Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 4

Disquiet Junto Project 0711: Show & Tell &

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 0711: Show & Tell &
The Assignment: Share some recent music; get and give feedback

Step 1: Choose a track/composition you’re working on. Share the recording on the Lines forum on the llllllll.co discussion thread at:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0711-show-tell

Step 2: When posting the track, mention that you’re looking for feedback, describe what you’ve been up to on the track, and if applicable specify some aspects of the recording you might want input on.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0711” (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-0711-show-tell/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, August 18, 2025, 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 711th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Show & Tell & — The Assignment: Share some recent music; get and give feedback — at https://disquiet.com/0711/.

Manga Tape Deck

I’ve been on something of a manga bender lately, and so I share this one panel from Masakazu Ishiguro’s very enjoyable series Heavenly Delusion. There a light echo of Akira Toriyama’s work in Ishiguro’s, a gentle roundness to some of the technology, as in this depiction of a portable tape recorder.

M8 Headless Cheat Sheet

The above image is borrowed from the manual for the M8 Operation Manual. This shows the layout for the physical M8 Tracker device. The text in gray on the eight buttons on the bottom half of the device is what I’ve added to the provided image. Here is a more useful detail:

Those eight keys are, I believe, the default settings for using a computer keyboard as replacements for the physical buttons on the official M8 Tracker. From my experience with the M8 Tracker, you cradle it with both hands and control the buttons with your thumbs, though I imagine some people may rest the device on a table, or lap, and employ additional fingers.

This is a picture of the first version of the M8, which is the one I have. There’s a more recent version, but the buttons are in the same place.

I’m trying to port some of my experience with the official device to running the software on a Teensy 4.1, connected to my laptop with a USB cable, as I’ve mentioned here recently. The transposition gets a little confusing, in part because I’m inclined to use more than just my thumbs on my laptop, and also because the arrow keys are on the lower right side of my laptop keyboard but on the upper left side of the M8 Tracker. Much M8 use is muscle memory.

I’ll continue to track, so to speak, as I explore the M8 Tracker further.

Kronos in the Red (Hot)

Kronos Quartet has released an EP to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first nuclear detonation, back in July 1945. The EP, available on Bandcamp, has three tracks. The first is an extended version of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” its vocal a composite of sections sung by numerous musicians, including Allison Russell, Iggy Pop, Stephin Merritt, Gustavo Santaolalla, Laurie Anderson, and Willie Nelson. There’s also an expanded ensemble, including Santaolalla on ronroco and Chris Geddes on Hammond organ, plus many other players, and a sizable chorus.

The second and third track take the concept further, and further still. A “drone” version eschews familiar instrumentation in favor of an extended sonic bed, above which spoken lyrics are more layered (even cut-up) than in the first take, spoken by Ocean Vuong, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Ringo Star, and many others. (I’d love if Kronos also put out the isolated instrumental of this one.)

Finally, there’s a spirited raga inspired by Kronos’ efforts, performed by Terry Riley with Sara Miyamoto, who teamed with Kronos previously on a re-imagining of Sun Ra’s music. The Riley/Miyamoto piece, “Komal Reshab Asavari,” came out the month prior to coincide with Riley’s 90th birthday, and then was included in this release.

All these were collaborations with Red Hot Org. Kronos now has just one of its founding members, violinist David Harrington, plus cellist Paul Wiancko, who joined two years ago, and violinist Gabriela Díaz and violist Ayane Kosaza, who joined last year.

M8 Headless Experiment

This was a satisfying series of initial steps. I have an M8 Tracker, which is a music-making device that combines a sequencer (hence the name “tracker”), a synthesizer, and a sampler, all in the palm of your hand. The M8 exists in part because of the creative opportunities afforded by the Teensy (specifically the 4.1), an inexpensive (roughly $35US) circuit board for product development.

