Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 268
June 9, 2019
Dummy Jack
When I received an invitation from hilobrow.com asking if I wanted to participate in one of its occasional Project:Object series, I knew immediately the identity of the object I’d want to write about: a little dummy jack made of plastic and metal.
The Hilobrow endeavor originated as Significant Objects, which its founders, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, have described as “a literary and anthropological experiment.” For each round of Project:Object, participants write about some item of interest to them, according to some theme. James Hannaham wrote about Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band’s 1978 album, Meets King Pennett, for a series on Political Objects. Annalee Newitz wrote about a remnant of a car bomb for a series on Illicit Objects. Ten years ago, William Gibson wrote about a military-industrial ashtray. The current series is Fetishes.
The esssays are very short, around 500 words, so I’m not going to quote much of mine here. It begins “Sometime around the turn of the millennium I was plagued by a very turn-of-the-millennium hassle: laptops that made unwelcome sounds when turned on.” The full piece is at hilobrow.com.
This dummy jack object was in my possession when the first Significant Object series rolled out, and in some deep lizard brain pocket of my memory, it was already associated with the endeavor when I got the invitation. As I note in the essay, I have been incapable of sorting out why the Realistic tape recorder the jack originally accompanied came with it in the first place, what purpose it once served. I did reach out to some engineering-profession friends, and we didn’t arrive at any useful conclusions, except to the extent that the absence of an explanation burnished the object’s aura of mystery, which reinforced its value to me as a fetish.
I had recalled one old friend, Jorge Colombo, used to employ a makeshift such object, forged from snipped headphones, to keep water out of his iPhone when drawing illustrations on his screen in inclement weather, so I asked him about the practice via email. He quickly replied:
You are all correct about the dummy jacks, great memory. Rendered unnecessary once Apple move headset orifices to iPhone bottoms (before that the main problem was shooting photos in the rain) but I still have some.
And he shared this photo of his collection:
I was fully aware that the dummy jack as a concept has an understood purpose: making a connection or interrupting a signal without introducing a new signal. Shortly after I submitted my Hilobrow Project:Object essay for publication, I happened to obtain a new (to me) module for my synthesizer, and I was reminded me of this utility. A detailed survey of the device’s functionality included two references to means by which a dummy cable (which is to say, a cable used as a dummy jack, in that half of it isn’t plugged into anything) can have an impact on the circuitry. For example:
Tip: if you want an inverted copy of a signal–such as a gate stream–but you want it in the positive voltage domain (0-5v), use these same patch approaches, but insert a dummy cable in LEFT to defeat the -5V offset. Voila!
Voila, indeed.
In any case, I love the Project:Object series, and it was a thrill to participate. There are 25 contributors in all for the Fetish series, and these include Kenneth Goldsmith, Beth Lisick, and Shawn Wolfe. Read the introduction and check out the full index at hilobrow.com.
The Hell of It
As I type this, I am 43% of the way through the new novel by Neal Stephenson, Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell. It is a Singularity story, which is to say it tells of someone whose brain is scanned and uploaded to a computer system, and what happens as a result. (Side note: It’s always “uploaded,” isn’t it? The word suggests a higher plane of existence is assumed for post-human experience. As the book’s subtitle seems to imply, however, we may be wrong about such linguistically entrenched correlations.)
There is a lot of sound in the book, like when, while still on this mortal plane, the protagonist asks himself: “if there was an afterlife, either old-school analog or newfangled digital–if we lived on as spirits or were reconstructed as digital simulations of our own brains–would we still like music?”
Or when exploring the nuances necessary in producing political disinformation: “Whoever had produced this counterfeit had completely nailed the sound: you could hear chairs scraping, shutters clicking, fingers pounding laptop keyboards, people’s cell phones going off, all conveying the sense that a hundred journalists were crammed into the room.”
Or an extended sequence exploring how the music we listen to on headphones alters our perception of reality. The subject is an imaginary band with the awesome name Pompitus Bombasticus. (It brings to mind William Gibson’s 1989 “Rocket Radio” essay, about how “The Walkman changed the way we understand cities.)
Or what his newly digital avatar experiences upon awakening for the first time in the brave new world of the computer: “to the extent he was hearing anything, it was just an inchoate hiss.”
