Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 24

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).

Junto Profile: Marjorie Van Halteren

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? My name is Marjorie Van Halteren, which I seem to use in its entirety most of the time.

Where are you located? I am based in Lille, France. I was born in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, went to college in Ann Arbor, then landed in New York City for my first 20 years after college. In 1992 I moved to.

What is your musical activity? I am currently a member of a collective in Lille called Muzzix (muzzix.info). The collective has been around for around 25 years, incorporating 30 improvisational and experimental musicians. I was invited to join about 5 years ago. My so-called musical evolution is very atypical. The others come largely from conservatory backgrounds, free jazz, or DIY branching off from their relationships to their instruments (percussions, saxes, guitars, horns, keyboards, voice, various electronics, etc.). My background was theater, studying performance at NYU, where I also taught, and a radio career in New York City and nationally. I was a successful spoken word producer when I up and moved to France. 

I made a lot of radio dramas (commissioned writers), hybrid documentaries, etc. in the US as well as a handful for the BBC. I won a lot of awards, including three Peabodys. I became frustrated with radio, it felt too formatted, a little “on the nose.” I began to create more experimentally, and it became clear that music had more to offer me than literature or playwriting. I was at WNYC in the 80’s during the brief period when the station broadcast only living composers, and I heard and met a number of them, including John Cage, when I made my first audio art piece for WDR Cologne. It was much later that I began to understand what any of them were actually doing.

In the last decade my actual musical life experience has come into play, from my childhood piano lessons, my fantastic choral teacher in junior high, my love of jazz, and my awareness and understanding of the music of my generation. The French love American music, and my singing is actually appreciated. I have always written sound poetry, and although it was hard to leave my accomplishments and reputation behind and start over (the French could have cared less), I have begun to write and perform in French a bit. Who would have thought it?

My current projects include: a composition with and for an excellent pianist who plays prepared piano, with field recording and voice; a solo project with midi controller, electronics and voice that I plan to play in Germany in April called “Can’t Draw, Can’t Paint,” and a folk duo with a great guitarist of songs of the 50’s and 60’s that I have unearthed from my youth, called “Spring Chickens.” The collective tries to do Grand Orchestra projects with everyone once a year, and this year I played voice and electronics with 25 other musicians for a piece by and with Ingrid Laubrouck. Fantastic.

What is one good musical habit? I put myself in challenging situations. For example, a few years ago I did a jazz singing master class which was pretty terrifying, I participated in scat improv evenings, I perform my sound poetry in poetry evenings, and I do the monthly improv session with the collective, with voice and monosynth (which I don’t really play that well — yet). Now I’ve booked my solo. Ah ha. When I first got here decades ago, I had this idea that people should know what I can do, and just ask me to do things. They do not. And when I can I do the Junto! I realize that I am only as good as what I am working on now, and although I am well past the age when many people retire, I need to keep learning. I also learn as many new tools as possible.

What are your online locations? I’m still on Facebook and Instagram, but I just joined Blue Sky at @marjorievh.bsky.social. And mastodon mastodon.social/@vanwindmill. Let’s make that work!! And at electroacousticalpoeticalsociety.com. This summer I updated it to show my whole story so that I no longer feel compelled to constantly explain myself, which is a really bad habit.

What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? I think I enjoyed this one in particular, because it used favorite existing drop-in recordings — I keep absolutely everything — some of them are really old — and it gave me the opportunity to try effects that I was curious about, like granular delays. My Junto projects are a bit simple — I don’t do a lot of rhythm or evolving repetition. I need to try that.

Did all those years working in radio train your ear, given the particular focus on the human voice? Can you say how all that attention to the voice has informed your music-making, not just in terms of singing, but in other ways? During my life as a radio producer in the United States, I became obsessed with natural performances. It might have come from working in these hybrid forms where we incorporated documentary, from exposure to performers like Joe Frank who was all about voice, then during my time on the Radio Stage at WNYC when I had the chance to work with some really great actors — but even today I think of my pursuit to reinvent American radio dramas in the 1980’s as finally quixotic. At that time everyone doing it was still stuck in the 1940’s, and in some ways they still are. Americans didn’t see radio drama performance like film acting, whereas the Brits can move around a studio like a voice film. It’s uncanny. 