Since the M8 runs on this common tool, and because Dirtywave, the manufacturer of the M8, makes its software available for download, you can make your own M8 equivalent pretty easily. Doing so is usually accomplished by hooking a Teensy to a game system or a laptop. I decided to try the latter, using a MacBook Pro, to begin with. This process is called a “headless” approach, though it’s not quite headless, because you’re using the game system or laptop as the screen.

The instructions, as laid out on Dirtywave’s GitHub documentation, were fairly easy to follow. I only encountered two sources of confusion:

First: Under Step 3 (“Install a M8 Display Client and Run M8 Headless”) of the headless process, there are three primary options for the Teensy to feed visuals through the laptop. However, the way it’s written out, it looked to me like the first two options had one step, whereas the third option had multiple steps. I didn’t initially understand those subsequent steps applied the first and second options, as well.

Second: I was confused that when the Teensy connected to my laptop via a USB cable, I didn’t see the SD card mounted via the MacBook’s file system. The SD card not appearing in the Finder meant I couldn’t transfer audio files, like beats and field recordings. I eventually sorted out that I needed to remove the SD card, and put it separately into the laptop in order to transfer files. Not a big deal, but this wasn’t self-evident to me. I interpreted this as a problem to be solved, not a norm I had to work around.

And that about covers it. The M8 Tracker is now running headless on my laptop, as shown up above. I ordered a little $10 plastic case to (somewhat) protect the Teensy 4.1, which is just a raw circuit board. And I’ll be experimenting some more.

The primary reason I did all this was because I’ve been looking into alternate firmware, and while to my knowledge there is no fork of the M8 software, this project was useful to give me some experience with flashing software to the Teensy. Also, I really enjoy my M8 Tracker, and using the headless Teensy version means I’ll have more ways to play around with the system.

Scratch Pad: 808, Holidays, Manga

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.

▰ Stoked for the dub version of the Outside Lands Festival. That’s what it sounds like when you live a few blocks away.

▰ August 7 is (along with April 13) like Christmas Eve for a certain subset of electronic music fans

▰ Whew, just under 7,860 posts on disquiet.com in the past (just under) 29 years (site anniversary in mid-December)

▰ Wishing a happy 808 Day to all who celebrate

▰ I’m not clumsy. I simply have inapproprioception.

▰ Best sounds of Outside Lands: (1) layers of honking from passing cars, (2) people cursing that a nearby porta potty is for a construction site not for attendees, (3) keeping track of slang, which gets more slurred as the day goes on

