

▰ I’m with Milchik on this one topic. “The theremin works best in moderation.”

▰ I watched and liked a video of a saxophone quartet doing what was originally a string quartet, composed by Philip Glass. Now I’m getting solo guitar versions, guitar quartet versions, solo piano versions, theremin versions. YouTube radicalization is real. :)

▰ Your writing job is to write to best explore and express what you’re thinking, not to tweak until all the little blue underlines magically disappear

▰ One of my favorite current comic book illustrators, Declan Shalvey, draws MF Doom for just over 40 minutes:

▰ I am sitting in a gulf different from the one you are in now …

▰ I am almost done reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (I’ll be done by the end of next week), but have really fallen behind in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, perhaps (ha, no — certainly) because as with the two previous novels I have completed this year (C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Jakob Kerr’s Dead Money), I started another in search of some closure: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. As with Cryptonomicon, it’s a book I’ve read before, in this case back when I was a teenager.

That prior reading provides a funny story. There was a “great books” book club being formed at the local library in the town where I grew up, and I was easily a quarter of the age of the next youngest member. I didn’t understand at the time that “great books” was a category, not a general descriptor, so I was confused by the proposed reading list. I didn’t understand why, for example, Frank Herbert’s Dune wasn’t on it (I didn’t even love Dune; I just thought it was a “great” science fiction book in that it was pretty well written and, you know, epic, which both seems like “great” things — look, I was young). Anyhow, reading The Good Soldier now, I’m amazed I even got through it as a teen, because I would have had no idea what was going on in the intertwined relationships at any emotional level, even as plainly as they’re laid out by the narrator.

Somewhat ironically, given my long-ago youthful confusion about what makes a “great book,” the author himself asks such a question about halfway through, when he has the narrator comment: “But the fellow talked like a cheap novelist.—Or like a very good novelist for the matter of that, if it’s the business of a novelist to make you see things clearly.” And please note that the “fellow” here is a vile individual, and yet he is the person with whom the book’s narrator and, thus, author associate with the word “novelist.” And then, should the self-reflexivity of the statement not have been sufficiently self-evident, Ford aims the interrogation regarding literary quality directly at himself: “It is melodrama; but I can’t help it.” This moment is, in addition, the only point in the entire novel when Ford uses the word “novelist,” so I believe the low-level vexation carries some inferential weight. Weirdly, this bit popped up just after I had begun to wonder, myself, what sort of book this is. For a long time, during my current re-reading, I thought of The Good Soldier as a worldly literary romance with some existential heft — or, once the dead bodies began to stack up, more of well-written psychological thriller: so, maybe less Virginia Woolf and more Patricia Highsmith. And then, just as I had shelved my categorical considerations and returned to the book, the author himself put the exact same question right on the page. It was sort of eerie.

I also read a few graphic novels this week, two of which I completed. Those would be the first two volumes of writer Tom King’s run on Wonder Woman: Outlaw and Sacrifice. I dug Outlaw quite a bit, especially how it dialed back the highly structured format that King has employed with other characters. Perhaps due to the switch in illustrators (Daniel Sampere for volume one, and both Sampere and Tony S. Daniel for volume two) and the broader array of superpowered characters and the absence of a central villain, the second volume didn’t seem to hold together as well, I felt.

Remembering Liquid Television

I’ve got another piece up at hilobrow.com, which I love writing for. The editor Josh Glenn has assembled 25 entries in service of “analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993).” It’s a great line-up, including Heather Quinlan on Mystery Science Theatrer 3000, Peggy Nelson on Seinfeld, Tom Nealon on Miami Vice, and Nikhil Singh on Chocky. And Annie Nocenti landed a personal favorite of mine The Singing Detective. Here are the first two paragraphs of my piece, which is about the ancient MTV (mostly) animated anthology series Liquid Television. This is easily the most Gen X thing that I (born: August 1966) have written in a long time.

There’s an old saw about how MTV doesn’t play any music anymore — old as in MTV dropped “music television” from its logo in 2010, so quit griping. More to the point, music doesn’t need MTV, and hasn’t for almost as long, because music videos are ubiquitous (hello, YouTube and social media). We no longer must weather Glenn Frey’s “Sexy Girl” and Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” while waiting for a network executive, bearing an Excel spreadsheet with the word “demographics” on the Y axis, to deign to share some of the good stuff. 

