Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 26

On Repeat: Dub, Buchla, Jamuary

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.

This week, all live performances:

▰ Andrew Tasselmyer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) gets quietly catastrophic with this dubby seven-minute live piece:

▰ A full hour-long set from synth legend Suzanne Ciani (Bolinas, California), just uploaded, but recorded last April in Milan. It goes everywhere — wispy space music, Tron-style pulse-raising beats, utter chaos. It’s something else.

▰ Jamuary — that’s not a spelling error — is the gift that keeps on giving, as electronic musicians upload work throughout the first month of the year, like this percolating set of looped elements from lap steel guitar, by Magnetic Loops of Bristol, UK:

On ‘The Straight Story’

I had the pleasure last year to write not once but twice about the work of David Lynch. I contributed a short essay about his film The Straight Story, which was just turning a quarter century old, for a special issue of The Wire dedicated to Lynch on the occasion of his new album release, Cellophane Memories, a collaboration with Texas-based singer Chrystabell. I also reviewed that album for Pitchfork. So, when Lynch’s death was announced, his work was especially present for me, still lingering from the hours I’d spent pondering it. Below is the Wire essay. I talked about it a bit when it first came out, and music critic Ned Raggett was generous enough to cite it in something he published this week.

Parable of the Mower
Sound design and radical juxtaposition lead the narrative in The Straight Story

Disney acquired David Lynch’s The Straight Story in 1999 after the Cannes Film Festival showered it with praise. It remains, 25 years later, Lynch’s sole G-rated release, for general consumption.

The film tells a story (based on a true one) about an elderly American Second World War veteran, lacking a driver’s license, who employs his gas-powered lawn mower to travel from his home in lowa to visit his estranged brother in Wisconsin, hundreds of miles away. The brother suffered a stroke. The protagonist Alvin Straight, played by Richard Farnsworth, deals with countless trappings of old age, including emphysema and failing eyes. The mower isn’t in much better shape.

Lynch’s only other credit on the film, besides directing, is sound design. And the sound in The Straight Story exudes his characteristic surreality by way of heightened mundanity (the score is by Angelo Badalamenti, dependably). The movie takes its title from the actual family name, Straight, of the man on whom its lead is based. Lynch also plays it straight, so straight that his use of sound here comes down to two approaches: very loud and very quiet.

First, though, Lynch instructs us to listen by having his characters discuss listening. Straight’s daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek) tells him (and us) about the sounds he makes when he stands, thus raising concerns about advanced age without announcing them. Soon after, a giant agricultural structure fills the screen, and we hear its thunderous nocturnal drone (Eraserhead’s radiator, minus the lady, writ large). The scene shifts from the looming structure to a moonlit backyard, where father and daughter are enjoying the evening. The whirr, quieter now, persists in the ambience. Says the older Straight, “Listen to that old grain elevator.” Rose replies: “It’s harvest time.”

Moments akin to the grain elevator’s violent drone punctuate The Straight Story like chapter headings. Lightning goes off with biblical intensity. A truck scares Straight off the road, and its fading rumble lasts for more than 30 seconds after it passes. Sometimes the noise is of Straight’s making: when he leaves town, his cantankerous friends yell over the mower’s motor. When a mower fails, Straight shoots it like a lame horse; it explodes loudly into flames. In the noisiest moments, exaggerated volume routinely subverts the seeming realism.

At other times, near-silence is the emphasis. When Straight rises from the seat of his mower, we hear each creak, a sonic exoskeleton of his troubling fragility. Later, in a bar scene, we only notice someone sharpening a knife when the bartender extends his attention from Straight to include the other patron. It’s a masterful moment, when the creative opportunity of diegetic sound — not just what’s in the scene, but what’s perceived by those in the scene — is on full display. In that same sequence, Lynch appears to nod to one of his most famous scenes. The director who, in Blue Velvet, introduced the exchange, “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!” into the vernacular, here records the sound of a beer bottle being opened with delicacy befitting an ASMR session. The most telling quiet moments are the ones when Lynch captures conversations from a distance, and mikes them with a faithfulness that renders them just shy of unintelligible. If he instructed us to listen earlier, he later tags on ethical amendments about privacy.