Of course, the key word there is not “hiss” but “inchoate.” I still have 57% of the book to go. We’ll see what comes of it.
This Week in Sound: Fungus + Echolocation + Deepfakes + …
Earworm-Ready: In an effort to find consumer-grade utility for synthetic biology, researchers developed headphones grown from fungus, as well as “bacteria and biosynthetic spider silk.” (Via Subtopes)
Trainspotting 2.0: Learn about the “oto-tetsu” scene in Japan, where musicians use railway sounds to create music. “At the heart of what oto-tetsu creators do is love. The love of trains, the love of making tracks about trains. They are well-known only by each other; they’re not fame-seeking because it’s a scene that feeds itself.” (Thanks, Paul Socolow)
Pod People: Apple out of the blue released a new iPod, the seventh generation of the device. The sixth generation came out way back in 2015. In related news, Apple is rumored to be retiring iTunes at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California, this week.
Practical Magic: In a kind of low-rent version of The Matrix, much of the ingenuity attributed to virtual assistants “relies on massive data sets built by subcontracted human workers earning low wages.”
3D Eavesdropping: New technology is combining echolocation and artificial intelligence “to decipher what the person is doing from the reflected sound alone.”
Political Slur: Deepfakes are an emerging technology of deception, but you don’t need to stick someone’s head on someone else’s body to create disinformation. The Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has criticized Facebook for not removing a doctored video that showed her “appearing to slur her words and stammer and has been viewed and shared on social media millions of times.”
Bose Silence: When physicists worked in a lab to confirm Stephen Hawking’s black hole theory, they used “the point of no return” for sound rather than light, called the Bose-Einstein condensate.
Ear Buds: There’s a parody of fine dining in the new Netflix film from Ali Wong and Randall Park and directed by Nahnatchka Khan, Always Be My Maybe (much of which is set in my longtime San Francisco neighborhood, the Richmond District). In a scene shot downtown, transforming the playful geometry of Daniel Libeskind’s Contemporary Jewish Museum into a hushed, haughty restaurant, a character (whom I won’t identify so as not to spoil a separate joke) asks the waiter, “Do you have any dishes that play with time, the concept of time?” The waiter replies: “It comes with headphones so you can hear the sound of the exact animal you are about to consume.”
Thinking About Frameworks: I didn’t want to waste time at the start of this issue noting how long it’s been since I last sent one out. It takes awhile to get an issue together, all the more so when I miss a week, when life and work intervene. The sonic data runneth over. I love running this newsletter. I’ve run various email newsletters since 1994. The This Week in Sound email, to me, provides a framework. I think a lot about frameworks. There are various frameworks that help me process things, get things done, move ideas forward, close the loop on ideas.
Disquiet.com, which I’ve run since 1996, is a framework in the form of a long-running blog (I think it might even be OK, at this point, to refer to it as a very long-running blog, to the extent that its launch predates the word blog by several years). The Disquiet Junto music community, now in its 8th year, is a framework for collaborating with musicians and working out ideas about sound, music, and networked creativity in real time. The course I teach each spring, “Sounds of Brands,” at a local art college here in San Francisco is a framework for focusing specifically on that topic and working through the ideas with students, who, thanks to being from all over the world, bring their own diverse experiences and perspectives to the discussion. (It’s the only place I have experienced a student from Kazakhstan talk about the stultifying silence of Eastern Bloc educational institutions. The only place I have witnessed a chance conversation between students from Thailand and Saudi Arabia about the whistles they attach to their pet birds. The only place I’ve heard a student, whose family lives in a vast desert, talk about how compounds employ rifles to signal distant neighbors regarding everything from “There’s an emergency!” to “The party has started!”)
Writing freelance articles is a framework. Working for clients is a framework. Writing books is a framework. Fiction I’ve been working at provides a framework. In any case, This Week in Sound is a framework I value a lot, despite the gaps in when I manage to send it out.
This was first published in the June 2, 2019, issue of the free weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound.
June 6, 2019
Disquiet Junto Project 0388: Random Less
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, June 10, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 6, 2019.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0388: Random Less
The Assignment: Make a single piece of music with very few tools, all selected at random.
Step 1: For this project you’ll be using just a few instruments, optimally three, to create an original piece of music.
