Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 28

Disquiet Junto Project 0680: Reverse Resolution

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 0680: Reverse Resolution
The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year.

This project has just one step: finish something you started last year, likely a piece of music you left unfinished.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0680” (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-0680-reverse-resolution/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, January 13, 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 680th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Reverse Resolution — The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year — at https://disquiet.com/0680/

Coppola x Davis

The Conversation is like Francis Ford Coppola’s In a Silent Way.

Which would make Walter Murch his Teo Macero, which just about works.

(Oh, nice, and as Aaron Oppenheim put it after I posted those observations: that’d make Apocalypse Now his Bitches Brew.)

If You’re Waiting to Hear from Me

Back at It / Trash Totem

Didn’t meet the Buddha on the road, but did spy this trash totem on a neighborhood walk, setting the tone for the year ahead. Note the damage done to the right speaker, and the weeds growing out of various holes on the left side.

On Repeat: Isungset, Aarset, Vogelsinger, Buckley, Levienaise-Farrouch

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

▰ In Memory of Nature by Terje Isungset and Eivind Aarset — this is Aarset’s most melodically remote album in some time, and the fact that percussionist Isungset gets top billing may explain why.

▰ Not sure if I’m ready for 2025, but Hélène Vogelsinger sure is. She posted this short montage of clips, “The Crossing,” from work she’s done the past year, all set to a single, flowing, warping, glorious synthesizer track.

▰ The Lincoln Lawyer and The Agency — two shows I’ve been watching, the scores to neither of which appear to be available commercially yet. David Buckley’s work on The Lincoln Lawyer has a jazz-tinged quality, emphasis on trumpet, that’s a little more ethereal than the score to Bosch (both series are based on novels by Michael Connelly). Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, whose work on The Agency I’ve mentioned previously, edges well past the standard grade tension-inducing beats and tones of thriller scores. I really want to hear both of these on their own, devoid of their respective narrative-making purposes.

Scratch Pad: Defrost Mode

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.

In fact, I’ve been off social media entirely since the Friday before (American) Thanksgiving, and I’m off a lot of other digital social venues, as well, including several Slacks, several email discussion lists, several Discourses, etc. That will remain the case until early next week, and I may phase in my emergence from Deep Freeze Mode rather than do whatever the opposite of cold turkey is. Defrost Mode should be enacted with caution. (And it hasn’t really been a deep freeze, because I wrote and read a heap ton, but mostly the past month-plus was family time.)

So, what follows are some notes I made for myself — a digital social network of one — from the past week:

▰ Started a re-read of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, just a tad past its 25th anniversary. Somehow I had entirely forgotten the extended opening section on sound, music, and the mechanics of the pipe organ. And this is the fourth time I’ve read the book — though the previous times were all more than a decade and a half ago.

▰ From early on in Cryptonomicon: “The fish are silver and leaf-shaped. Each one strikes the water with a metallic click, and the clicks merge into a crisp ripping noise.”

▰ It’s the year of Option Command H.

▰ First earworm of 2025: “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals

▰ Sad to learn of the death of artist Pete Doolittle (here’s a touching memorial from my friend Marke B), whose painted window panes have been a constant visual presence in San Francisco for a very long time. I got this one in 2005 in the Lower Haight, a couple years after we moved back from New Orleans. He did great robots, lemme tell ya: sad, broken, helpful.

I’ve only been in touch with Doolittle digitally for many years now, and knowing he’s dead feels a lot like when Steve Silberman died: a star in the digital firmament has gone dark, silent. There’s a moment in Dennis E. Taylor’s science fiction novel We Are Legion (We Are Bob) when a character dies, and all his colleagues learn this simultaneously because his signal goes out quite suddenly and unexpectedly. That book is a work of fiction that takes place mostly many start systems away and a century-plus in the future, but the experience is all too familiar, and it has really hit home with Doolittle’s death.

▰ Why does it say music “plays” in the captions to TV shows and movies? Isn’t “[suspenseful music]” sufficient? Does “[suspenseful music plays]” add or clarify anything? I mean I get “[fades out]” but “[plays]” is redundant.

