Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 33

Arriving at Hogwarts

I’ve got this week off, mostly from work, entirely from social media, though only slightly from writing, and late in the afternoon I got in some time on the PS5 with a video game, Hogwarts Legacy (2023). The decision as to what to play was based in large part on its industry recognition: Game Developers Choice Awards Best Audio (honorable mention), British Academy Games Awards Music and Audio Achievement (longlisted), and Grammy for Best Video Game Soundtrack (nominee). As is my habit, I dialed down the score to a little under a quarter of the relative volume, and the dialog to about 90%, and I let the “world sounds” of the game take the primary spot.

Two key things stood out, as of our arrival at Hogwarts — which is to say, right up until the title card — following extended cut scenes and some necessary wand — that is, controller — training:

First is how drastic shifts in the tonal quality of the imaginary spaces signal the transitions, and how stark those transitions are, given the magical transport that is involved in getting from most places to the next. For example, at one point we’re in a massive interior space, with an echoing room tone, and then suddenly we just barely escape a pillar leaning toward us, felled by something a bit like the Destroyer from the first Thor movie. Then we move instantly through a portal into the outside world, a forest after dark. Not only are the nocturnal sounds of the bugs prevalent, but they highlight the otherwise seemingly blank audio slate, the relative silence of the forest. Throughout, the significant tonal shifts are markers of stages.

Second is the small speaker built into the PS5 controller. This is a subject I want to explore more thoroughly. I’m used to vibrations from controllers. For example, in the game, we don’t just hear the footsteps of our character; we also feel them. But the controller sounds are something else entirely. During a fight sequence, we hear aspects of the spell-casting as if the wand is right in our hands. There is something beyond the mere distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic sound here, between the real-time sounds of a given scene and those, such as score or voiceover, outside the world of the story. The sound from the controller has a power different from the one coming from the living room television. This controller speaker sound is hyperdiegetic.

Breaking Bread

I hope to write about this more in the near future, but in the meanwhile, here’s a photo from a two-day course I took this weekend in electronics breadboarding. On day one, we made the rear item, which is a VCO, or voltage-controlled oscillator, with a three-button keyboard that allowed it to emit a variety of pitches. The breadboard in the foreground is shown when still under construction. It would eventually become an LFO, or low frequency oscillator, that would introduce variation to the VCO. Several other stages followed. I think I only destroyed one integrated circuit and one potentiometer in the process.

Scratch Pad: Gregorian, Beat, Jig

I  do this manually at the end of each week: collating lightly edited 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.

And this is the final Scratch Pad entry of the year, since as of of yesterday afternoon, I’m off social media until the first week of January 2025.

▰ I often take time off social media between (our American) Thanksgiving and the end of the (Gregorian calendar) year. Not sure I did last year, but I think I will this year. Maybe hit pause the end of this week. I can feel the year winding down.

▰ When there’s a new Scottish TV show you want to see, and you turn it on — and the subtitles aren’t available yet, so you cannae watch it

▰ The clothes dryer plays a little jig at the end, like an old-school performance of a Shakespeare play at the Globe

▰ 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.

▰ Caught the King Crimson quasi-reunion tour last night, aka the Beat tour, with Adrian Belew and Tony Levin from the classic ‘80s trio of albums, and Steve Vai in Robert Fripp’s seat (except he stood) and Danny Carey in Bill Brufford’s. It was a lot of fun, especially the second set.

▰ I get literally 100s of music releases each week. I download what strikes my interest, or I listen online, or both. The things that stick with me, I write about. It’s just about that simple. And I can’t reply to all the inbound requests for coverage. That time simply doesn’t exist.

For some reviewers, it may feel important to be on top of releases other people are talking about. I think they might be convincible that something is topical, and for that reason worthy of review consideration. That thinking plays about 1% of a role in my decision-making, but that’s just me.

It’s a bit of a mystery to me, how my ears work. I just pay attention to what they tell me.

▰ New microwave. New drones. New beeps.

▰ If you’re on the Disquiet Junto project email announcement list and didn’t receive the one that went out on Thursday, November 21, could you let me know? Thanks.

▰ Me: I’m taking my annual social media break starting November 22 and through the end of the year.

Friend: Do you find that difficult?

Me: What I find difficult is locating all the different ways required to turn off notifications I hadn’t even realized were on.

▰ I think about how hitting the record button when making a field recording focuses my hearing. As I near the juncture when I take a long holiday break from social media, I get a similar sensation — of the world both closing in and opening up. I don’t foresee giving up social media, but these long breaks do remind me of a different way of being present.

The Salamander Lives in the Fire

“The salamander lives in the fire because it has forgotten how to live any other way.”

I was reading Nick Harkaway’s new novel, Karla’s Choice (which involves George Smiley, the legendary character created by Harkaway’s father, John le Carré), over breakfast earlier this week, and I was thinking about the breaks I take from social media (evenings, weekends, end of the year), and then I arrived perchance at the above sentence. To say it registered with me would be an understatement.

To wit: Right on schedule, as we gear up for Thanksgiving, I’m off social media (Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, Facebook) and for the most part Slacks and Discords and Discourses and so forth through at least January 2, 2025, and likely January 7, the first Tuesday of the new year. I’ve also paused several email discussion groups I’m in (groups.io, for one, makes this quite easy).

