Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 30

Data Overload, 1817 Edition

That is from Middlemarch, George Eliot’s novel, back in 1817. This will either be the last novel I finish reading in 2024 or one of the first I finish reading in 2025.

Disquiet Junto Project 0677: Jeux d’enfants

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 0677: Jeux d’enfants
The Assignment: Make music inspired by a children’s toy or game.

Step 1: In the early 1870s, the composer George Bizet wrote a suite of short pieces, each inspired by one or another toy or game beloved by children. The first in the series, “L’escarpolette,” suggested a swing, and another, “La toupie,” a spinning top. There were pieces for soap bubbles and leap-frog, as well. Read up on and listen to Bizet’s suite, which was titled Jeux d’enfants, or Children’s Games.

Step 2: Choose a suitable toy or game, perhaps one from your own childhood, or perhaps something even more modern.

Step 3: Record a short piece of music inspired by the subject you selected in Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0677” (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-0677-jeux-denfants/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long does your top spin?

Deadline: Monday, December 23, 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 677th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Jeux d’enfants — The Assignment: Make music inspired by a children’s toy or game — at https://disquiet.com/0677/

Final Night(s) at the Luggage Store

I don’t know if tonight was the final night of the Luggage Store Gallery Music Series, which Rent Romus has run or co-run for the past 22 of its 30 years. I think there’s one more concert, on January 8, but if I understood correctly, there may not be, something about a possible cancellation, but I may have misunderstood. In any case, if tonight was the last night, it was a great one to go out on. Two bands, both trios, a musician shared between them, first on guitar as the leader, then as the youngest member of a group in which he played the drums. That would be Inkwells Trio (Lorenzo Arreguin, guitar; Elijah Pontecorvo, six-string fretless bass; Christian Arriola, drums) followed by saxophonist Romus’ long-running (since 1995) group with a shifting lineup, Lords of Outland (tonight: him; Ray Scheaffer, five-string bass; Arreguin, drums). Both bands played out, the Inkwells a loud jazz metal, with Arreguin calling out directions with a combination of cards and hand signals, and Outland a keening, spirited free jazz. The gallery building, here in San Francisco, on Market Street, around the corner from 6th Street, is due to be sold.

And the city smiled for its close-up on my way home:

Robin Fox’s Lasers

Did I mention* I attended one night of the Recombinant Media Labs festival this month? There were lasers, courtesy of Robin Fox, as part of Triptych, a tribute to Polish audio-visual artist Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski. The accompanying sharp, somehow sparse yet tightly packed techno was not just perfectly aligned with the ever-shifting images; it was so exhilarating that I found myself closing my eyes just to listen, which was sort of exactly the opposite of the concept, but so be it. A great night at Gray Area, courtesy of impresario Naut Humon.

*Ah, I did.

Music Thing Workshop (KOMA Chameleon)

A quick lunchtime experiment. The Music Thing Workshop System (the device here dressed in black) does, indeed, supply sufficient power to run the KOMA Elektronik Field Kit (the device here dressed in white), which means I can easily run the randomly sampled FM radio from the latter into the modulated filter in the former. I imagine someone will recognize some of what is being sampled in realtime, but I certainly can’t. I wrote a story for The Wire magazine a few years ago about musical instruments that contain radios, and during the research phase I learned from KOMA that the radio portion of the Field Kit might someday become a standalone module, and that happened recently (though just the FM reception, not the AM or shortwave). Anyhow, much exploring ahead.

Emergency Handsets

Emergency Handsets would have been a great name for a new wave band. And it comes with its own snaky logo.

Scratch Pad: Tornado Alert

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, currently I’m off social media entirely (and I’m off a lot of other digital social venues, as well, including several Slacks, several email discussion lists, several Discourses, etc.), and that will remain the case until the first week or so of January. So, what follows are some notes I made for myself — a digital social network of one, though occasionally people do reply to posts I write — from the past week:

▰ White noise apps on your laptop have their own volume control because you want to keep the system sound low, so you don’t have your earbuds blasted with an alert.