▰ I was on a short vacation last (extended) weekend for my birthday and then under the weather much of this week, so I read a lot more than usual, and in particular a lot more comics/manga than usual. I read the first seven tankobon volumes of Satuski Yoshino’s Barakamon, about a fairly young (early 20s) calligrapher who leaves Tokyo for a rural island in order to find his own writing style. It’s a great example of why I think of much standard manga as “paper television.” This series is, essentially, a highly addictive, binge-able, fish-out-of-water comedy, capably and affectionately drawn and expertly paced. I wish there was more calligraphy in the story, but what calligraphy there is is pretty interesting. There are another dozen volumes of Barakamon, and a seven-book prequel, too. We’ll see if I get around to them. ▰ I read the standalone collection Rakuda Laughs, by Satuski Yoshino, about a hyperviolent and hypersexual yakuza. It’s over the top, but there are panels of city scenes that are so beautiful it’s worth it. Rakuda Laughs includes an afterword by director Takashi Miike, which tells you how violent it is. ▰ I read the first volume of Tsutomu Nihei’s Tower Dungeon, which is like reading a video game, right down to the mention of “levels” as the fighters make their way to, yes, rescue a princess. With a little more self-consciousness, it would count as LitRPG. The illustrations, which are a little rough, at least in this first volume, reminded me of Norihiro Yagi’s Claymore a bit. The depictions of the built environment are, as in the Yoshino, worth the price of admission, but are also totally different. ▰ I read the complete, seven-volume collection of Inio Asano’s Goodnight Punpun, which is quite a strange read, moving from fairly straightforward teen melodrama to something exceedingly nihilistic, akin to Terrence Malick’s Badlands, or Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. It uses so much photography as backgrounds (albeit treated, so as to look like line drawings) that it almost counts as fumetti. Also, and this is a key factor in its style: several characters, including the main one, are drawn like stick figures. ▰ I don’t know when we stopped calling Kazuo Umezu that and started calling him Kazuo Umezz, but in any case I read the first collection of his My Name Is Shingo, an old-fashioned sentient-robot story that feels a bit like classic Osamu Tezuka (and Umezz’s own The Drifting Classroom, which is a decade older), and I’ll be finishing the series for sure. ▰ I read the first two volumes of Ishino’s Mujina into the Deep (dystopian story about young assassins), and I’m excited for the third volume, which is due out by the end of the year, I think. ▰ And I read the first three volumes of Masakazu Ishiguro’s Heavenly Delusion, which is a near-future dystopian road story that jumps back and forth between some children with heightened abilities stuck in an enclosed scientific environment, and some older kids (also with powers) wandering a post-apocalyptic Japan. I’ll continue to read this series, and explore some of its author’s earlier work. (The art made me want to revisit Jeff Nicholson’s Ultra Klutz.) ▰ And I didn’t just read manga. I read two western graphic novels: Wolverine: Revenge by writer Jonathan Hickman and illustrator Greg Capullo, who may be my favorite superhero illustrator these days, now that Frank Quitely and Chris Bachalo aren’t doing that much (far as I can tell). ▰ Quitely did draw the first volume of Mark Millar’s The Ambassadors (each of its collected issues has a different artist), which I also read and enjoyed, though I’m kind of a sucker for getting-the-band-together story lines; what happens after they get together is often another story. (I just started Hickman’s Imperial, a new series from Marvel, but only the first issue is out on the Marvel Unlimited app, so it’s gonna be four or five months before I complete the first collection.) ▰ If this seems like a lot of pages of comics, it is. The Goodbye Punpun septet alone was 2,952 pages. Like I said, I’ve been a bit under the weather, and when I am — which fortunately isn’t that often — TV can give me a headache and novels and non-fiction can take more concentration than I’ve got. So, I read comics. One of the first things I learned when I started working at Viz, back in 2004, was how quickly kids read Shonen Jump and similar magazines. It’s like eating ramen quickly and while slurping: it’s how it’s done.

Musical & Environmental

I follow the work of the musician who goes by he_nu_ri pretty closely, and I was excited when this video popped up on YouTube. Not only does it feature Serge synthesizer modules (designs that go back to the early 1970s, though these specific devices are fairly new), but the musician described it as pushing the bounds of what previous releases might suggest: these are “more experimental and atonal experiments.” That said, it’s a delight, precise little sounds that seem to echo forever, like drops heard from a deep deep well. It is at once musical and environmental.

Disquiet Junto Project 0710: Let’s Get Loud

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 0710: Let’s Get Loud
The Assignment: Make a piece of your own music louder/busier.

There is just one step in this project:

Choose a recent piece of your own music and rework it by making some portions of it significantly louder and busier than they were initially.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0710” (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-0710-lets-get-loud/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, August 11, 2025, 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 710th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Let’s Get Loud — The Assignment: Make a piece of your own music louder/busier — at https://disquiet.com/0710/.

The Art of Circuitry

Incredible circuit board illustrations, all full-page, from the first volume of Kazuo Umezz’s manga My Name Is Shingo (1982–1986). A fairly common aspect of manga is to, after pages of sometimes casual and spare drawing, to be suddenly hit with a page or spread of intense detail, like cityscapes or nature scenes. Here the eye focuses on the detail inside a machine — a machine that is, at times, the story’s narrator. I worked in manga for a half decade, and moments like these thrill me to this day.

Five Apartments and a Mailbox

Another day, another doorbell, or set of doorbells. I like to think the Master Lock set-up on the left is for when the electric buttons fail. Bonus points for the one apartment that gets a mailbox.