I’m fully aware I’ll inevitably end up peeking, because something I’m doing — writing, music-making, coding, gaming, reading — will lead to me identifying that the best available resource is, in fact, a thread in some useful corner of the Miasma (if you made it through Neal Stephenson’s Fall; or Dodge in Hell, you get the reference). I won’t, however, be actively engaging. It’s time to take some time off: digital social life on pause.

I’ll still be typing away here at Disquiet.com (my website turns 28 years old on December 13, 2024) and in my newsletter, and the Disquiet Junto music community (which turns 13 years old on January 2, 2025, the first Thursday of the new year) will continue weekly.

I’l have my social media notifications turned decidedly off throughout. I dream of taking an email break, as well, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Imperial Big Box

The ceiling at this big box store always makes me feel like I’m on a spaceship in a Star Wars movie. The beeping and overall drone of the room tone support this impression.

Disquiet Junto Project 0673: Switch Back

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 0673: Switch Back
The Assignment: Make the quiet part loud, and vice-versa.

Just one step this week: Record a piece of music in which you make loud that which is usually quiet and quiet that which is usually loud.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0673” (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-0673-switch-back/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, November 25, 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 673rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Switch Back — The Assignment: Make the quiet part loud, and vice-versa — at https://disquiet.com/0673/

Getting to the Tracks

I think sometimes about not just what I listen to but how I get to the music I listen to, how a recording ends up being a focus of my attention. For example:

▰ Taylor Deupree is often on my mind, in his capacity as a musician, and a record label owner, and the moderator of a great Discord, which is an offshoot of his record label. And he has an excellent newsletter on his process, which is how I ended up spending this afternoon listening to some forays into what he calls “digital degradation territory.” Beautiful stuff. Definitely give it a listen.

▰ It was then through another Subtack, dated earlier this month, from the musician Lia Kohl, that I came across the name Dorothy Carlos, whose Split EP, which came out in August, I’ve been listening to quite a bit:

▰ And then there’s Julian Lage doing the bluesy “Nocturne” live in Manchester, thanks to the steady feed of his YouTube channel:

▰ And the instrumental of Casual’s “That’s Bullshit,” which I sought out after a friend informed me that the rapper Saafir (who appears on the track) had died. Choice taut sampling.

▰ And a couple tracks off the upcoming Oneiris from Chloe Lula. I learned about it from her Instagram. She’s melding her cello with her interest in electronic music. Dramatic stuff.

EV Car Wash

Just as the car pulled into the low-rent automatic wash attached to the gas station and wrapping around and behind the snack shop, I pulled my cellphone out of my jacket pocket and hit the big red record button. Not documented here are the interior’s colorful flashing lights, which seemed to exist solely to heighten the mechanized entertainment factor, but the sounds tell enough of the story, beginning with the high-pressure drone of the commercial cavern, proceeding through foam and the thick Lovecraftian tongues that lapped at the windshield, past the oversized brushes, and through the final rinse and drying cycles, followed by the fade-out as the car emerged back into society, just at the start of end-of-day rush hour. This was my first time through a car wash in an electric vehicle — meaning there were no particular sounds emitted by the car itself throughout — and my first time in a car wash in a very long time. A decade, maybe two? The denouement at the end was almost complete when I hit the stop — actually, “Done” — button. (Recorded November 19, 2024, on an iPhone 13 Pro.)

Vibrating with Decisive Purpose

Fizzy, twitchy little sonic trinkets, the longest just a couple seconds over four minutes, the shortest a little over two and a half. Lulling bits of room tone split into fragments and scanned through as if with a radio dial. Beats made of considerably less than the sound of dust brushing against a vinyl player’s needle, other times — in classic glitch fashion, here rendered all in lowercase — like a questionable, all-plastic CD player well past its return date. Beats like windshield wipers made of eyelashes. Beats like stray thoughts caught in a spider web on a rickety wooden metronome. A hushed voice struggling to be heard, and yet cagey about what it might want to say. These are the components that comprise New Old Loops, a set as compact as it is delicate, at once intimate and private, and yet vibrating with decisive purpose. The musician is Oleg Malov of Tuapse, Russia. Malov, who goes by Okmiracle, knows exactly what he is doing, and it’s low-key glorious.

On Repeat: Skupina, Jackal, Rohrer

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.

▰ Really digging this mix of light synth tones, nature field recordings, and slow singing from Manja Ristić and Tomáš Šenkyřík, from the Czech record label Skupina. There are moments on Vstal when the artificial tones fit in more like background sound than prominent additions.

▰ I don’t have an embed or a link for this, because the music isn’t available — yet? — as an album, but I’ve ben enjoying the scene-setting score that Volker Bertelmann (aka Hauschka; All Quiet on the Western Front, The Old Guard) composed for the new The Day of the Jackal, the one starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch. Spy thriller scores, especially those serving stories that don’t veer too much into science fiction, are a steady source of rhythmic and moody background listening, and this one doesn’t disappoint. (He’s been very busy. He also scored the new Dune TV series, Dune: Prophecy, and Conclave, both of which have album releases.)

▰ I’m still working my way through Samuel Rohrer’s new album, Music for Lovers, which I discovered due to a guest appearance by characteristically ethereal trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer on one dubby track, “The Gift.”