Plus, even back in the day, much of the good stuff wasn’t even music. Take Liquid Television, the network’s classic animation anthology, which ran for four delectable seasons during the early 1990s. The sheer anarchy and variety of Liquid Television was its own special zone of mainstream weird.

Read the full article at hilobrow.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0686: Catch Your Breath

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 0686: Catch Your Breath
The Assignment: Listen to yourself inhale and exhale; make music from what you sense.

Step 1: Sit for a moment and slow your breath.

Step 2: Continue with Step 1 for a bit longer.

Step 3: Pay attention to your breathing, in and out, in and out. Don’t record yourself. Just listen, and feel.

Step 4: Consider how the process of breathing in and out slowly can lend shape to a piece of music. Again, just do this through personal consideration of the act of breathing. This project isn’t an exercise in audio sampling.

Step 5: Record a piece of music that engages with the ideas that surfaced in Step 4.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0686” (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-0686-catch-your-breath/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long does one sit and just breathe?

Deadline: Monday, February 24, 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 686th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Catch Your Breath — The Assignment: Listen to yourself inhale and exhale; make music from what you sense — at https://disquiet.com/0686/

Junto Profiles: The First 26

Since early February 2023, I’ve managed to post 26 interviews with participants in the Disquiet Junto music community. I thought I’d hit 25, and then realized I’d mis-tagged one of them along the way, an error that’s now been rectified. The series is called the Junto Profiles. The prerequisite to be interviewed for a Junto Profile is activity in the weekly projects for at least nine months. That doesn’t mean participating every week, just often enough to be a regular presence. The process for the Q&A is that I send the interviewee a document that consists of the same set of basic questions (where they’re from, what their musical activity is like, what’s a good music-making habit, etc.). When I get their responses to those questions, I read through the document, and then I send back one or two follow-up questions, exploring topics the interview subject has raised.

The answers to the standard questions are always of interest, and the follow-up questions are icing on the cake. The internet is awash in templated Q&As, and I get the attraction: for the interviewer, it’s easier than recording something and then transcribing and editing; for the interviewees, it can be done on their own time, and there’s a paper trail for what they said, so no surprises or errors pop up when the material is ultimately published. But every convenience comes at a cost, and I hope that the follow-up questions I include enliven the Junto Profiles Q&As a little bit, getting at some of the spirit of in-person interviews I so enjoy doing, but just don’t often have the time for. At the heart of this is a focus on the idea of conversation. These follow-up questions — albeit committed asynchronously in the cloud in a shared document — have a touch of conversation to them. And sometimes a touch is enough.

There’s a handy #junto-profiles tag that pulls up all the interviews to date, and they’re also listed in this website’s Conversations category index.

Junto Profile: Coraline Ada Ehmke

This Junto Profile is part of an ongoing series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.

What’s your name? Coraline Ada Ehmke. I also record under the name Sudre’s Violin and, previously, A Little Fire Scarecrow.

Where are you located? I live in Chicago — technically, across the street from Chicago — which is a city full of music and art and culture. No place feels like home exactly, but I’ve been here longer than anywhere else so I guess this counts. 

I came here when my daughter was just over a year old, and I was just getting started in my tech career. After she was born, I had to make a transition from living in Austin, Texas, where I was primarily playing live in bands, to being a parent in Chicago with only occasional time for music, now spent recording in brief and scattered bits of free time. I went from thinking about songs to thinking about albums, and really started taking my time with things. That’s how I spent a lot of years.

Now my daughter is grown, but the recording albums habit has stuck. That said, I’ve got a new project going now — called The Disaster Society — which will be performance-based. So I’ll have a chance to contribute back to some of that music and art and culture that I love so much here.

What is your musical activity? Today, I would call what I do a studio practice. It took some time for me to come to terms with considering my own work “art”, but once that happened I started taking it more seriously and pursuing music with more purpose and discipline. I have blocks on my calendar twice a week for dedicated, no-interruption studio time, on top of whatever free time I can find. The Disquiet Junto has been great for keeping me on a schedule, too.

I tend to organize my musical activities into different projects, each with its own constraints and context. Sudre’s Violin is the container for my (mainly) instrumental postpunk stuff, produced to create the illusion of a consistent musical lineup with consistent instrumentation. There’s the Drone Day project, “Gangs of Ireland”,  which is a five-year sort of thing inspired by an interview segment on Irish TV in the early ’80s. And there’s always some sort of one-off project going as well.

