Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 38

Refresher Course Set 6: Reviews, Best of 1999

I continue my light edit pass through the 7,500+ posts that have accumulated on this website since I founded it at the end of December 1996. This set of 20 posts — I’m working through them chronologically — are mostly album reviews, including several favorites from this period of time (1999-2000): Breakbeat Era’s debut, Gavin Bryars’ Cadman Requiem, Jake Mandell’s Parallel Processes, Bernhard Günter’s Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue (For Mark Rothko), the great Raster-Noton 20′ – 2000 series (which I mentioned here in standalone not once but twice), Mouse on Mars’ Niun Niggung, μ -Ziq’s Royal Astronomy, plus Spring Heel Jack, Nobukazu Takemura, Matmos, Twine, Steven (J.) Kane, Beastie Boys, DJ Spooky, DJ Krush, and Eulb, and the compilation Brassic Beats USA from the label Skint.

And a software mention that really takes me back, PCDJ (it’s still around: pcdj.com!), which I used to use to play MP3s on top of each other. Doubling up Philip Glass recordings was a fetish of mine around the turn of the millennium.

And my 10 favorite records of 1999, which included Underworld’s Beaucoup Fish, DJ Krush’s Kakusei (which was, along with Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, a CD I always had with me when I traveled), and the Mille Plateaux label compilation Modulation & Transformation 4. There’s a tag (#years-best) that brings up my top 10s from over the several past decades.

Scratch Pad: Apostrophe, Allergy, Angel,

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will 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.

▰ Truly odd. What seemed to be a car alarm on loop turned out to be from a bus stop. It had gone off accidentally. A call to 311 (San Francisco) led to a call to the police (non-emergency). The noise was sorted out quickly. Unlike (most) car alarms, this didn’t stop after a minute or so. Kept looping.

▰ The absence of an apostrophe in the title to this great 1997 David Holmes album always bugged me, but the apparent after-the-fact introduction of an apostrophe bugs me even more

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▰ Love when my microphone during a call thinks my allergy-induced coughing is me trying to talk and alerts me to turn on my microphone

▰ This new Jeff Parker album is a reminder that when it comes to my favorite music, the whole is often seemingly less than the sum of its parts

▰ Insane heat. A few days of chill. Then the Blue Angels show up.

▰ The Blue Angles are back for more World War III pre-enactment, canine incitement, and remote-triggering of car alarms

Refresher Course Set 5: Autechre, Photek, Coldcut

This is the fifth set in the Refresher Course series. I’ve begun going back through the archives of this website from the very beginning, about 7,500 posts ago. The first four sets consisted of 10 posts each. Posting every day seemed a bit much for the site’s readers, so I decided for the fifth set I’d wait until I had read back through 30 posts. However, I now think 30 posts is a little much in its own right, so I may try 20 next time. Anyhow, this latest tranche includes:

Reviews of Oval and Christophe Charles album Dok, an Up, Bustle and Out record, the compilation Blip, Bleep (Soundtracks to Imaginary Video Games), Underworld’s Beaucoup Fish, Funki Porcini’s The Ultimately Empty Million Pounds, a Hollowman project, Chessie’s Signal Series, Michael Nyman’s The Piano score, Orbital’s The Middle of Nowhere, Borden Raczynski’s Boku Mo Wakaran, Bill Laswell’s Panthalassa — The Remixes, and Moby’s Play, which I gave a particularly negative take on, but over the years I came to really enjoy the album. Also, my favorite releases of 1997 and 1998.

A ton of interviews: Autechre’s Sean Booth (1997), Coldcut’s Matt Black (1887), DJ Food talking about a David Byrne remix (1997), Amon Tobin not once but twice (1997, 1998), Photek (1998), Rob Zombie of White Zombie (1999) talking about sampling and personal memory, Dub Assassin (1999), Moby (1999), Bogdan Raczynski (1999) in an email interview (unusual at the time), and an essay with four different interview subjects about jazz and electronica (Beth Custer, Jack Dangers, Nils Petter Molvaer, and Ben Neill). That last one was only just recently added to this site, and such are the time-warping complexities of datelines.

And a grab bag of other items: a riff on the use of “NP” (for “now playing”), and apparently I thought emoticons were over; the music-slowing software Slow Gold II; how to listen to pi (the number); an essay in the mock-style of the For Dummies series, so sort of a joke, except the recommendations are real; and what I think is the earliest “sounds of brands” piece on this site, a mention of music in VW ads.

Disquiet Junto Project 0667: Neighbor of the Beast

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 0667: Neighbor of the Beast
The Assignment: What’s it sound like when the devil lives across the street?

