Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 39

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.

Scratch Pad: Polymeric, Pulice, Luggage

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.

▰ Went to type “polymetric synthesizer” which was then autocorrected to “polymeric synthesizer” and now I’m trying to imagine what that could be

▰ I get tons of spam calls. Today I decided to see what one was, some sort of tax debt BS. I called back the number I had ignored, someone answered, they identified the organization as a “tax center” (whatever that is), and I said, simply, “Hi, what exactly is this?” And they hung up. So weird.

▰ I saw Cole Pulice open for Caterina Barbieri at Great American Music Hall on September 30th, and right now, between Pulice and Kin Sventa and Cecyl Ruehlen (both of whom I’ve also seen live), all I wanna listen to is people processing saxophones electronically

▰ Yeah, Thursday, October 3, 2024, marks the start of the 666th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto music community project

▰ Go back in time to New Orleans me (1999-2003) and tell him in the future he can’t handle a relatively dry 86° F

▰ Part of a paid newspaper subscription should be you get the non-clickbait headlines

▰ Fun fact: playing guitar chords with a wrist recovering from a fall is not advised

▰ Word’s out that the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco is closing and with it the Luggage Store Gallery Music Series. When I think of places where I regularly attended concerts and that are now gone, the two others that hit me as hard were the Knitting Factory on Houston Street in Manhattan and the Mermaid Lounge on Constance Street in New Orleans. :(

▰ Yow, there have been just over 7,500 posts on my Disquiet.com website since I founded it in December 1996. That comes out to roughly 270 posts a year. A lot of them have accumulated weird unicode characters and mangled formatting, and I’ve been thinking of going through the site from the start to the present and tidying things up. If I attended to 5 posts a day, that’d be 4 years before I was done. Eek.

▰ Fun fact: if you write something online about proofreading something, you are destined to have a typo in it. I didn’t make the rule. I’m just reporting gthem.

▰ Afternoon trio for shofar, roof repair, and washing machine — with special guest appearance by automated voice emitted by city bus

▰ I love going back through old articles I’ve written and finding not just record reviews but heavily researched longer pieces I’d entirely forgotten about. Like, of course I interviewed Ben Neill, Beth Custer, Jack Dangers, and Nils Petter Molvaer in 1998 for this one piece I just dug up.

▰ At first you’re like, “Oh, this is just from 2000,” and then you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’d be a quarter century ago”

▰ I will never understand people who talk continuously during concerts.

Let me rephrase that: I think I do understand them, and the psychological profile is not flattering.

▰ I was once in an otherwise empty movie theater with a friend waiting for the film to start, and a couple came in and every other seat in the entire theater was open, and they sat right in front of us. After a few minutes, one of them turned around and said, “Do you have the time?” and I replied, “I’ll tell you if you move.”

▰ So I started the week deeply enjoying Cole Pulice playing electronically mediated saxophone as the opener for a Caterina Barbieri concert, and I ended the week by unearthing, perchance, a 1998 article for which I interviewed Nils Petter Molvaer, Ben Neill, and Beth Custer talking about electronically mediating their respective horns (trumpet, trumpet, clarinet). I guess I’ve been into this stuff for a while.

▰ Been writin’ (and lifin’) more than readin’, hence no finished books for a bit now. On the cusp of a few, and yesterday after lunch I (self-admirably) delayed purchasing the new Alan Moore, The Great When, until my stacks (virtual and physical) diminish a bit. It may just be my imagination, but I feel like he and Neal Stephenson (whose upcoming one I did pre-order) turned in massive books to their publishers around the same time, and those publishers replied, “We’re splitting these into three parts and doling ’em out over as many years.”

Nobuto Suda’s Private Space

Some of the best ambient music can sound simply like music blocked in part by a thick wall. There’s a party going on, and you’re in the next room over, and the sounds are muffled, but you’ve got some much needed personal space and the trade-off is well worth it. “Cloud Streams” by Nobuto Suda involves no trade-offs. The piece is the piece, as intended by the Japanese musician (who is based in San’yō-Onoda), but the pleasant sense of isolation connects to the chance variety described above. Everything moves slowly, which in this case transmits the underlying vibe that any potential urgency has been dispensed with. The effect is calming, all the more so because the sounds have all the hard edges wiped away. It’s more than a wisp, and still lighter than air.