What is one good musical habit? In my music (and in my life I guess) I like to leave plenty of room for serendipity. I regularly browse Wikipedia for rabbit holes, either technical or philosophical or metaphorical, and write down what I find. I also keep ambidextrous spiral notebooks, writing in one direction for specific projects, and abstract techniques or ideas in the other.

What are your online locations? I’m on Bluesky (bsky.app/profile/coralineada.bsky.social) for professional stuff, and Mastodon (ruby.social/@CoralineAda) for personal and music stuff. Everything I do goes up on Soundcloud (soundcloud.com/coralineada), and I highlight the interesting bits on nosignal.zone. During the quarantine years I streamed live from studio on twitch, so there are a bunch of production videos up on YouTube at youtube.com/@livemusicproductionwithcor3585.

What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? My voice has always been problematic for me. I just can’t sound the way I want to sound and it really upsets me sometimes. I used to try to sing anyway, but I found that even if I didn’t hate it in the moment, I would hate it two months later when I heard it again. I had to come to terms with the fact that I just do not have a viable singing voice, and that led me to focus on instrumental music. 

But one alternative that I’ve turned to in some pieces, including several of the Disquiet Junto pieces, is using AI-driven text-to-speech to create custom spoken vocals. I like what I’ve been able to accomplish with them just fine, but. But.

Then came Disquiet #0681, in which we were invited to turn a walk or run into something dramatic, like a scene in a thriller. I wanted to avoid the trope of a woman alone being followed at night, so I went with a story about the vengeful ghost of a hitchhiker. For story as well as aesthetic reasons, I needed the hitchhiker to be singing “Walkin’ After Midnight” to herself as she stalked along the highway looking for her next victim. I didn’t really think about it. I put on headphones, grabbed a mic, and played a part. I sang without making it about singing. I wasn’t trying to sing well or sound a certain way; I was just playing a part.

That was pretty transformative, and it’s inspiring me to find other ways to incorporate my natural voice into my work.

The track is here, and it would be criminal to listen without headphones:

I think many people reading this Q&A will register interest in what you describe as time “blocks” for studio work. Can you talk in some detail about how much time you block, and how you structure your studio time? First of all, I should confess that I live a life that combines precarity with flexibility, which is a fancy way of saying that I live paycheck-to-paycheck but do fascinating and diverse work that, for the most part, does not require working business hours. 

Although I can work pretty much whenever or wherever, I keep “office hours” for interacting with people in a business context. But on Thursdays and Fridays I front-load my workdays, mark BUSY on my calendar, and spend from 2pm to 6pm doing work in the studio. That’s my studio time, it happens every week, and I take it very seriously. 

And it can be anything in my home studio: from organizing cables, to noodling on the piano, to recording a song for the next album. It doesn’t matter, as long as I’m engaged with the context and space.

I’ve felt tremendous growth in my understanding, capabilities, and creative output since adopting a regular studio practice. I find that it creates more opportunities to get inspired and create new art: sometimes just being in the space primes me for creativity.

I recognize that not everyone has the privilege of flexibility that I do, but if you can try to set aside even a couple of hours a week on a regular day and time, you’ll reap a reward.

The names of your projects — Sudre’s Violin, A Little Fire Scarecrow, Disaster Society — are evocative. Can you talk a bit about how the process of naming helps you in developing these distinct musical efforts? I was a software engineer for many years, and there’s an adage in that field that “naming things is hard”. In my music doc (see screenshot below), I have a whole section called “Naming things is easy,” full of words and phrases that I come across in my wanderings and readings and conversations. Again, Wikipedia can be a great source for unique finds. (The name for Sudre’s Violin came from an article I found when I was researching artificial languages; Sudre was a 19th century musician and composer who could hold fluent conversations via violin.)

Strange words and phrases can come from anything really– it’s a matter of listening for things that are evocative or suggestive, especially when taken out of context. Things that have creative potential. Ideas that want a soundtrack.

In terms of projects, I typically have several going at once and move between them frequently, so having distinctive names for them helps me with context switching. The name has to contextualize and differentiate, and it has to reflect the individuality, constraints, goals, and character of the particular project. It’s an important part of how I maintain separation and cohesion between different creative endeavors.