▰ While I collate my social media activity in these weekly Scratch Pad posts, I don’t by any means collect here much of what I am up to on forums and BBS’s and so forth. But I do on occasion, and one thing I wanna track is my interest in izzzzi.net, so here’s on the Lines forum about izzzzi and its potential. The discussion about izzzzi is private currently, so I’m careful here not to expose anything, not that there’s anything untoward about the discussion as a whole:

I really dig izzzzi, and I dig it both as a self-contained community and as something more akin to a protocol that is agnostic of specific communities. I think about people in different communities (like a set of friends or a subset of family or people collaborating on a project) using it as a way to, just within their own little unit, share things with each other — almost (not certainly, but possibly) to the point where it would be beneficial to have a different identity for each subset, so as to actively keep them separate from each other.

Perhaps down the road, there might even be a way to collate one’s follows into subsets that yield different daily izzzzi “today” pages, but that may be too many complications. (Though, it would also be a way to politely follow someone without, you know, seeing their stuff all the time. Less a mute than a shutter you can open and close.)

I’m into the network complexity that results from the collision of simple and frictional. That’s izzzzi. And it’s too bad I’m still on this social media hiatus right now, ’cause it includes izzzzi (but not Lines, for me). But it’s cool. I can watch izzzzi mature from the sidelines.

▰ I tend to wake early on Saturdays, some lizard brain from my childhood eagerly awaiting cartoons. So, I was up for a couple minutes before the actual tornado (!) alert — see below — went off this morning at around 5:50am. This is in San Francisco, mind you. I was actually reflecting at that moment on how barely a week ago we got the tsunami alert, right after the earthquake, for which I received no advance alert. Here’s evidence of the tornado alert:

▰ In some countries it is illegal for a phone camera app to not make a sound.

▰ This completes my third full week of an ongoing social media break, with about three more weeks remaining, and it’s been good so far. It took about two weeks to chill the part of my brain that is actively noting things to note, which is to say noting things to note things publicly. I wrote a lot this week, but I jotted down fewer of the little observations that have formed the majority of my social media output. Which means my brain is breaking that habit. I would say that for me, a two-week social media break is the minimum. For the first week, it’s not really a break, per se. The second week is when the chill begins, and the third is when the chill has taken hold, when the chill is the new room temperature.

Music Thing Workshop (First Patch)

Oh, this is fun. Very happy. We had a tornado scare early Saturday morning in San Francisco, so it’s been a long and confusing day. Further south, near Santa Cruz, cars were flipped. Up here, it’s been mostly a matter of downed trees, a fence in our backyard, as well as nearby power and phone lines. Speaking of cables, I’m safe at home playing with LFO beats on my newly arrived Music Thing Workshop System. The batch that’s going through the filter is being layered on the Ditto looper, which is helpfully powered by the Workshop itself, so I only need to plug in the Workshop, which works great with my laptop’s USB-C charger. Humorously, I didn’t understand at first where the on/off switch was. That’s what sleep deprivation and weather shock will do to the brain, apparently. So much more to explore here, most notably that “Computer” module on the left side of the contraption.

Disquiet.com Turns 28

On December 13, 1996, I made one of the best decisions of my life. I purchased a URL, disquiet.com.

I was living in San Francisco, which is where I live now, though between then and now I also lived, for almost exactly four years, in New Orleans. In December of 1996, I was still fairly new to San Francisco, in a full-time sense. I had moved, seven years earlier, from Brooklyn to Sacramento to take a job at Tower Records as an editor on its magazine, Pulse!, and in my time there, I went on to co-found its Classical Pulse! magazine with my good friend Bob Levine, and to found, in 1994, epulse, which was Tower’s first email newsletter.

I visited San Francisco from Sacramento frequently, often weekly, sometimes more than once a week, but living here was different. The biggest difference I felt when I settled into my new job and my new apartment, in the Richmond District, which is where I still live, was a sense of rootlessness, one that had nothing to do with the physical location. For seven years, I had worked for Pulse!, and Tower had provided a focus for my activities in a way my new job, much as I enjoyed it, didn’t. The answer was fairly obvious to me.

So, long before blogs came to be given that name, and long before micro-blogging came to exist, and long before micro-blogging morphed into social media, and long before social media became recognizable as a broader sense of distributed asynchronous public inter-connectedness, I decided I wanted my own home on the digital range. I wanted to place to channel my thoughts, which at the time were largely about electronically mediated sound, and morphed to be about the intersection of sound, culture, and technology.