Throughout the film, all the sounds are real (or at least Foley) until late in the narrative, when a fellow veteran tells Straight a story of his own, and then the soundtrack superimposes the sounds of war itself. There’s nothing subtle about the audio overlay, but there’s also nothing subtle about the impact of the story on the man’s life, when his fellow soldiers were killed by a passing German warplane. The man switches, tellingly, to the present tense and says, “I can see the swastika.” Past and present are simultaneous in the moment. Straight commiserates with an equally harrowing story, and again there is a noisy resonance, but its origin is more ambiguous. Quite likely it is sound from the street given meaning and purpose by Straight’s tale. That is the best sound effect of all.

Scratch Pad: Nicholson, ’Phone, Obsidian

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.

▰ Terribly sad about the death of author Geoff Nicholson. Geoff wrote a bit for me when I was an editor at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine in the early/mid-1990s. When a new Bush album came out, we were due to put the band on the cover, because they were popular, and covers played a different role in decision-making than did the interior material. I’d just read Geoff’s novel Everything and More, which takes place in a department store and said lots of interesting things about consumerism, and his earlier non-fiction book Big Noises, about the guitar in rock and roll (in classic Nicholson mode: it was about the role of guitar in the 1990s, yet was published at the start of the decade, not the end), and so I assigned him the interview. He did great, needless to say. He was also (as am I) an obsessive walker. I will miss him.

▰ I was looking today at some old newspapers from 1916, and I like that the word “‘phone” was new enough usage that they still included an apostrophe to show it was a shortened “telephone.” (The “Wilson” is Woodrow Wilson, due to address a convention in St. Louis long-distance. Very high-tech.)

▰ This new Gemini thing in Gmail that insistently inquires if I wanna “polish” my email is spelled with a capital “P” so every single time it pops up I wonder why the software is trying to get me to translate my draft into Polish. (And not today, AI. I don’t — neither polish, nor Polish.)

▰ The ice cream truck drives by — yes, it’s mid-January — playing its little ditty, and everyone in the cafe, employees and customers alike, looks up in unison from whatever they’re individually doing and out toward the street

▰ I watched the old Beastie Boys performance of “Ch-Check It Out” from Letterman where they emerge from the subway, rapping much of it outdoors before entering the studio. Automated captions read “swap the fish” at the bottom of the screen for a long time, then replaced by “down,” and that was it.

▰ That thing where an app pings you and it’s pretty clear it’s nothing remotely important, just somewhere a product manager decided to try to juice engagement statistics

▰ Chinese food gurus: Any recommendations for restaurants serving spicy douhua in San Francisco? Thanks. (I’m not big on sweet.)

▰ It’s a small thing, but it still feels a little magical when I add a Disquiet Junto participant’s just-uploaded track to the week’s project’s playlist, and then somewhere else, where the playlist is embedded, like on my own website or the llllllll.co BBS, the track appears.

▰ Loved this essay about David Lynch by music critic Ned Raggett, and am stoked to have my little piece on Lynch’s The Straight Story mentioned.

▰ As a heavy Obsidian user, I’ve found the expedient Bebop iOS app to be nearly perfect. One other thing I’ve done is use an easy Shortcut so from my iPhone with one click I can open a specific doc (like a to-do list). Just paste in a doc URL and the Shortcut works. (This link is the Shortcut template. I still find Shortcuts very confusing, but I manage to get a little bit done with them.)

▰ I’m still plugging away at my two extended reads that have defined the start of this still very new yet already very long year: Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (closing in on halfway, and it’s a re-read, my fourth time since it was published, back in 1999) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (more like a quarter-ish). In the midst of two very long books, I needed some sort of short-term closure, so while doing so cut into my predetermined reading, I made quick work of a short novel in the meanwhile, the first (or second, depending on publication or storyline sequencing) of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, which I never completed reading as a child, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, mostly because I wanted to have read it before the in-the-works Greta Gerwig film adaptation comes out. I also finished reading one graphic novel, Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton, by writer Kyle Starks and artist Chris Schweizer, neither of whom I knew much about before, and which I liked the heck out of, especially Schweizer’s ability with cute-yet-chaotic moments in tightly packed little panels. There’s a lot of Kyle Baker in Schweizer’s drawing, and Tex Avery, and other elements I can’t immediately tease out. He can put more drama in a still frame of a casually drawn car hovering in midair than does much of the splash-page bravado I’ve been faced with lately, and more characterization, as well, in faces drawn simply.