For a piece of music, giving it a name is like recognizing that it’s alive. When I’m working on a new piece, even for a few hours, I don’t hit “save” for the first time until I feel like it’s ready for a name.  Sometimes I’ll browse the “naming things” list to see if anything I’ve collected resonates with the music, while other times the piece evokes its own name. 

Naming something takes a combination of attention and divination, seeing clearly what is there and having a sense of what is to come. The name and the shape of the thing intertwine as it unfolds, and you can’t always go back. It’s like quantum entanglement. Or maybe just psychology. But I prefer to think of it as magic.

Megaphone Redux

The illustrator Hannes Pasqualini and I revived our 2020 comics series in late December of 2024. We have posted two more comics since that one (“Audiobook” and “Stroll”), and today’s, “Megaphone Redux,” continues the run, revisiting both the cultural context and a specific comic from when we initiated the series. See a full index of Frame by Frame comics at disquiet.com/fxf, which features a special index page just for the episodes. And check out more from Hannes at hannes.papernoise.net.

On Repeat: Gorge, English, Clayton

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.

▰ With track titles like “a concrete corridor,” “jagged branches,” and “tungsten bulbs,” the excellent new score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, for The Gorge, could be easily mistaken for a Nine Inch Nails album. (The Gorge is the one with the woman from the chess movie and the guy from the drumming movie. The best thing about it, besides the score and it having a very small cast in a very large landscape, is that Netflix positioned it as a Valentine’s Day movie.)

▰ Lawrence English’s new album, Even the Horizon Knows Its Bounds, is like an orchestra of pianos tuning up forever. Includes source material from Amby Downs, Chris Abrahams, Chuck Johnson, Claire Rousay, Dean Hurley, Jim O’Rourke, JW Paton, Madeleine Cocolas, Norman Westberg, Stephen Vitiello, and Vanessa Tomlinson.

▰ Archival Entry: Look out. Old man Weidenbaum is listening to James Newton Howard’s Michael Clayton (2007) score on repeat again.

Scratch Pad: Rain, Rain, Read

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.

▰ Yes, I was standing near three people and near-ish to a half dozen other people when an elder alert went out to phones this afternoon. Quite the readymade spatial sound installation.

▰ Two new Steven Soderbergh movies and a new Luc Besson movie? I appreciate this cumulative opportunity to convince myself not only that it isn’t 2025, but that the previous millennium hasn’t yet ended.

▰ The rain in San Francisco falls mainly everywhere

▰ I thought the printer had decided to just print out something on its own initiative, but that sound turned out to be a street cleaning machine coming up the block slowly in the pouring rain

▰ An earthquake during a rainstorm (which we just experienced) is like an elevator pitch by a Hollywood executive who already knows he’s being put out to pasture

▰ I finished reading my second novel of the year, that number masking the substantial amount of pages I’ve actually read, ’cause I’m nearly done with Neal Stephenson’s massive Cryptonomicon (I’d give it two more weeks), and continuing apace, if more slowly, with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The novel I finished reading — which, like the first one I read this year, I read to attain a little desired closure amid the open-endedness of reading two roughly 900-page books — was Dead Money by my old friend Jakob Kerr. It’s a fun corporate thriller that takes place mostly right here in San Francisco, and it is twisty. And this week I finished reading one graphic novel, Superman: Year One by Frank Miller (writer) and John Romita Jr. (illustrator). And I just realized that at some point I stopped being one of those people who puts commas before and after the “Jr.” in names that have a Jr. in them. I don’t know when that happened.

End of Week

And it’s been a week

Disquiet Junto Project 0685: Pick-Me-Up

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 0685: Pick-Me-Up
The Assignment: Treat a set of sounds like a game of pick up sticks.

Step 1: Think about pick up sticks, the children’s game.

Step 2: Assemble a small collection of sounds.

Step 3: Record a piece of music in which you employ the sounds from Step 2 as if in a game of pick up sticks.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0685” (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-0685-pick-me-up/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long of a game is it?

Deadline: Monday, February 17, 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 685th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Pick-Me-Up — The Assignment: Treat a set of sounds like a game of pick up sticks — at https://disquiet.com/0685/

The photo, by Heurtelions, associated with this project is used thanks to a CC BY-SA 4.0 Creative Commons license (photo repeated in a grid with text superimposed).