Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 33

Leaving Records Is ‘Staying’

The LA-based label Leaving Records has posted two tracks for free streaming off its latest release, Staying: Leaving Records Aid to Artists Impacted by the Los Angeles Wildfires. That’s two out of just shy of 100 — yes, 100. Wisely, they lead with some strengths, a bubbling track from early ambient master Laraaji, “Joyous Dance ’82,” and a slightly more downbeat but still percolating piece by Baths and Rachika Nayar, “Dried Apricot.” Once you purchase the collection, you’ll have 96 more to listen to. I’m still working my way through all 98, but early favorites include a quick bit of glitchy beatmaking from Glia (“Gaal RDM”), a sedate trance from André 3000 featuring Carlos Niño, Alex Cline, and Pablo Calogero (“This is Where my room used to be.”), a totally warped excursion from Daedalus (“Making the Beat Scene”), lush new age from Cool Maritime (“Freshet”), and a great explorative mix of funky soloing and noisy effects by Sam Wilkes (“Culebra”), a haunting drone by KMRU (“Visions”), and a contribution by Steve Roach that I would call angelic except that the title already does that for me (“For the Angels”). Details on the fund distribution are on the album’s webpage.

Half Mast

The local movie theaters are paying tribute. Ours, by some bizarre chance, already had Blue Velvet scheduled, so they added more showings.

On Repeat: Loraine James, Aphex on Guitar

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

▰ I was mistakenly under the impression that the great Loraine James wouldn’t have a new record out until 2026, but she does, and it’s due out mid-March, and the first song is already here under her Whatever the Weather moniker, “12°C.” Very interesting amalgam of field recordings and low-key glitch, and all the more interesting for mixing it up as it proceeds, never sticking to one idea for long before moving on.

▰ Simon Farintosh has a new transcription of an Aphex Twin song out, part of his third volume of Richard D. James adaptations. This is “IZ-US,” originally the closing track on the Come to Daddy album from 1997. I interviewed Farintosh back in early 2021 about his work.

▰ Marcus Fischer has posted a fascinating document of his sound installation Carry the Water from last year. The installation consists of 55 gallon water barrel, powder-coated jerry cans, concrete, transducers, and digital audio. As Fischer explains: “The installation is made up of a series of metal vessels, all of which could hold water but are in fact empty and only act as resonators for the amplified sound of water.”

▰ Gorgeous self-titled album of ambient chamber jazz from the Nighttime Ensemble. The group consists of Daniel Wyche (guitar), Brian J. Sulpizio (piano), Ro Lundberg (upright bass), Lia Kohl (cello, radio, objects), and Sam Scranton (drums, percussion). It’s one single track, almost an hour in length.

Scratch Pad: Passarell, Murata, Collins

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.

▰ The wind is fairly intense today. There’s a buzzing outside the office that half the time is like the world’s largest fly, and sometimes like the dentist from Marathon Man moved next door.

▰ I feel like if my call was really important to this company, I wouldn’t still be on hold after 28 minutes and 49 seconds

▰ I was using speech-to-text in the car to reply to a message, and the system was stalling, I think because when I, myself, paused to formulate a sentence, the microphone picked up the podcast being listened to loudly one car over.

▰ Apparently the great musician Tony Passarell has died. While I have tons of his albums, I’m listening to Miles Davis’ Dark Magus in his memory. First time I heard it was at a party at Tony’s place back in the early 1990s. I wandered into a room and didn’t leave until the second side ended, and we bonded heavily over it. Tony’s music will never end so long as it’s out there — and he was, to his credit, always out there.

▰ A new Sayaka Murata novel, Vanishing World, is due out on April 15. I have never been this excited to pay my taxes.

▰ The TV show’s caption read “[gentle tense music]” and I wondered, is such a thing possible? Like, what’s “gentle tense”? Then the next show happened to have a similar caption: “gentle, tense music,” which made more sense, though this seemed to be using “gentle” as an unnecessary synonym for “quiet.”

▰ I’ve finished reading one book so far this year, and I finished it a week ago but forgot last Saturday to note it. It’s Nicolas Collins’ excellent new memoir, Semi-Conducting: Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket, which comes out later this year. He’s best known for his book Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. And so far this year I’ve read three graphic novels: Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures by Yvan Alagbé (translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith from the French), the first volume of Once & Future (by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Dan Mora), and the first volume of Ultimate Black Panther (by writer Bryan Edward Hill and artist Stefano Caselli). And while I haven’t finished reading a novel yet this year, I have read 300 pages of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (which I’m currently re-reading for the first time in at least a decade and a half) and 200 pages of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (which I’m reading for the first time), so that’s gotta count for sumthin’.