Most Loved

What are the chances? Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, Keith Richards’ Talk Is Cheap, Mountain Man’s Magic Ship, King Sunny Ade’s Syncro System, and so much more, including a turntable, just sitting here, and for free.

post.lurk.org/@disquiet

If you’re on Mastodon, lemme know if we’re not following each other. I’m on Mastodon at post.lurk.org, which may be a confusing sentence — like, “How are you on X if your URL is Y?” — but that’s just how it works. I’m on a bunch of social media services, and I’ve been having fun on Bluesky (aka bsky.app) lately. The service I’d like to see take off the most is Mastodon. My Mastodon account is post.lurk.org/@disquiet (I don’t love the word “lurk,” but it’s where I started, so for the time being, it’s where I’m hanging). See you there.

Disquiet Junto Project 0682: Unring a Bell

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 0682: Unring a Bell
The Assignment: What if you could?

There is just one step to this project. The idea that one cannot “unring a bell” is a fairly common saying, at least in English. But what if you could? What might it sound like? And what use might the unrung bell serve in the making of music. Please record a track in which you try to unring a bell.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0682” (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-0682-unring-a-bell/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, January 27, 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 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/

Rainy Day in London (Field Recording)

There are, let’s say, times when I need to get away, and if not physically, then at least mentally, and in the latter case then all the better psycho-geographically. I need change to register with me in ways that signals different, alien, other. Even if the experience is vicarious, it should, best it can, express itself somatically. A walking tour can do this, a video-enabled wander around a place other than where I actually happen to live and work. Many such videos I piggyback on are from video games, where vloggers record their play in ways that avoid play in favor of ambience.

But, I’m not entirely against the real world, and this rainy day winter walk in London, recorded by the YouTuber who goes by Watched Walker, really hit the spot. Perhaps it was the time of day, or the weather, or the part of London, but much of the video, despite being from our actual flesh and blood (or concrete, glass, and cobblestone) world, feels as empty — in a good way — as those game-less video games, just a blank space in which one can follow along, and listen to the way the weather and geography, the building facades and vehicles, lend a music-less soundtrack to the excursion.

Leaving Records Is ‘Staying’

The LA-based label Leaving Records has posted two tracks for free streaming off its latest release, Staying: Leaving Records Aid to Artists Impacted by the Los Angeles Wildfires. That’s two out of just shy of 100 — yes, 100. Wisely, they lead with some strengths, a bubbling track from early ambient master Laraaji, “Joyous Dance ’82,” and a slightly more downbeat but still percolating piece by Baths and Rachika Nayar, “Dried Apricot.” Once you purchase the collection, you’ll have 96 more to listen to. I’m still working my way through all 98, but early favorites include a quick bit of glitchy beatmaking from Glia (“Gaal RDM”), a sedate trance from André 3000 featuring Carlos Niño, Alex Cline, and Pablo Calogero (“This is Where my room used to be.”), a totally warped excursion from Daedalus (“Making the Beat Scene”), lush new age from Cool Maritime (“Freshet”), and a great explorative mix of funky soloing and noisy effects by Sam Wilkes (“Culebra”), a haunting drone by KMRU (“Visions”), and a contribution by Steve Roach that I would call angelic except that the title already does that for me (“For the Angels”). Details on the fund distribution are on the album’s webpage.

Half Mast

The local movie theaters are paying tribute. Ours, by some bizarre chance, already had Blue Velvet scheduled, so they added more showings.

On Repeat: Loraine James, Aphex on Guitar

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.

▰ I was mistakenly under the impression that the great Loraine James wouldn’t have a new record out until 2026, but she does, and it’s due out mid-March, and the first song is already here under her Whatever the Weather moniker, “12°C.” Very interesting amalgam of field recordings and low-key glitch, and all the more interesting for mixing it up as it proceeds, never sticking to one idea for long before moving on.

▰ Simon Farintosh has a new transcription of an Aphex Twin song out, part of his third volume of Richard D. James adaptations. This is “IZ-US,” originally the closing track on the Come to Daddy album from 1997. I interviewed Farintosh back in early 2021 about his work.

▰ Marcus Fischer has posted a fascinating document of his sound installation Carry the Water from last year. The installation consists of 55 gallon water barrel, powder-coated jerry cans, concrete, transducers, and digital audio. As Fischer explains: “The installation is made up of a series of metal vessels, all of which could hold water but are in fact empty and only act as resonators for the amplified sound of water.”

▰ Gorgeous self-titled album of ambient chamber jazz from the Nighttime Ensemble. The group consists of Daniel Wyche (guitar), Brian J. Sulpizio (piano), Ro Lundberg (upright bass), Lia Kohl (cello, radio, objects), and Sam Scranton (drums, percussion). It’s one single track, almost an hour in length.