There is just one step for this project. The devil happens to live across the street from you. What’s it sound like on an average evening?

Thanks to Paolo Salvagione, who proposed this project many hundreds of projects ago. 

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0667” (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-0667-neighbor-of-the-beast/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How late and long does your neighbor rage?

Deadline: Monday, October 14, 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 667th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Neighbor of the Beast — The Assignment: What’s it sound like when the devil lives across the street? — at https://disquiet.com/0667/

Buddha Boxing Day

Enjoy nearly a quarter hour of a bunch of Buddha Machines mixing it up, along with the sounds of the environment in which they are present. Writes the Polish musician responsible for the recording, Grzegorz Bojanek: “Aside from the Buddha Machine loops, every sound you hear comes directly from my garden — from the gentle hum of insects and the chirping of birds to the soft crunch of my footsteps.”

Jeff Parker Goes Silent (Way)

We’ve now gotten a taste of the forthcoming The Way Out of Easy album due out November 22 from Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, a jazz ensemble featuring Parker (Tortoise, Isotope 217, Chicago Underground Trio) on guitar, Josh Johnson on saxophone, Anna Butterss on bass, and Jay Bellerose on drums. Titled “Late Autumn,” the slowly simmering track — it purposefully never reaches a boil — is one of four on the album, and at merely 17 and a half minutes, it’s the shortest of them. Echoing Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way and the work of the Necks, it has a steady pulse above which the musicians ease their way around each other. Both Parker and Johnson are credited with amplifying their instruments with electronics, and Parker also, according to the liner notes, employs a sampler. Those effects are quite subtle, and like the musicianship in general, never try to command attention.

Refresher Course Set 4: Oval, Potter, Reviews

This is the fourth set of the process of my making my way, in chronological order, from the earliest entries on this website, all the way through the 7,500+ that have accumulated since December 1996, when the site launched. That number includes posts from before 1996, those that I later ported from print media and other writing opportunities.

As I finished the third set this weekend, it occurred to me that 10 posts a day may be a burden for the reader, so I may slow the pace a bit — not of the re-archiving, but of these summary posts. I may do one every 30 archived posts, which would mean roughly every three days, rather than a summary post every single day for each set of 10 I’ve cleaned up. We’ll see. Also, rather than lay them out here as bullet points, I may summarize them thematically, at least when doing so applies.

The main item in the set of 10 I looked over today is a 1996 interview with Markus Popp of Oval, both the original published profile, and the full text of the Q&A that informed the profile.

There are a bunch of reviews. In some cases, the albums aren’t online, at least not on official channels. This batch includes the Sci-Fi Cafe compilation (covers of movie and TV theme music by the likes of Loop Guru and Kinder Atom), a Tone Rec album, a Kiyoshi Izumi release on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, an Asian Dub Foundation/Atari Teenage Riot split, a Toru Takemitsu compilation, a Steve Roach album, a great David Holmes album I still listen to regularly, and Francis Dhomont’s Frankenstein Symphony, which I single out because it is featured in the screenshot of the earliest evidence on the Internet Archive of Disquiet.com:

And finally, there’s mention of a 1997 musical episode of Chicago Hope, which name-checks Dennis Potter. Musical episodes of TV shows have become so common that I’m not sure how many people producing them or participating in them these days are aware of the importance of Potter to the format.

On Repeat: Husebø, Seidel, More

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.

And let’s be clear: given the semi-methodical processing of all the old posts on this website — and the addition of other old stuff that’s coming online for the first time ever — I’ve been doing a lot of retrospective listening, revisiting old Funki Porcini and Matmos and so forth, and being alarmed by how much music from not even 30 years ago is not (officially) online. 

Meanwhile, some more recent favorites:

▰ I’ve spent a lot of time with Kjetil Husebø’s Years of Ambiguity since it came out in 2023, and he’s now followed it up with Emerging Narratives, which again teams him with guitarist Eivind Aarset and trumpeter Arve Henriksen for a slate of Fourth World wonders. 

▰ Post​-​Orientalism No. IV: Dream Inside a Dream is an intense drone work by Dave Seidel, who is based in New Hampshire. If the word “arpeggio” in the accompanying descriptive text puts the fear of automated cascades into your imagine, don’t worry. These come in slow motion.

▰ The EP MEMO by mr.coon is an excellent concoction of beats and samples, echoing at the intersection of dub, noise, and big beat.