▰ Second earworm of 2025: the song from Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors. This barely counts as an earworm, in that it’s not remotely annoying to me. It’s only annoying to everyone around me as I sing it all day long.

▰ The Mary Cassatt exhibit at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco is so great, and it ends on January 26, so if you’re in the area and haven’t gone, get your tickets. It is the perfect parallel to my ongoing read of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. And yes, I’m reading two 900-page books at the same time, so forgive me for not having finished anything by this first Saturday of the new year. Though I am almost done reading a graphic novel and a non-fiction book I’ve snuck in.

▰ Also at the Legion of Honor, Dress Rehearsal: The Art of Theatrical Design, in one of my favorite small exhibit spaces in San Francisco. This piece is a 1919 illustrated panel by the British painter David Bomberg (1890 – 1957), from a work titled Russian Ballet. I’m not certain what it means, but I’m reading it as that even back in 1919 someone found a standing ovation (or the equivalent) to be unearned. Also, best em-dash ever.

▰ I was in the ER for a family emergency shortly after New Year’s Eve, which after about six hours in the middle of the night came to a relieving conclusion. I mention this because the ER is a cacophony of beeps and moans in a way that has amazed me on the few occasions when I’ve been unfortunate enough to visit one. There is no underestimating how inured the professionals there become to the audio alerts, and how not conducive those alarms and buzzers are to the recuperation of the patients. There has got to be a better way.

Novels Read, 2024

Weirdly, I finished reading the same number of prose novels this year as I did the previous year: 30, on the nose. The books with the + signs next to them are the ones I particularly recommend. Doesn’t mean I disliked the others. There are two more + books in this list than there were in last year’s list. This list is in the order in which I finished reading the novels. A few are novellas. The list doesn’t include graphic novels or non-fiction or poetry.

1: +Alastair Reynolds: Permafrost
2: Adrian Tchaikovsky: Shards of Earth
3: +Mick Herron: The Secret Hours
4: Allie Rowbottom: Aesthetica
5: Nick Harkaway: Titanium Noir
6: +Jennifer Egan: The Candy House
7: David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
8: +Colson Whitehead: Harlem Shuffle
9: Lawrence Block: The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep
10: R.F. Kuang: Babel
11: +Rebecca West: The Return of the Soldier
12: HG Wells: The World Set Free
13: Anthony McCarten: Going Zero
14: Ken MacLeod: Beyond the Hallowed Sky
15: +Robin Sloan: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
16: Fonda Lee: The Jade Setter of Janloon
17: +Robin Sloan: Moonbound
18: Max Barry: Lexicon
19: Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry of Time
20: Jean-Patrick Manchette: The Prone Gunman
21: James S.A. Corey: The Mercy of Gods
22: James S.A. Corey: Livesuit
23: John M. Ford: The Final Reflection (Star Trek)
24: Neal Stephenson: Polostan
25: +Charles Portis: True Grit
26: Lawrence Robbins: The President’s Lawyer
27: +Nick Harkaway: Karla’s Choice
28: +Vasily Mahanenko: Survival Quest (The Way of the Shaman: Book #1)
29: Kate Atkinson: Case Histories
30: +Dennis E. Taylor: We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Disquiet Junto Project 0679: Ice Age

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 0679: Ice Age
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.

Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto communal music projects. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one step:

Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each January ever since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. By now, it qualifies as a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0679” (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-0679-ice-age/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, January 6, 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 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/

2025: Enter Quietly

On the last day of 2024, I found myself again in Muir Woods, again in the mode of “Marc walks into nature and takes pictures of signs.” Not until I was back in the car did I recognize that I had found the right way — essentially an oblique strategy, courtesy of the National Park Service — to approach 2025. There’s a useful ambiguity to the typeface, the italics a tool of emphasis, despite what they’re emphasizing being an effort at self-constraint.

Junto Profile: W. Sze Tsang (aka Samarobryn)

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 full name is Wing Sze Tsang. In my artist practitioner-researcher life, I use W. Sze Tsang. In the majority of face-to-face interactions, I use Sze (pronounced like ‘sea’, I usually tell people to think of the ocean). When I’m ordering food or coffee from a shop, I use Wing because people will mishear ‘Sze’ and turn it into a variety of different names.

samarobryn is my moniker for my solo music projects. ‘samarobryn’ comes from a Nostradamus quatrain:

Samarobryn, a hundred leagues from the hemisphere,
Shall live without law, exempt from policy.

