Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 4

Disquiet Junto Project 0720: One from Two

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 0720: One from Two
The Assignment: Combine a pair of your recent tracks.

Step 1: You just recognized something. Two tracks you’ve been working on but haven’t finished would work better if you turned them into one single track.

Step 2: Choose two of your recent works-in-progress.

Step 3: Combine — by whatever means you see fit to employ — the two tracks from Step 2 into a single track.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0720” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0720-one-from-two/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, October 20, 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 720th weekly Disquiet Junto project, One from Two — The Assignment: Combine a pair of your recent tracks — at https://disquiet.com/0720/.

Always Be Doing

This paragraph is from the email newsletter that will announce tomorrow’s Disquiet Junto project. It provides context for the week’s effort. This will be the 720th consecutive Disquiet Junto project.

This week’s project involves reworking recent work. It was inspired by a few different observations, one of which comes in the form of a memory from college. I worked for a spell on one of the literary magazines published by students. Early my first year, the editor-in-chief had quickly announced a due date for submissions. My immediate sense was this impending date didn’t provide sufficient time for potential contributors to write something. I came to understand that the sort of writers this publication was looking for didn’t need to be told to do something in order to start it. They would already be writing regularly. They just needed to be given a deadline to finish one of the things they were working on. I think about this experience all the time.

Meierkord’s Time Loops

A new Henrik Meierkord release is always welcome. He has mastered the technologically mediated cello, striving for and achieving a steady, layered tonality that underlines the moment without overwhelming it. “Drones with my beloved cello and pedal” is his simple description of this new set, When time becomes a loop, yet from such a simple combination vast spaces and rich harmonies are made. Overdubbing and reverb and granular effects have become common elements in music-making, but it still takes a considered approach to sustain such a thing, and all the more so to explore new aspects of ambient textures. Meierkord, as always, delivers.

Music from the Silo

There’s a grain silo in Scotland I’ve been reading about for years (thecourier.co.uk, thetimes.com). In the town of Cupar in the parish of Fife, the silo originated as part of a former sugar beet processing factory. That factory, now defunct, would turn 100 this coming year. The silo is of more recent vintage, dating from 1964. In 2025, the silo — the Cupar Grain Silo, as it’s called — launched a series of live recordings, making the most of the venue’s expansive resonance. The second release is a nearly 45-minute live set by the musician Konx-om-Pax. It’s mastered by Russell Haswell, who contributed the first release in this new series. Spacious and rangy, slow-moving yet making occasionally drastic shifts in instrumentation (rich drones, echoing near silence, thick choral singing), it’s something to put on, turn up, and give one’s own room over to.

Here’s footage, from several years back, of what I believe to be musician Scott Gordon performing in the silo:

And here’s some drone footage of the outside of the silo:

On Repeat: “play at low volume”

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ There’s a gorgeous collection, six sound installations, of installation soundtracks — all looping, gestural, atmospheric audio — by the late Steve Roden (1964-2023) out on the Line label. The exhibits where these works were first installed were at such places as the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, UCLA Hammer Museum, e/static gallery (Torino, Italy), and Henry Museum (Seattle, WA), as well as at the Mercosur Biennial (Porto Allegre, Brazil), among others. Roden was a master of — and originator of — lowercase sound. Fittingly, the album, which is 3.5 hours long, includes the instruction “play at low volume.”

Steve’s friend, sometime collaborator, and now archivist, Stephen Vitiello, wrote an essay about the ongoing archival process of Roden’s audio work for thekitchen.org.

▰ Infinity Gradient is an hour-long collaboration between composer Tristan Perich and organist James McVinnie, in which McVinnie’s instrument intertwines with 100 speakers playing sounds resulting from the Perich’s fascination with low-fidelity 1-bit audio. The music is a symphony of precious — sometimes vibrant, sometimes fragile — minimalism.

▰ Beautiful solo performance by Kenta Kamiyama at the venue Shibasaki Mod in Tokyo. Billowing, lightly glitchy sounds from processed guitar.

Scratch Pad: Commas, Koyaanisqatsi, AFX

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 need to hack my TV to include serial commas in captions

▰ Sitting here in the mall by myself with my earbuds in noise cancellation mode, listening to abstract music, I can tell you that just about any track of abstract music would work as a music video if you just set up a camera in a mall and let the world saunter by. It’s like a minimalist-budget Koyaanisqatsi.

▰ My video playlist on YouTube of live performances of ambient music is up to 225 tracks. It is, apparently, 31 hours, 48 minutes, and 1 second in length. (Tracks come and go. I rarely if ever delete them from the playlist, but sometimes they do get removed from the overall service.)

▰ That’s pretty cool. I didn’t realize that the Spanish edition of my 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II was the first book in the series of Spanish translations. Some background on the publisher here (in Spanish).

▰ Have a good weekend. Open a window as soon as you wake up. Search an ebook of your favorite novel from childhood for the words “sound” and “listen” and note the results. Play an album very loud from the next room over. See you Tuesday — or maybe Wednesday.

▰ Read a ton this week; finished nothing.

After Autechre

Got a good photo of Autechre’s awesome show at the Regency here in San Francisco:

Bonus points to the musician — FiLTHMiLK, I was informed by Wobbly — who set up across the street from the Autechre concert at the Regency and drew a crowd when the show ended, around 11:15pm.

Oh, and in case the joke up top didn’t register, here is what was projected on the screen in advance of Autechre taking the stage:

Disquiet Junto Project 0719: Riding on the Metronome

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 0719: Riding on the Metronome
The Assignment: Play with and against a steady beat.

Step 1: Locate a metronome and set it to play at a speed of your choice. Recommended: 70 bpm.

Step 2: Practice playing with, and against, and entirely apart from the beat.

Step 3: Record a piece of music in which you start off playing with the beat, and then veer away from it, and then are drawn back to it, and then veer away, around and again. End the piece while playing apart from the beat, not in sync with it.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0719” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0719-riding-on-the-metronome/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, October 13, 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 719th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Riding on the Metronome — The Assignment: Play with and against a steady beat — at https://disquiet.com/0719/.

Gashapon Caution

My wallet survived a gashapon encounter

Texan Ambient Industrial

A solid five minutes of ambient industrial music from Peter Lukeson of Denton, Texas.
What begins, initially, as a quiet, lofi atmosphere expands by adding a series of rhythmic patterns, notably mechanical bursts that resemble a heartbeat, and then on top of that some precise pixie stick percussion. When the music returns to original atmospherics, they don’t just carry the memory of the recent pounding. In addition, the drones are louder, and higher-pitched, and overall more threatening, more commanding. Good stuff. More from Lukeson on Bandcamp.