Just Back Data Set 1: Spooky, Krush, Molvaer

OK, why just do one sweeping refactoring of your massive, nearly three-decades old website when you can do two? So, in addition to having today started what could end up being a methodical pass through the 7,500+ posts I’ve made to Disquiet.com since the site debuted in December 1996, I’ve also begun looking through back issues of print magazines I have written for, and posting those articles, as well. The first four of this new set of additions include:

▰ A 1998 essay about the intersection of jazz and electronica featuring interviews I did with Beth Custer, Jack Dangers (Meat Beat Manifesto), Nils Petter Molvaer, and Ben Neill

▰ Reviews of two 2000 DJ Spooky albums

▰ A review of a 2000 DJ Krush album

▰ A review of a 2000 Beastie Boys album

Note that for each of these, I’m setting an old date for them specific to the cover of the issue they appeared in, so they won’t be visible at the top of this site, but instead deep in the chronological archives, which is why I’m introducing an occasional post, such as this one, noting the addition.

Just Backdata Set 1: Spooky, Krush, Molvaer

OK, why just do one sweeping refactoring of your massive, nearly three-decades old website when you can do two? So, in addition to having today started what could end up being a methodical pass through the 7,500+ posts I’ve made to Disquiet.com since the site debuted in December 1996, I’ve also begun looking through back issues of print magazines I have written for, and posting those articles, as well. The first four of this new set of additions include:

▰ A 1998 essay about the intersection of jazz and electronica featuring interviews I did with Beth Custer, Jack Dangers (Meat Beat Manifesto), Nils Petter Molvaer, and Ben Neill

▰ Reviews of two 2000 DJ Spooky albums

▰ A review of a 2000 DJ Krush album

▰ A review of a 2000 Beastie Boys album

Note that for each of these, I’m setting an old date for them specific to the cover of the issue they appeared in, so they won’t be visible at the top of this site, but instead deep in the chronological archives, which is why I’m introducing an occasional post, such as this one, noting the addition.

Refresher Course Set 1: Eno, Krush, Proto-Post-Classical

This website, Disquiet.com, has thus far accumulated 7,509 posts since I started it in December 1996, and I wrote all but one of them. This will be the 7,510th. According to a handy calculator, that’s 10,157 days as of today, October 4, 2024. This rate of production averages to about 270 posts per year; for the past four or five years, I’ve posted every single day. 

I decided it’s about time I went back and tidied up everything on the website. Over the years, especially during the move from hand-coded HTML, around 2007, to WordPress, weird formatting issues have surfaced, and special characters have gotten swapped somehow for gibberish. I’m going to see if I can do at least 10 posts a day. That could be a lot. If I manage it, the entire site will have been refreshed by December 2026, when Disquiet.com turns 30 years of age, which is also how old I was when I founded it.

Even though the site started in 1996, its contents date back earlier still, since I have ported to it material I published elsewhere. I started writing professionally in the summer of 1988, and there are plenty of pieces from college that I could add, as well.

I got started on the refresh process this afternoon. As of today, the 10 earliest posts on the site have been updated. If you see any significant errors, let me know. They are:

▰ A 1991 interview view both Brian Eno and John Cale about their album Wrong Way Up

▰ A 1992 interview with Randy Greif about his reworking of Alice in Wonderland

▰ A 1993 interview with all the members of Depeche Mode

▰ A piece from 1994 about overlaps between classical and pop music

▰ A piece from 1995 about indie labels getting into classical music

▰ A 1995 interview with Skylab’s Matt Ducasse

▰  A 1996 essay about a piece of comics art by Matt Madden I edited that was about sound

▰ A 1996 interview with DJ Krush

▰ A 1996 review of a compilation of French trip-hop

▰ A 1996 mention of a sound art installation by Christopher Janney

It was a treat to revisit things I had written so long ago. Some are fairly fresh in my memory, like the Matt Madden one, which circulates online with some frequency, and the Depeche Mode, which I added to the website what feels like a few years ago but was actually back in 2012. It’s rewarding to see my commentary about classical music well in advance of what we now think of as post-classical music. In a few cases I was entirely surprised. For example, I remembered DJ Krush recognizing the title to the movie Blade Runner when I said it out loud in an interview that was mediated by an interpreter. I had not recalled that he likewise recognized when I mentioned John Zorn. I don’t know why I didn’t ask him about Zorn at the time. It’s also fun to see how into — obsessed, really — I was with certain artists. There are hints here. Mentioning DJ Premier in the DJ Krush article in 1996 makes perfect sense, but Premier is much more tangential subject in the Janney piece.

Another thing I hope to address is the site structure. The tags could benefit from some refactoring, and the sections have changed over time. For example, a lot of the early record write-ups, such as the French trip-hop one in this batch, were in a section called The Crate, which later became meaningfully distinct from Downstream, which was focused initially solely on freely downloadable music. Now, following the broad reach of streaming, everything goes into Downstream.

Anyhow, I’ll see if I can keep at this. I also plan on going through past work I published elsewhere, notably during my long run as an editor (1989 – 1996) and contributing editor (1996 – 2004) at the magazines published by Tower Records.