Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 31

More Junto Profiles?

I had a great time in 2023 when I interviewed a heap of Junto participants for the Junto Profile series. The idea is to focus on individuals who’ve participated in the Junto regularly for, say, at least nine months. The series provided a great way for participants in the Junto to have a richer sense of the varied perspectives, backgrounds, and thoughts of the people they’re creating alongside asynchronously, and often across great distances. If you’re interested in being part of it, let me know. And if English isn’t your first language, that is no concern. I can put resources together for situations where translation would be beneficial (likely by asking bilingual Junto participants if they would pitch in). We do the interview via a Google Drive document. I ask you questions, you respond, and then I ask some follow-up questions. It’s pretty straightforward. Just email me (marc@disquiet.com).

Incident at Sainsbury’s

A field recorder — field recordist? — in England happened upon a light infrastructural tonality of interest, taped it, and shared the resulting audio online. The individual, named Andy, who noted it on a forum recently, describes the incident as follows: “Stumbled across an aircon unit and fridge harmonising together in the Sainsbury’s at York Railway Station. Placed my Zoom H5 in the fridge next to some milkshakes and hit record. Bought a meal deal.” This recording isn’t Andy’s first from York Railway Station. At the website where the track is shared, two others appear nearby, one from later that same year, 2023, and one from the year prior. The website is aporee.org, which is sort of like if freesound.org crossbred with Google Maps. The adjacent recordings are evident on the satellite map page, each marked by a red circle. As for the site’s homepage, it is a textual heat map of recent uploads.

And Andy is right about the recording. The naturally occurring drone — well, “naturally” may be stretching it — is captivating, both transparent and insistent. It’s a fine recording of the sort of sound that can feel either like a fleeting presence or a claustrophobic one. I can’t seem to embed it, so click through to the website to listen. If it doesn’t pop up immediately, click on the leftmost of the three red circles. Of course, there may be more such red circles in the future, should Andy return to the location and hear something of interest.

“Drop In, Tune Up, All Out”

Another evening out at the symphony, another excellent orchestral tune-up. I love how this sort of pre-concert moment can itself function like a composition, the murmuring crowd serving as an ersatz chorus.

Please

The sign isn’t merely disarmingly polite. It’s also been saying the same thing for many years, judging by the rust and the sun damage. I’d love a typeface extrapolated from what has come of these letterforms over time. And I’ll file this one under “doorbell adjacent.”

Scratch Pad: Dalloway, Levienaise-Farrouch, Lasers

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 — from the past week:

▰ Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway might as well come all highlighted in yellow, ’cause that’s what it looks like after I’ve read it:

“For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? over twenty — one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”

▰ I’m loving the score to The Agency (the remake of The Bureau, now with Michael Fassbender, most definitely playing a different spy from the one he played in David Fincher’s The Killer — his current mode seems to be, “What if I did what Liam Neeson did except the stories are interesting”), but the music doesn’t appear to be online yet, so I’ve been listening to other scores (Living, Censor, All of Us Strangers) and other music by its composer, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch.

▰ There’s a great moment in the first episode of The Agency when Michael Fassbender’s spy character, having confirmed that his apartment is full of surveillance equipment, steps onto his balcony. The song “It’s Not Easy” by Ofege plays, and sonically superimposed on it, as the camera pulls back to show the expanse of London, are countless voices being overheard.

▰ I tend toward a mode one might call “handwringing” when it comes to year-end best-of lists. I used to do them more enthusiastically. I kind of don’t enjoy making them. I find the undertaking dispiriting — ranking, leaving things out, and so forth. And yet! And yet, I like looking at other people’s lists, because it’s a great way to discover things, and to think about things in a broader context. For example, anyone who puts new new Lia Kohl or FourColor records on a year-end list is likely to have something else on their list that I might never have heard of, and might enjoy. So, I did make a list (also because some publications I write for requested such a list). I would love to see other people’s best-of lists.

▰ Lies down on the couch after several meetings. Feels earthquake. Continues to feel earthquake. Recuperates, to a degree, from the earthquake. Is ravaged by phone’s tsunami alert klaxon.

▰ I like living walking distance from multiple establishments that sell handmade, inexpensive, frozen dumplings — and after I type this, I realize I meant Chinese, but there are also a lot of Eastern European options. Clearly, the ones I cooked up this week were meant to be steamed, not boiled. My bad.

▰ I was on a Rolling Stones kick for much of the week. “Hang Fire” is one of the best Cars songs the Cars never recorded. I would have loved to have heard the Bee Gees cover “Miss You.” I think of Bill Wyman as the Stones’ inker, in comics-drawing terms: the band sketches the song, and then he inks it.

▰ When I was young, it was Beatles, then the Who, and I barely gave a second thought to the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin were alien to me. To a degree, that sequence has now been flipped on its head. This isn’t a firm order or anything. And Black Sabbath was even more alien to me, and I’m not sure where they fit in the list, but they are no longer alien to me. Quite the contrary.

▰ I’ve been working on a bunch of scripts for a new set of four-panel, square-format (2 x 2) comics I’m working on with the excellent illustrator Hannes Pasqualini. We’re gonna get a couple finished before beginning to roll them out. One of them is essentially done. This process feels really good. It’s a totally different way of exploring sound than anything else I do — related, but with its own unique capacities. I made a script template for the four-panel format we’re using, and it’s funny how many different things fill that template: some light, some self-obscuring, some deeply felt. It’s a treat. It’s work, mind you, but it’s a treat.

▰ Neighborhood news: the old burger place that’s been closed for a couple years is now a sushi place that also serves udon

▰ TIL on a Mac, OPT + either of the brightness buttons pulls up the display settings

▰ You know the show is good when the person at the sound board is taking photos.