I am still involved in a kind of radio project which you can see on my site. I work with five other sound poets to compose a project around a theme. They are geographically spread about (Indiana, Northern California, Massachusetts, Italy). Two of them I have never met. They all send me their pieces, I make one, too, then we all hear the result together for the first time. The resonances are fantastic. Everyone brings their A game even though it does not get heard that much — Radiophrenia Glasgow has been broadcasting them up to now in their project. I am really happy to include Gregory Whitehead in this, because he is a seminal practitioner of radiophonic art — and did not get as discouraged by radio as I did. He’s had a whole career. (More https://eaps.mixlr.com.)

So yes, I’m interested in language, and I consider a voice, a field recording, or an instrument a sound like any other. In my “musical” work, I like to use the melodies and rhythms of voice — and have probably overused that feature in Ableton where you can convert a phrase into notes, then edit it. I keep wondering what kind of hip-hoppy feature I am appropriating in a clumsy way. I also like to sing.

In addition to language fluency, were there other ways you had to adjust to cultural life as a participant once you moved to France from the U.S.? Ho, ho — I was so American when I arrived. (I was already 40.) It took me ages to give in to French. Cultural life sucks everywhere right now. France is cutting funding right and left. I think the hardest thing for me was not understanding that without an organizational reference, you don’t get anywhere — plus if people don’t know you or know someone that does, you also can’t do anything. I remember when a guy who ran a big sound festival in Belgium said, “but I don’t know your work.” I had sent it to him more than once. And he seemed mixed up between running the festival, commandeering all the funding and programming himself a lot. That seemed wrong to me. “It’s who you know” has a special meaning here. 

Also when I left New York I made the decision to not try to earn my living doing my art. (I taught in upper education here for 25 years.) I wanted to be able to experiment, and I didn’t want to have to fit into funding boxes. I guess that made people think I was some kind of amateur at first. 

But all this forced me into the basements, into the avant garde. As soon as people see you around, and you know people they know, everything changes. In my former life, I got some status for the quality of my work. Now it seems like it’s mostly because I’m around. Long live the basements! It’s where people know how to really listen.

Noise Hours

I love this sign, which I walk by several times a week. The name of the record shop is Noise and these are its hours, but of course it pleases me to take the sign more literally.

Severance Playlist

Sometimes there are shows — and books, and movies, and so forth — that are so seemingly up my alley that it takes me a while to get around to them. A TV show that combines office drama, conspiracies, critiques of corporate in loco parentis, minimal-effects science fiction, and midcentury sets, and the cast of which includes Dichen Lachman, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken, seemed almost too good to be true. (I don’t watch a lot of comedy, so pretty much the only thing I’d seen the show’s star, Adam Scott, in previously was Big Little Lies, which I didn’t even connect him to until I pulled up his IMDB profile.) The show in question, Severance, is not too good to be true; it is as good as it might seem to be based on the ingredients, which is quite good. I’ve just finished season one, and am very much enjoying the occasional musical cues, the interstitial music by Theodore Shapiro, and the sound design of the various imagined technologies. In the episode of this makeshift screenshot, the winner of an office competition gets to choose the music to be played at a party. The character selects — appropriate to said character’s character — “defiant jazz,” emphasis on “defiant,” and indeed defiance is precipitated. I hope someday we get to hear the “spooky ambient,” though that could simply be Shapiro’s score.

On Repeat: Halvorson, Bingen, Power Tools

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.

▰ The first track off the forthcoming duo album from pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson, Bone Bells. Bluesy, funky, gently atonal, sweet, rough. This may be my single favorite thing Halvorson has recorded to date:

▰ I love how a “single” nowadays is so universal: any standalone track that’s put out in advance of a full album release. No matter the coinage, chill out to the Sixteen performing some seriously ethereal Hildegard of Bingen (I couldn’t get the embed code to work) from their forthcoming Angel of Peace:

▰ An incredible concert recording (audio only) of Power Tools (guitarist Bill Frisell, bass player Melvin Gibbs, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson) at the Bottom Line in Manhattan on September 10, 1988, which is to say the first September of my life when I wasn’t in school since I’d entered preschool. This band meant so much at the time to me, just outta college, and it still does.