I already had a small website on some server space that came along with my ISP account, but I wanted what felt, in effect, like a vanity license plate in what we would later call the cloud. I had a few different names in mind for this website, but I was particularly enthralled at the time with The Book of Disquiet by the late Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), and so disquiet.com it was.

Initially, almost everything I posed to disquiet.com was simply something I wrote elsewhere and then repurposed. At some point it occurred to me that I could write directly for disquiet.com. That might sound obvious, but the internet still felt quite new in 1996. A friend proposed something to me that was not yet the norm, which was to put a dateline on each article, and so I did.

The word blog reportedly didn’t come around until 1999, but that isn’t to say that blogs didn’t yet exist. They did, and mine was one of them. They just didn’t have a name yet. I was not in love with the word “blog” at first. Like “wiki” and a lot of other web terms, it had, to me, at the time, a whiff of infantilization that really turned me off. But I became more comfortable with “blog,” and these days I’d say I am quite actively a proponent of blogging. I won’t get into details here, because I’ve already written about the topic quite a bit, especially back in 2019, which marked the word blog’s 20th anniversary, and then two years later.

Each year when the anniversary of my starting disquiet.com comes around, I try to do the same thing, which is to write a brief memory of the experience, both at the time and over the years, without looking back at what I have written on the subject previously. This year is no different.

I am sitting here at the dining room table on the 28th anniversary of the purchase and the launch of the website, and what is on my mind at the moment is not how much I have written, or the great conversations I have had along with way, or the creation of the Disquiet Junto music community, or the opportunities that this website has afforded me. What is on my mind is how much has changed.

The world is different today in so many ways from 1996, that we can’t really take stock of it all. One of the reasons I enjoy noting the role of sound in interfaces — from voice menu cues to the sonic exhaust of electric cars — is because those interfaces are always in flux. In 1996, the MP3 was only 5 years old. The idea that my laptop could automatically transcribe my voice existed in commercial sense (Dragon Naturally came out the next year), but the ease with which it does today is as comparable as my parents’ refrigerator was to their parents’ literal ice box. Each and every day, sound’s role in our lives evolves, and to me the line between the (largely ambient) music I write about and the role of sound in society gets blurrier and blurrier. I have no idea where it is headed, but I certainly have ideas about it, and I love using Disquiet.com to nudge those ideas ahead, and to pay witness to the changes I hear and see around me.

I said I wouldn’t go on about blogs, but I do feel the urge to close by saying if you’ve read this far and you don’t have a blog, I politely suggest that you start one. Choose a topic that is important to you and start typing, and uploading images, and audio, and video, and code, and whatever other forms your experience of the topic takes. And don’t just cover the topic. Write about your life. Write elements of whatever you would write elsewhere in public — on social media, in comments, in newsletters, on BBS’s, in email discussion groups — on your blog first and foremost. Make everything else — all the places online that you don’t own — ancillary to the central activity of blogging.

We can’t fully take stock of how different today is from 1996, but blog entries are like still frames in an unspooled film canister of the time between then and now. The more we document everyday life, the more control we have over the changes happening around us and to us, the more conscious we are of those changes. I really disliked the word “blog” at first, and then I came to appreciate it, and now more than ever I think of it as, frankly, incredibly important. I find it hard to believe that I once recoiled at the word blog, and now I think the word blog is powerful and beautiful. But like I said, a lot has changed — and it’s gonna keep changing.

Disquiet Junto Project 0676: Sub Melody

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 0676: Sub Melody
The Assignment: Bury a slow melody deep inside a drone.

Step 1: We did a drone project last week and it went well, so let’s do another one. You needn’t have done last week’s to do this week, as is always the case. Again, you may, yourself, be experienced recording drone music, or you may never have recorded any. You may not even be sure what drone music is, in which case read up a bit. Not matter your experience and familiarity, please give some thought as to what constitutes drone music.

Step 2: Think about what makes a melody, even a very slow and simple melody, different from a drone.

Step 3: Now record a piece of music that is, objectively, a deep drone, but somehow within it, somewhere well below the surface, include a slow-moving melody. 

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0676” (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-0676-sub-melody/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, December 16, 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 676th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Sub Melody — The Assignment: Bury a slow melody deep inside a drone — at https://disquiet.com/0676/