Step 2: Select three instruments available to you at random. (Alternately, you can roll a die and add one to determine the number of instruments, yielding a result between two and seven.)
Step 3: Create a piece of music employing only the instruments determined in Step 2.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0388” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0388” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0388-random-less/
Step 5: Annotate your track 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, June 10, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 6, 2019.
Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0388” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.
Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Consider setting 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 388th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Random Less / The Assignment: Make a single piece of music with very few tools, all selected at random — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0388-random-less/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project adapted is from the public domain book The commoner diseases of the eye: how to detect and how to treat them, published in 1904. Via the Internet Archive:
May 31, 2019
Interviewed for Wired
I was interviewed for this Wired article by Arielle Pardes, published this morning, about a new wave of generative music apps, among them Endel and Mubert:
Marc Weidenbaum, a writer and cultural critic who studies ambient music, sees this adaptive quality reshaping the future of music itself. “The idea of a recording as a fixed thing should’ve gone away,” he says. With a generative music app, there is potential not just to listen to something organic and ever-changing, but something that strives to emulate your desired mind state exactly.
Weidenbaum says we may be seeing a surge in generative music because our phones are capable of more computational power. But another reason might be that the genre offers a way for companies, advertisers, and game-makers to skirt licensing issues when adding music to their products.
“That’s a little cynical,” he says, but “I think it has a lot to do with cost savings, control, optimization, and a veneer of personalization.” For the rest of us, these apps offer a pleasing surrender to the algorithms–ones that shape the world to our desires and ask nothing in return.
Now, to be clear, I love generative music. I was an early and strong supporter of the RJDJ app, which later evolved, in a manner of speaking, into the Hear app mentioned in the article. (RJDJ creative director Robert M. Thomas has been a frequent participant in and friend of the Disquiet Junto music community.) I’ve also avidly tracked and used Bloom, among other apps created by collaborators Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers. A central theme in my book about Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II is the wind chime, a pre-electronic tool for generative expression.
The distinction I’m drawing is between art and commerce. Art projects of course have financial restraints of their own, but it is modern commerical products and services that undergo rigorous cost-benefit analysis as part of their ongoing development and maintenance. This distinction is what led to my self-described cynical (perhaps a better word is skeptical) view of certain economically incentivized flourshing of generative music.
Much as Uber and Lyft are simultaneously employing countless drivers and pursuing driverless transportation, some activities in generative music seem less like artistic ventures and more like attempts to remove the need for human participation. If the clear primary goal is simply to cut costs through automation, that’s when I think the venture should be viewed (and, to mix the imminent metaphor, heard) through a keen, critical lens.
As a friend recently reminded me, ambient music has its foundation in the writings on cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and philosopher who inspired Brian Eno, the genre’s originator. A key text is Wiener’s 1948 book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which developed a following in management theory. You might even say that the interest by corporations in generative sound in 2019 is the 70-year-old cybernetics concept coming full circle. Then again, in his later book, God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964), Wiener employed the image of the golem, a pre-Frankenstein symbol of artificial life gone awry. Which is to say, skepticism isn’t unprecedented.
Read the full piece at wired.com.
May 30, 2019
Disquiet Junto Project 0387: Everything & More
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, June 3, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 30, 2019.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0387: Everything & More
The Assignment: Make a single piece of music using every single instrument that you have at your disposal.
There is only one step to this project:
Step 1: Make a single piece of music using every single instrument that you have at your disposal.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0387” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0387” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0387-everything-and-more/
Step 5: Annotate your track 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, June 3, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 30, 2019.
Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0387” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.
Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Consider setting 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 387th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Everything & More / The Assignment: Make a single piece of music using every single instrument that you have at your disposal — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
The title for this project come from the 1994 novel by Geoff Nicholson, but David Foster Wallace’s book about infinity arguably applies as well.
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0387-everything-and-more/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project adapted (cropped, colors changed, text added, cut’n’paste) thanks to a Creative Commons license from a photo credited to Clayton Parker:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
May 25, 2019
Speaking Privately to the Algorithm
I spend a good amount of time watching YouTube videos by musicians. Not just of them, but generally by them: studio-journal videos that musicians make to show how they work. Not just recordings of their music, but videos of the process, of the effort, required.