Refresher Course Set 3: Vibert, Porcini, Matmos

Well, I’ve made it three days in a row, which makes places the Refresher Course series — and yes, I’m still considering other names for it — 30 posts into the 7,500-plus exploration of this website’s nearing 30-year archive, and it goes back further still because I’ve also posted plenty of pieces that predate the Disquiet’s December 13, 1996, birth.

A bunch of these pieces from today’s clean-up happen to date from around 1996, when the major labels had a (false) sense that electronic music — specifically under the still new “electronica” genre name — was going to solve their financial problems. Also a sign of the times, I felt the need, in the Richards/Extreme interview, to note that an emoticon as sign that we did the interview via email.

One thing I’m having trouble sorting out are tags. If you’re reading along with these old posts and have thoughts on any that are lacking (or low on) tags, lemme know. Thanks.

And yes, I realize that if I do manage to persist in these summaries of the back catalog, it’ll add roughly 750 posts to the website. I hope never to have to revisit those.

Today’s posts are:

▰ A full 1997 interview with Luke Vibert

▰ The Vibert profile that resulted from the above interview

▰ Review of a 1997 reprint of Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present by David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello

▰ A 1997 interview with Roger Richards of Extreme label

▰ A 1997 interview with Steven Levy of the Moonshine label

▰ A 1997 interview with Erik Gilbert of the Asphodel label

▰ Short 1997 review of Matmos’ self-titled album

▰ Short 1997 review of the compilation The Knights Who Say Dot

▰ Short 1997 review of a Gianluigi Trovesi Octet album

▰ Short 1997 review of a Funki Porcini album. I was pretty addicted to Funki Porcini.

Refresher Course Set 2: Oliveros, Dub, Aphex Twin

Whew, some of these early posts are heavy hitters. This “Refresher Course” series, of which this entry is set 2 (the first set went live yesterday), is the result of me starting to methodically work my way back through the more than 7,500 posts on Disquiet.com since the site launched at the end of 1996. Today’s set includes some of my favorite conversations I’ve had with musicians, among them a 1997 chat with Aphex Twin and a 1996 one with the late Pauline Oliveros. Here are the 10 old posts I tidied up today:

▰ A 1996 chat with Pauline Oliveros. I was DMing with Oliveros on Facebook before she died about doing a Disquiet Junto music community project with her, but then she passed away.

▰ A 1997 overview of electronic labels. I’d just revisited this piece a week or so ago when Achim Szepanski, who was among the people I interviewed for it, died. I’m wondering if that experience may have been part of the impetus to begin this clean-up process, this revisiting.

▰ My list of my favorite albums of 1996, including μ-Ziq’s In Pine Effect, Arvo Pärt’s Litany, and the Heat soundtrack. It was a very good year.

▰ An interview with Gavin Bryars from 1997.

▰ An interview with Darrin Verhagen, aka Shinjuku Thief, from 1997.

▰ A very short review of a 1996 Black Dog release.

▰ My 1997 Aphex Twin interview, one of the most read pages on this website. Funny story about this: I was warned in advance by the label, to an unprecedented degree, how “difficult” Richard D. James could be. At the appointed time he called me, I said hello, and then the phone went dead, and I was like, “Wow, they weren’t kidding.” And then he called back immediately. He’d dropped the phone by accident. This is why he starts off the Q&A by saying “Sorry about that.” In retrospect, it’s too bad I didn’t ask him much about Selected Ambient Works Volume II, because about 25 years later I’d publish a book on that album, but I didn’t have a lot of time, and we had a lot to cover.

▰ A starter kit for people new to ambient music. It’s actually broader than that.

▰ A fun interview from 1997 with both members of Spring Heel Jack. They faxed me their answers so they wouldn’t be misquoted.

▰ An essay, with interviews, on contemporary dub-influenced music in America, “Dub, American Style.” This was later collected in a book.

A few additional notes: As I’ve been working through these old posts, I’m amazed by how much of the music isn’t online, at least not officially. One of the DJ Spooky albums I mentioned, the one with Freight Elevator Quartet, isn’t, nor is Drain’s Offspeed and in There, mentioned in one of the pieces included today. This is also the case with many of the compilation albums in the “starter kit” listed above. Many of the URLs from the mid-1990s have gone dead. As I work through this material, if a link works, I leave the link live; if the link is dead, I make it not-clickable but leave th original URL in the text. Also, I was apparently much less of a serial comma absolutist back then; fortunately I eventually saw the light. And: I need to give some serious thought to tags. I never, for example, had an “ambient” tag on this site, but maybe it’s about time. I’m experimenting. I’d like the tags to be more useful, which means having a few more of them, and having them be more consistent.