This is Robin Fox performing on December 6 at Gray Area in San Francisco as part of the Recombinant festival.

▰ I finished reading one book this week, a novel, Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway, featuring George Smiley, the greatest creation of Harkaway’s father, the late John le Carré.

Satellite ASMR

Synthesizer workstations can look like the inside of NASA command modules for spaceflights, so it makes perfect sense that a synthesizer session could be used to create an ersatz field recording of an orbital space station. Such “space ambience,” or satellite ASMR, is heard here as an array of clanking and voices and beeps and signals, and an overall metallic reverberance that lends the whole thing a sense of place. It’s the work of a musician who goes by BRiES, and this piece is one of seven tracks that make up a recent album, simply titled binaural, which emphasizes the spaciousness, the space-ness, of the work. BRiES writes of the recordings: “The tracks are an effort to create realistic sounding ambiences with binaural beats and music mixed in.” There’s also a recognition that work like this can have utility: “The album can be used as a masking tool in loud environments, for relaxation or even to fall asleep to.”

BRiES is based in Sint-Gillis-Waas, Belgium.

Disquiet Junto Project 0640 Update

This coming Monday, December 9*, will mark that we have gone eight months since project 0640, which means that it will then be time for me to post the audio that was recorded for it. If you don’t recall — or weren’t around for — that project, the idea was to record a piece of music, send it to me, and then delete it from your hard drive. (Yeah, kinda scary — for me as well as for the musicians.) When I post the music this coming week, none of the resulting 27 tracks will have been heard by the musicians who made them since they were recorded. (Project 0640, which was titled Time Vault, is highly unusual for the Junto. Every other project since we started, back in January 2012, involved participants more or less immediately posting a track online.) My original plan was to simply post the Time Vault tracks myself on my soundcloud.com/disquiet account, attributing the music to the individual artists, but it occurs to me that some participants may want to post the tracks themselves, in which case I can return the tracks to them directly. Either way is fine. I’ll be in touch, and you can let me know if you want me to post it myself, or if you want me to return it to you so you can post it.

*I accidentally had this as January 9, rather than December 9, in the email and initial Lines BBS announcement. Thanks to RPLKTR for pointing that out.

Disquiet Junto Project 0675: Arc of the Drone

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 0675: Arc of the Drone
The Assignment: Record a drone that goes from simple to complex to simple.

Step 1: 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: Now think about what makes a drone simple and what makes a drone complex.

Step 3: Now record a piece of drone music that begins simple, gets complex, and then gets simple again. And note: The simple drone at the end needn’t necessarily be the same sort of drone with which the piece opens.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0675” (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-0675-arc-of-the-drone/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long is your arc?

Deadline: Monday, December 9, 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 675th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Arc of the Drone — The Assignment: Record a drone that goes from simple to complex to simple — at https://disquiet.com/0675/

Ambient Tea Party

I believe that this Ambient Tea Party, on the YouTube channel Den Pat, took place in Saint Petersburg, Russia, as that is where the associated Bandcamp page is based. Den Pat is, I think, the Denis Vladimirovich Patrabaev (or Патрабаева Дениса Владимировича — thanks, online translation tool!) listed in the label’s description as its founder. This solo set, which I listened to on repeat while working, is a treat, an admirably consistent, nearly hour-long mix of modulated tones and gently abrasive intrusions. Highly recommended. I’ll be working through the label’s catalog shortly.

My Favorite Albums of 2024

I voted in this year’s Pitchfork “best albums of 2024” list (and The Wire’s), and was asked to hold off on publishing my personal list until the full Pitchfork list went up on their website, which it now has, and the issue of The Wire with their look back came out today, too. (The Wire does a cool thing when listing the contributors to the voting: they list each contributor’s #1 album of the year.) So, here are my favorites. I have friends and colleagues who actively refine and adjust their lists of the best albums over the course of the given year, and even continue to do so, revising years and decades as time passes. I am, quite simply, not one of those people. Were I not asked to make a list, I would likely not. But I was, and I have, and I recognize these lists are very useful to people, so I share here happily. These are 25 records I enjoyed (or: appreciated, admired, got lost in) the heck out of this year:

Bill Frisell/Andrew Cyrille/Kit Downes: Breaking the Shell (Red Hook Records)Jeff Parker / ETA Vtet: The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem / Nonesuch)KMRU: Natur (Touch)The Necks: Bleed (Northern Spy Records)Taylor Dupree: Sti.ll (Greyfade)Sarah Davachi: The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir (Late Music)Dialect: Atlas Of Green (Rvng Intl.)Lia Kohl: Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph)Prefuse 73: New Strategies for Modern Crime (Lex Records)Eiko Ishibashi: Evil Does Not Exist (Drag City)Dirty Three: Love Changes Everything (Drag City)Eli Keszler: Live 2 (LuckyMe)Christopher Bissonnette: In a Second Floor Window (12k)Seefeel: Everything Squared (Warp)Kali Malone: All Life Long (Ideologic Organ)Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Challengers (Original Score) (Milan)FourColor: Lightscape (12k)Max Richter: In a Landscape (Decca)Tristan Perich & Ensemble 0: Open Symmetry (Erased Tapes)Michael A. Muller: Mirror Music (Deutsche Grammophon)Kenneth Kirschner: Three Cellos (Greyfade)Patricia Wolf: The Secret Lives of Birds (Nite Hive’)Nonkeen: All Good? (Leiter)Adam Wiltzie: Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal (Kranky)Zimoun: Dust Resonance (Room40)