I chose ‘samarobryn’ because I was really drawn to this image of a strange, watchful, distant cryptid — as a fellow strange, watchful cryptid, I can totally relate to the experience of observing the world from afar.

I’m currently in two bands: Veils is an experimental, instrumental band combining vocals, guitar, modular synths, laptop and live visuals. Phantom Island is a thumping, new-wave tinged rock band featuring a bunch of local legends.

Where are you located? I was raised in, and currently live, work and play in Boorloo [Perth], on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja, part of the Noongar Nation [South-Western Australia]. My ancestral roots are in Hong Kong, where I spent the first two years of my life. I’ve travelled a lot over the years, but Boorloo is my home.

I currently live in the outer northern suburbs, with the beach in the west and a national park behind. I generally enjoy living here, although it can feel isolating because I’m far away from the city’s cultural hotspots. Living in Boorloo itself can also be quite isolating, as we are so far from the rest of Australia and the world, but we have an active, close-knit arts scene where everyone is so supportive of each other. I also think the isolation has given me the space to approach my music in novel ways.

What is your musical activity? At its core, my work is about exploring how I feel about something — and this something can be a theme, a place, or an idea. I list a few keywords that summarise my feelings, then I ask myself — how might I express these feelings through sound? I’m really interested in the intersections between history, place and self, and this interest ultimately led me to completing a PhD in Music Composition in 2023, via the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University.

The main foundation for my works are field recordings, for two reasons. Firstly, it’s a way of incorporating place into my works as a way of self-reflexive narrative. It’s interesting to explore what drove me a) to go to a place and record and b) why did I choose to record a certain sound? Secondly, using field recordings is a way of exploring how I could use existing sounds in a new way. I use a lot of audio manipulation in my works — delays, time-stretching, distortion, phasers, reverbs — because it’s fascinating how these tools can dramatically alter the character of a sound.

Time-stretching is one of my favourite techniques, particularly extreme time-stretching. I first came across the idea via English composer Joanna Baillie, who would do extensive elongations on small moments in time. She termed this process as, ‘freezing’, and it’s about exploring all the hidden rhythms and melodies of an instant, and allowing these events to become accessible to memory. In a similar vein, Canadian composer Barry Truax also uses elongation as a way to dive into the inner, hidden harmonics of a sound.

A lot of my work tends to be quite aurally dense — full of drones and sounds asynchronously layered, alongside unaltered field recordings. Much of my work is based around deep dives into a single field recording — taking moments of varying lengths, elongating and manipulating them, having them pan and weave around each other. It’s also quite exciting because I can never predict the final result.

I’d say my current practice started to coalesce around 2017. For about three years prior, I had been exploring how to translate my landscape photography to sound. The work I created had a bit of field recording, but it was largely sonification (aka the process of translating non-musical data into musical data) and beat and notes-based.

In terms of music in general — the very first instrument I learnt was the piano. I did classical piano until I was 16, until I discovered the cathartic power of smashing out distorted power chords on guitar. While I don’t directly employ my classical training in my current music, I find that it’s been a great foundation for structuring compositions and working out melody lines when I’m playing guitar. Speaking of which — the guitar has taken me to some interesting and unexpected places. I’ve been part of lots of local bands over the years, and also played guitar in a dance show (Cry Baby) and a theatre show (The Dirty Mother). It would’ve blown my angsty teen self away.

What is one good musical habit? I think it’s always good to ask yourself, “What am I trying to convey with this song/piece/sound?” Then always circle back to your original rationale with anything you do while in the midst of your work. Think about whether this technique/piece of equipment/instrument etc. will help you achieve your goal. Sometimes people get caught up in wanting to, or feeling like they need to, use something that’s new to them, simply because it’s there — and not because it’ll actually enhance the final work.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t experiment — on the contrary, experimentation is where you get some of the best ideas! — but it’s a) okay to try something and abandon the idea because it’s not the right moment and b) always think back to whether something is going to help you create your work’s narrative.