Scratch Pad: That Galactus Vibe

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.

▰ Looks like The Agency has been renewed, so there will be a second season — so maybe we’ll see a release of Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s score to the first season?

▰ The wind is intense. Fortunately some of it sounds worse than it is, exacerbated by planes flying by, but the power of 50-mph gusts is something to behold. The occasional beep on my phone alerts me to my concern about another tornado warning. Really don’t want to go through that again anytime soon.

▰ Current vibe

▰ Been thinking about what are probably the four most important concert venues of my life, and how only one of them is still around

Knitting Factory (Houston Street, Manhattan), RIPOld Ironsides (Sacramento)Mermaid Lounge (New Orleans), RIPLuggage Store Gallery (Market St, San Francisco), RIP

▰ Just sitting here listening to the wind, the washer, the dryer, and Palestrina

▰ I feel like I’d read that the bridge* song had been tamed, but judging by today’s storm that clearly isn’t the case

*Golden Gate Bridge

▰ I don’t think I understood until now that Obsidian could have not just multiple tabs and multiple panes open, but also multiple windows. On a Mac, a two-finger click on a given tab allows you to “Move” or “Open” the tab “to a new window.” It’s fantastic, as is Obsidian in general.

▰ The link for the website exposure.band is going in and out, but the news is that on the heels of the awesome Beat tour currently underway, there’s another a Crimson-adjacent reenactment/cover band in the works, doing Robert Fripp’s solo Exposure album, with Terre Roche, Pat Mastelotto, and others. Expooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-sure!

▰ Have a great weekend, or best you can. Open a window and listen. Play one of your least favorite LPs, CDs, or tapes and decide if it’s worth keeping. Pick up a favorite book and read a section at random out loud.

▰ And I read a lot this week, but I only finished reading a few graphic novels, four of ’em: writer Ed Brubaker and illustrator Sean Phillips’ Houses of the Unholy, writer James Tynion IV and illustrator Fernando Blanco’s w0rldtr33 (volume 1), writer Ryan North and illustrator Iban Coello’s Fantastic Four: Whatever Happened to the Fantastic Four? (the first volume of their collaboration), and writer-illustrator Quentin Zuttion’s All Princesses Die Before Dawn. Making my way, meanwhile, through the massive Cryptonomicon and Middlemarch, and a thriller I picked up.

A Cure

Minimal instrumentation (piano, bass) combine with rhythmic bits of everyday sound. The result, both fragile and engaging, melds post-classical, ambient jazz, and lowercase. This is the first track, “i,” off the forthcoming duo album, A Four Part Cure, from Jason Calhoun and Foresteppe (the latter aka Egor Klochikhin), on Ned Milligan’s Florabelle label. Can’t wait to hear the rest.

Disquiet Junto Project 0684: Early Bird

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 0684: Early Bird
The Assignment: Record not so much an alarm as a guided wakening.

Step 1: You are going to record a piece of music intended for someone to listen to almost immediately upon waking up. Think about your mornings, and what a more optimal morning might entail.

Step 2: Consider a scenario in which someone wakes up and, rather than look at their work or check the news, they take a period of time to just get centered. Think about how long you might want this to take, say three minutes, or five minutes, or twenty minutes.

Step 3: Consider the stages of awakening, from quiet to loud, from slow to fast (or a middling pace), from simple to complex. Perhaps the sounds go full circle, returning to where they started.

Step 4: Consider what sound at the end — a gong, a bell, a bird call, etc. — might signal that the waking process has concluded.

Step 5: Having reflected on the topics brought up in the instructions thus far, record a track that might guide someone slowly into consciousness upon waking each morning.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0684” (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-0684-early-bird/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long does it take you to wake up?

Deadline: Monday, February 10, 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 684th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Early Bird — The Assignment: Record not so much an alarm as a guided wakening — at https://disquiet.com/0684/

Frame by Frame (Index)

There is now a proper index — at at disquiet.com/fxf — for the ongoing Frame by Frame comics series I’m doing with illustrator Hannes Pasqualini. The next standalone episode is due out on February 17th.