Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 34

Scratch Pad: LA, I Ching, Earthquake

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.

▰ I used to fly to LA a lot for work. I had a friend who’d often pick me up at LAX. We’d make that turn where DTLA comes into view and he’d tell me I’d gotten “that smile” on my face. He’d say, “You really do love this place,” and I was like, I sure do. My heart goes this week out to the people of LA.

▰ It’s a mumblecore James Taylor singalong at the barbershop

▰ Me: Nice to work in a cafe for the day.

Me soon after: Well, then there’s the guy humming to himself loudly across the room.

Me later still: I wish they’d turn off the music so I could record this.

▰ When Facebook loads in my phone’s browser, sometimes it takes a moment, and when that happens it looks like it’s casting a lot of I Ching throws simultaneously

▰ First time back at tai chi in almost half a year. That felt good. (Pro tip: Being incredibly clumsy makes it easy to maintain a beginner’s mind.)

▰ Just as a side note to my earlier note about The Conversation, I’ve been watching that The Lincoln Lawyer TV show, and while Manuel Garcia-Rulfo has a certain James Garner quality to him, he seems to be channeling Gene Hackman at times, notably his posture and facial expressions.

▰ This place serves iced ammonia. I’ll assume it’s iced ambrosia, but if this is my last post, you’ll have a good guess at what happened.

▰ Why set an alarm when there’s the option of the creaking of your cabinets during a 7am earthquake?

▰ I wanted to take piano lessons. I visited a teacher, who sat me at a piano and asked, “Which is more important, melody or harmony?” I sat there. The teacher waited, having asked me something ostensively rhetorical. I said, “I think you want me to say melody.” That was my first and last lesson. (This is years ago. I take guitar lessons now.)

▰ After two earthquakes this morning, I took a lie-down just to chill out, and was, of course, stirred by a third earthquake

▰ Statement: I can’t stand when electronic musicians list all the equipment they use.

Reply: You realize there’s a vast amount of classical music titled things like Concerto for Flute, Harp, and Orchestra, and Rondino for oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons in E♭ major?

▰ I’ve (temporarily?) turned off “reposts” in my Bluesky feed. Too much was endless reposts without comment or context. “Quote” posts will still show and “replies” and, ya know, “post” posts. Too bad “Experimental” isn’t about more experimental music posts. :) And yes the word “feed” is still gross.

▰ Whew. I took over a month off social media at the end of 2024, and I dunno if the first 10 days of 2025 have been especially insane, or if life was just better when I was more offline. Maybe both. I’m just glad it’s nearly the weekend.

Junto Profile: Andreas Kitzmann

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? Andreas Kitzmann

Where are you located? I was born in Vancouver, Canada. In my mid twenties I moved to Montreal to pursue graduate studies and after a few years I made my way through Europe, settling for a few months in Prague and Paris, before moving to upstate New York to be with my partner who was doing her stint at graduate school. After a while, I got on a plane and lived/worked in Eastern Cyprus for a year and a half and then up north to Sweden, specifically Skövde and later Karlstad for a period of 6 years. During that time my son was born and then we returned to Canada and made a home in Kitchener, Ontario, which is where I’m now based.

What is your musical activity? I grew up learning musical instruments — cello and piano — but then later drifted in alternative and experimental explorations during my university days. Today, I’m fortunate to be able to explore my interest in musical synthesis as a part of my academic profession, notably in terms of using it as a means to engage with and think about the connections between art, philosophy, science, technology, and engineering. I am by no means a professional musician, but rather see my collection of instruments as objects to think with and through. I seek out instruments that ask me to think about sound and music in different ways and that challenge me to pause and reflect on what is and is not possible.

What is one good musical habit? I don’t do this regularly enough, but one habit that I am trying to engrain is to spend concentrated time on one singular instrument and to go through it in a thoughtful, but not necessarily programmatic way. Explore what you have deeply but not only in terms of “outputs” (i.e., finished pieces). Think of your instrument as a partner as opposed to something that you control and master. It is a conversation that meanders in directions that cannot be anticipated. 

What are your online locations? I organize a local synthesizer society, which can be found at https://www.tricitysynthsociety.org/. There are corresponding Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube links, as well, which are all accessible on the main page. Some of my research efforts and those of my colleagues can be found at https://www.designingsoundfutures.org/ 

What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? That’s a hard one, as most of the projects resonate with me for one reason or another. I recall disquiet 0620, which was a collaborative effort, as being particularly engaging, mainly as a result of having the opportunity to engage with others. I used a sample of Emily Haines, from the band Metric, which I literally stumbled over while listening to an interview on the radio. There is something about how she speaks and the words she uses that I still find compelling as a source material. https://soundcloud.com/andreas-kitzmann-27370936/disquiet0620

The Tri City Synthesizer Society seems very interesting. Could you explain a bit about it? The TCSS was founded in 2023 to promote synthesizer-related activities and events in the region of Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge, Ontario. We have organized a number of events, such as Electronic Music Open Mic nights that invites local synthesists to perform in a welcoming and inclusive environment; workshops at local libraries to showcase electronic instruments, presentations by artists and synth developers and workshops that focus on specific techniques and skills associated with synthesis and electronic music; makerspace activities where individuals build sound objects and synthesizer components. This summer we are partnering with Open Ears (https://openears.ca/ ) — a long-running experimental music festival — to organize workshops and performances as part of their lineup. 
Your bio on the website of York University in Toronto lists modular synthesizers as one of your areas. Could you talk about synthesizers as a subject of academic inquiry? For the past few years I have been using modular synthesis as a means to explore questions related to technology and creativity; modes of learning through practice; theoretical concepts related to the “idea” of modularity and generally using synthesis as a context to think about sound, music and the artefacts we use to express ourselves. Recent projects include the edited volume Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People (Routledge, 2024), eds. Andreas Kitzmann, Ezra Teboul and Einar Engstrom; a project that explores the relationships between preservation, access, community and authenticity with respect to historical musical instruments, specifically by building a small Buchla 100 system; and an ongoing makerspace project where participants build a complete modular system, learn how to play it and then connect with the community networks that focus on sound and synthesis that I have helped establish. I am also part of a research cluster housed at the Responsive Technologies Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University (https://relab.blog.torontomu.ca/ ) that uses synthesis to explore a variety of avenues, ranging from disability lead instrument design, using synths as a means to foster STEM based learning with under represented and at risk youth and community based efforts that focus on music, sound and technology. Many of these activities are described in https://www.designingsoundfutures.org/

Disquiet Junto 2025

For participants in the Disquiet Junto music community, which has run weekly since the first week of January 2012:

1: Now would be a fun time for you to invite someone to join in on Disquiet Junto projects, as people are getting creative plans and goals together for 2025. You can direct them to disquiet.com/junto.

2: As I mention on occasion, there is no requirement to do every Disquiet Junto project. Don’t burn yourself out, please. Don’t take the Junto as a whole as a challenge. The Junto is here every Thursday (through Monday) for when you have the time and interest.

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)