What are your online locations? If you want to find out more about my work and research, my website is a great place to start. Contains links to everything!: samarobryn.work/

I post about my latest updates and works-in-progress on my Instagram: instagram.com/samarobryn/

For my bands, you can check them out here:
Veils: instagram.com/veils.collective/
Phantom Island: instagram.com/phantomislandband/

What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? I first started joining the Junto in 2018, as a way to overcome my then writer’s block — so there’s quite the back catalogue! After some thought, I finally settled onto this one from December 2020 — [distant screaming], from Disquiet 0469.

2020 was a difficult and tumultuous year for me — it marked the advent of the pandemic where I was an essential worker as frontline hospital staff. I also dealt with lots of personal losses, and the cherry on top of this hellscape was dealing with a toxic workplace that sent my mental health into the shitter. It was very healing to record myself screaming and getting the frustrations of the year out of my system.

What characteristics does your music have today that it didn’t before you studied for and received your PhD? Good question! Sound-wise, I’d say the main characteristic is the emphasis of field recordings as the basis for creating work. Before my PhD, it was there in the background as a supporting element, while I was more interested in thinking how to convey data from photographs I’d taken in the field (in the form of HEX and histogram values) into sound. I had that interest because I was into landscape photography at the time, and wanted to find a way to combine my love of photography with my music practice. During the course of my research, I began to find this approach limiting, in two ways — firstly, I really wanted to find ways of incorporating place into my work, so that place becomes intertwined within, and secondly, my supervisors at the time really encouraged me to dive into the reasons why I was doing all of this in the first place.

So I began to use field recordings as my foundational source, because the association between HEX and histogram data from photographs of a place and the place itself is pretty loose, whereas field recordings are far more immediate and visceral. Also, I began to really appreciate field recordings as a way of documenting the perspective of the recordist, as well as documenting place itself at a particular moment. I found this quote by Hildegard Westerkamp quite powerful:

I use environmental sound and language as my instruments. I want to find the “voices” of a place or situation, voices that can speak most powerfully about a place/situation and about our experience in and with it. (Westerkamp, 1985)

My current work is more about the texture of the sound, and the conveying emotions rather than anything melodic. Any harmonies or rhythms are purely incidental. I also embrace aspects which might otherwise be seen as “audio flaws” — the sound of the wind hitting the microphone, handling noise, the sound of my footsteps as I traverse a terrain — because to me, that’s all about capturing the entirety of the soundscape at the time. I am part of the soundscape being recorded, in the same way that I am part of the work that arises from these recordings.

In terms of conceptual differences — I’ve gained a deeper appreciation of the complexities of the nature of place, and the relationship between place and artist. I’ve realised that my personal experiences very much matter in the creation of work, and that having that level of self-reflection can make a work quite powerful. I’m also more thoughtful about history and culture — both within myself and of the places I record. A lot of places have contested histories and arguably my personal history is similar. There’s things that have happened that people don’t want to acknowledge because it’s too difficult. All this probably reflects on why my music is always a bit unsettling with these undercurrents of darkness.

Do you use the sound of your voice frequently in your music, and if not, why? Actually, no — I use my voice very rarely. Although there’s been a few times where I’ve used my voice in a piece. I recorded a piece once where I sang with a recording of an Australian raven, slowed 8x. That was interesting because all these rich microtones really came out. Then, of course, there was the Dischoir prompt from Disquiet 0419.

I was really interested in using more of my voice though, at one point, mainly because I liked how personal voice can be. It’s emanating directly from you — how much more personal and intimate could you get? I imagined my work to be something akin to Scottish artist Susan Philipsz, who explores the psychological and sculptural aspects of place through sound, by primarily using recordings of herself singing reworked compositions acapella, which are then played through a PA. It’s interesting to hear how her voice interacts with place — i.e., how it bounces off buildings and the terrain, and how it interacts with the soundscape of the moment. Then I found myself moving in a decidedly non-musicality direction, so I let go of the idea of using my voice.