Ruehlen & Trejo at the Crown (Oakland)

I had a great time last Saturday night, January 11, catching a live performance by Cecyl Ruehlen and Chelsey Lee Trejo at the Crown in Oakland. I’d previously reviewed, for The Wire, a fantastic performance that Ruehlen was part of at the Luggage Store Gallery back in July 2023. It says something about the impression that concert made on me that I would swear it happened last year, not the year prior. He evidenced an incredible capacity to push the horn and the synth against each other. Usually when I witness acoustic instruments in an arrangement with synthesizers, the latter is processing the former, but what he was up to was more partnership, even confrontation.

Ruehlen, who lives in Arizona, as does Trejo, let me know in advance that they would passing through the Bay Area and performing here twice. He also warned me there was “no saxophone” in this show, because he knew it was his use of a sax in the context of a modular synthesizer that had so impressed me a year and a half or so earlier.

This set at the Crown was full-on drone, the sounds of his and Trejo’s instruments given extra roominess thanks to the space’s expansive and impressive green tile. Trejo played synth and bowed instruments of her own invention. Also handmade was Ruehlen’s remarkable six-guitar set-up, with one string on each guitar, and each with its own volume pedal, eBow (to sustain notes), and weights (to tune the strings).

You can get a sense of the the music from a recent album, Texture of Light, by the duo, though note the instrumentation on this is far more wide-ranging, including bass clarinet and, yes, saxophone:

Disquiet Junto Project 0681: Drama Course

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 0681: Drama Course
The Assignment: Record a piece of music to transform a walk or a run into something theatrical.

Step 1: Choose a length of time for a proper walk (or run), maybe 10 to 30 minutes.

Step 2: Think of how that walk might be experienced by someone if that person were made to feel as if they were in a thriller. As the composer, you can set the pace with a steady beat, and add music, and sound effects, maybe even bits of dialog. The idea is someone listening to your track while walking will have a much more dramatic experience.

Step 3: Record the piece of music you imagined in Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0681” (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-0681-theatrical-run/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long is the walk?

Deadline: Monday, January 20, 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 681st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Drama Course — The Assignment: Record a piece of music to transform a walk or a run into something theatrical — at https://disquiet.com/0681/

Music for Airports (Trio Edit)

When I first began listening to this recording, a sliver of Brian Eno’s classic Music for Airports (1978), I just assumed it was the entire Bang on a Can ensemble playing it, because I saw pianist Vicki Chow’s name at the start of the list of performers, and because it sounded so rich. It turns out, though, that it’s just Chow and two additional musicians: percussionist David Cossin and guitarist Mark Stewart, also of Bang on a Can. And yet with that minimal available instrumentation, they’re able to flesh out the wholeness of the original piece. Now, the word “flesh” there is not entirely correct, because the source material is fairly sparse, famously so, but it’s sparse the way a very large room might be empty yet still be voluminous and communicate its volume, and this trio really gets at that spaciousness, thanks in large part to the sustain on Chow’s piano and the buzzing trail of Stewart’s electric guitar chords. The video was taped at the Ragas Live Festival at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, back in 2023, and was posted this week in advance of 2025’s festival, which is scheduled for October.

In fact, the full performance is also up on YouTube, and had been up since the middle of last year, part of a playlist of 20 videos from the festival:

Knuckle Tattoo

This image generator brought a smile to my face. The results also reminded me of that brief window of time — post-cellphone yet pre-smartphone — when I considered buying the URL 34778438.com, so people could (it made sense to me at the time — though, again, not so much sense that I actually bought the URL) more easily access my website from their mobile. (Image via knuckle.tattoo — thanks, Emenel!)

Audiobook

This is the second of our new batch of comics. The previous one was posted on December 30. The plan henceforth is to do one of these each month on the first Monday and third Monday.

On Repeat: Tasselmyer, Bushel, Mirror’s Edge

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

▰ A short live video by Andrew Tasselmyer that I had on loop for quite a while, a beading ambient techno piece with chamber music overtones:

▰ I’m a sucker for lengthy collections of short snippets of experiments. Book of Golden Furrows
by Bushel is such a thing. A lot of it is like instrumental hip-hop sheared to within a millimeter of its life.

▰ I watch — and more to the point listen to — a lot of video game footage on YouTube. This particular approach, which a friend shared with me, is new to me. They are long-form videos intended to be watched by people while on exercise machines. The idea is, while you’re running, it’s like you are in Mirror’s Edge, which is one of my favorite games ever, even though I was terrible at it. Speaking of which: I don’t understand why playing the game gave me motion sickness yet watching the video doesn’t. The channel is named Video Game Run Club. Join in, whether vicariously, or “vicariously vicariously.”