And I marvel at (which is to say, more directly: am dismayed by) instances when a positively received video on YouTube also receives a small handful of dislikes. By this I specifically mean mute negative gestures, devoid of any comment, just a downward-facing thumb. Say what you will about haters, at least when they comment they leave some fingerprint on their dissenting opinion. There’s a uniquely buzz-killing pall cast by the unqualified, unidentified, anonymous thumbs down.
Certainly everything will have its detractors, but I wonder if something else might be going on here. (Now, by “popular” I don’t mean the given video has racked up hundreds of thousands of views. I just mean maybe a couple dozen accounts have given it a thumbs up, and the video is innocuous, not to say inconsequential, just a musician doing their thing.)
I wonder if the issue is that the YouTube interface should provide an opportunity for the watcher/user to say, privately to the algorithm, “I’m not interested in this.” That suggestion is in contrast to requiring, as YouTube currently does, that you register your disinterest publicly.
Right now it’s like the waiter asks how your meal was, and your only option is to stand up and announce it to your fellow diners. And the issue may not be the food; it may not be that you didn’t like the food. The issue may be that it just wasn’t your sort of food, or you would have liked this for lunch but it didn’t satisfy your dinner appetite.
As I’ve thought about this user-interface conundrum, I’ve become entranced by the concept of speaking “privately to the algorithm.” Perhaps that should be capitalized: “I’m speaking, privately, to the Algorithm.”
In that formulation, it’s like a confession, not a religious confession toward addressing your personal spiritual and all-too-human shortcomings, but a confession in the hopes of tailoring your reality. That is, toward addressing the shortcomings you perceive in (digital) reality.
And this is where the constant request for feedback can have (big surprise) unintended consequences. The tools have trained us to let them know what we think, because it’s in our best interest. But is it in anyone else’s interest that you found the given musician’s music uninteresting? While making your world better, have you yucked someone else’s yum? What is the good in that? What does it mean when acting to address the shortcomings you perceive in your digital reality has the direct effect (not merely a side effect, but a direct and immediate one) of negatively impacting the digital reality of other people?
Note the following three different scenarios on YouTube and how the user’s feedback is constrained, even directed, by the interface.
Below is a screenshot of the egregious situation I’m currently describing. If you’re on the page for a video, you have only the options to ignore, comment, or give it a thumbs up or thumb down, and of course to “Report” it, but that’s a different situation entirely:
Contrast that with the option you have for videos that YouTube serves up to your account based on what you’ve viewed before. Note that here, there is a plainly stated means to say “Not interested”:
And note that this isn’t merely a matter of whether you arrive at the video through your own actions or through the recommendations of YouTube. For example, if you subscribe to channels on YouTube, you can still, from the Subscriptions page, elect to Hide something:
Now, perhaps if you select “Hide” that is all that happens. Perhaps it just takes the video out of view. Perhaps YouTube doesn’t register your action as a means to adjust how its algorithm triangulates your viewing taste. But that seems unlikely, doesn’t it? We use these interfaces today with the impression that they will inform our future use of a given tool. Which is why when faced with no “Not interested” or “Hide” equivalent on a page, the user is, if not justified in registering their disinterest, forgiven a little for registering their dissatisfaction.
The issue is that the user’s dissatisfaction isn’t necessarily with the video. It is, indirectly and yet significantly, with YouTube.
May 24, 2019
Synth Learning: “Tako Friday”
The soap-opera narrative of my modular synthesizer diary is me breaking up with and then getting back together again with my Soundmachines UL1 module. I think we finally committed to a long-time engagement last night. Season-ending episode.
This evening, to celebrate the 24-hour-versay of our vows, I ran a slow arpeggio of a series of electric guitar chords through the UL1, and through four other processing units.
