Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 37

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/

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.