Here’s more technical detail, as part of my modular diary, mostly for my own memory: All five of these separate processings of the guitar play simultaneously, though two are being gated, meaning you don’t hear them consistently. The UL1 is a lofi looper, and it’s the thing here being pushed into glitch territory. The UL1 is receiving a narrow, high-end band of the guitar signal, as filtered by the Make Noise FXDf. Another narrow band, also on the high end, is going from the FXDf straight out. A third narrow band, the highest of the trio, is going into a slowly clocked Befaco Muxlicer, the relative volume of the signal changing with each pulse. That same pulse is determining whether a fourth channel, the guitar through the Make Noise Erbe-Verb reverb module, is to be heard or not (as clocked by a slow square wave on a Batumi). That Erbe-Verbe is also having its algorithm flipped into reverse, on occasion, based on the same clocked pulse, but the gate delayed a bit (thanks to the Hemispheres firmware running on an Ornament and Crime module). And finally, the guitar is running through Clouds, a granular synthesis module, which is also being clocked to occasionally snag a bit of the guitar signal and turn it into a haze.
It took awhile to get the chords right. The only note the four chords have in common is an open D. The piece fades in with the D played on two strings, setting the backing tone. It also took awhile to get the right processing decisions made. I started with the UL1, and then built up and adjusted from there. I’m working on having more randomness in the triggering of the UL1, but this is pretty good, far as it goes.
It sounds a bit “Octopus’s Garden,” so it’s titled “Tako Friday” (tako being Japanese for octopus, and this being Friday). In retrospect I hear a bit of “The Dark Side of the Moon” in there, too. The audio was recorded through a Mackie mixer into a Zoom H4n, and then trimmed and given a fade in and fade out in Adobe Audition.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
May 23, 2019
Disquiet Junto Project 0386: New Colors
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, May 27, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 23, 2019.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0386: New Colors
The Assignment: Out with the old white noise, in with the new.
Thanks to Todd Burns, a conversation with whom led to this project, and to Jason Wehmhoener for the use of his original art.
Step 1: The goal for this project is to develop new realms of white noise, new colors of noise.
Step 2: Think of your audience as a new parent, and also their newborn. Think of noises that can cancel out the world, that can provide comfort and a sense of safety.
Step 3: Record a piece of music that results from your thinking about Step 1 and Step 2.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0386” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0386” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0386-new-colors/
Step 5: Annotate your track 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, May 27, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 23, 2019.
Length: The length is up to you. Presumably this piece will be played for a long time, perhaps on loop.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0386” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.
Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Consider setting 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 386th weekly Disquiet Junto project — New Colors / The Assignment: Out with the old white noise, in with the new — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Thanks to Todd Burns, a conversation with whom led to this project, and to Jason Wehmhoener for the use of his original art for this project’s “cover.”
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0386-new-colors/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
May 20, 2019
Live: Branciforte, Bleckmann, and Gomberg
Finally got to see Joseph Branciforte perform live last week for the first time, having admired his music for several years now. He is on tour with Theo Bleckmann, supporting their forthcoming collaborative album, LP1, which as the title suggests is the first of something, in this case the first from a new record label, Greyfade, founded by Branciforte. The duo performed on Wednesday, May 15, at the Center for New Music at the edge of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, with Billy Gomberg opening up. Branciforte and Bleckmann are based in New York City, and Gomberg moved to San Francisco from New York last year.
Branciforte, an accomplished producer and musician, worked with sounds manipulated by and triggered from his laptop, yielding small percussive motives and gentle washes. Bleckmann has recorded for ECM, Winter & Winter, and other labels, and his past collaborators include Laurie Anderson, Phil Kline, and Meredith Monk. He was very much the focus of the performance, a charismatic singer in a polka-dot shirt who channeled the evident power of his voice into tiny, soft gestures that he looped and transformed with a small battery of devices on an adjacent table. Together they filled the room with often fiercely quiet and delicate material, playing straight through for about 45 minutes.
Gomberg opened the evening with a set on his economically sized modular synthesizer rig. He explained to the audience at the start of the show that the apartment building in which he lives has had renovations going on, and that the work has caused a lot of noise, noise he has in turn been filtering into his own work. In this case that meant the sounds of construction and the muffled conversations, in Spanish, of workers, which he slowly subsumed, the voices giving way over time to modestly scaled melodic pursuits. The transitions were so subtle that you had to think back to recall where your ear had been. There was an introspection to the piece that suggested someone making mental space for themselves amid the persistent cacophony.
More from Bleckmann at theobleckmann.com, Branciforte at josephbranciforte.com, Gomberg at fraufraulein.com, and the Greyfade label at greyfade.com.
