Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 40

Vibrating with Decisive Purpose

Fizzy, twitchy little sonic trinkets, the longest just a couple seconds over four minutes, the shortest a little over two and a half. Lulling bits of room tone split into fragments and scanned through as if with a radio dial. Beats made of considerably less than the sound of dust brushing against a vinyl player’s needle, other times — in classic glitch fashion, here rendered all in lowercase — like a questionable, all-plastic CD player well past its return date. Beats like windshield wipers made of eyelashes. Beats like stray thoughts caught in a spider web on a rickety wooden metronome. A hushed voice struggling to be heard, and yet cagey about what it might want to say. These are the components that comprise New Old Loops, a set as compact as it is delicate, at once intimate and private, and yet vibrating with decisive purpose. The musician is Oleg Malov of Tuapse, Russia. Malov, who goes by Okmiracle, knows exactly what he is doing, and it’s low-key glorious.

On Repeat: Skupina, Jackal, Rohrer

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.

▰ Really digging this mix of light synth tones, nature field recordings, and slow singing from Manja Ristić and Tomáš Šenkyřík, from the Czech record label Skupina. There are moments on Vstal when the artificial tones fit in more like background sound than prominent additions.

▰ I don’t have an embed or a link for this, because the music isn’t available — yet? — as an album, but I’ve ben enjoying the scene-setting score that Volker Bertelmann (aka Hauschka; All Quiet on the Western Front, The Old Guard) composed for the new The Day of the Jackal, the one starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch. Spy thriller scores, especially those serving stories that don’t veer too much into science fiction, are a steady source of rhythmic and moody background listening, and this one doesn’t disappoint. (He’s been very busy. He also scored the new Dune TV series, Dune: Prophecy, and Conclave, both of which have album releases.)

▰ I’m still working my way through Samuel Rohrer’s new album, Music for Lovers, which I discovered due to a guest appearance by characteristically ethereal trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer on one dubby track, “The Gift.”

Scratch Pad: Brahms, Noise Sewer

I  do this manually at the end of each week: collating 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.

▰ Does the conductor perspiring while the orchestra plays Brahms count as Sweatin’ to the Oldies?

▰ One odd downside to being off social media from Friday night to Monday morning is may you receive Instagram alerts about stories you’ve been mentioned in that have since disappeared, as have stories those stories might have responded to. It’s like showing up to a party after it ended, but I’m happy for my low-digital weekends.

▰ Whew, a month and a couple days from the 28th anniversary of Disquiet.com. Getting that URL and getting the site going was one of the best decisions I ever made. I resisted the word “blog” for a long time, but I’ve long since embraced it.

▰ A British novel introduced me to the term “crosspatch,” apparently a derogatory word for a “bad-tempered person” (versus, I suppose, a laudatory term for a bad-tempered person?). Now I wanna hear bad-tempered synth patches. And I realize as I type this that “tempered” also has a musical meaning. And there is a synth company called Crosspatch, but I don’t think the name choice had anything to do with the slang term. They make one Eurorack module, called the Triggerpad, which serves as an interface for grids, such as the Launchpad.

Ah, as the Further Records account (on Bluesky) subsequently pointed out to me, “curmudgeon” arguably counts as a laudatory term for a bad-tempered person.

▰ Best autocorrect yet: while I was typing the word “are” my laptop decided to unfold those three letters into “aesthetically pleasing.” We’re going to wake up one morning and computers will simply have gone insane and there will be no walking it back.

▰ Remarkable how much better a laptop seems to run when you simply clean the grime off its screen

▰ It’s funny to think I might want my streaming music service to learn from my Shazam usage, like I can’t be interested in the identity of a song yet never ever want to hear it or anything like it again

▰ This elevator would make an even better synthesizer sequencer:

▰ 1999: Begin to download new email in the morning, and by the time it’s all downloaded, there’s more email to download.  

2024: Begin to download new app updates on your phone in the morning, and by the time they’re downloaded and installed, there are new app updates.

▰ Let’s get liminal, liminal:

▰ “noise sewer” — Say what you will about the blight that is noise pollution, it sure does reap linguistic rewards. This phrase is from concerns in Kent about the impact of changes at Gatwick, already one of Britain’s busiest airports (telegraph.co.uk).

▰ Finished reading one novel this week, on top of the two I finished last week — and of course, immediately started reading three more. I finished Lawrence Robbins’ The President’s Lawyer, based on a positive mention by Sarah Lyall in the New York Times.

Nuthin’ but Bluesky

This whole series of Disquiet Junto projects got started, to a good degree, on Twitter, back when it was actually called that — and to a lesser degree on Instagram, back when it seemed like it was mostly fuzzy photos of nature and street scenes — as a result of discussions there toward the end of 2011. I’m still on social media, mostly Mastodon, but as Bluesky has been having a bit of a moment lately, I figured I’d mention: if you’re on Bluesky, please let me know your account name (email me: marc@disquiet.com). I’ve begun a “Starter Pack” — which is, in part, a way to collect Bluesky users with some shared characteristic — of Disquiet Junto participants. You can find it at https://go.bsky.app/EaKoSoS.

Disquiet Junto Project 0672: Day Break

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 0672: Day Break
The Assignment: Make a handful of sonic alerts for various purposes.

Step 1: You’re going to make alarm sounds. Think about the alarms and alerts — phone, egg timer, microwave, neighborhood church bells, etc. — that currently go off regularly in your life.

Step 2: Make a list of a handful of instances you want to create an alert for, like something urgent and something that’s a gentle reminder, and so forth. Maybe you have a different tone for each morning of the week?

Step 3: Record roughly five (more or less) sonic alerts for the purposes you decided upon in Step 2.

Step 4: Make one track with each of the alerts separated briefly by some silence. When posting the track online, be sure to list the intention behind each alert.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0672” (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 https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0672-day-break/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long do you plan to snooze for?

Deadline: Monday, November 18, 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 672nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Day Break — The Assignment: Make a handful of sonic alerts for various purposes — at https://disquiet.com/0672/

Autechre Diary Updates

My ongoing Listening Diary of the newly released dozen Autechre live sets from 2023 and 2024 has passed the 2,000 words milestone, with no signs of slowing down, and thus far I’ve still only touched on half the latest AE_2022- recordings. Today I focused on the Melbourne date for the first time, with side trips to Turin, and to Japan, and to William Gibson’s early fiction (speaking of which, Neuromancer turned 40 this year). In the process of keeping this diary, I’ve also been building up a much larger collection of “Other Notes” at the bottom of the post than I had expected to, most recently to share some examples of the software Autechre utilizes (live and in the studio), as well as to strike an accidental contrast between these new sets and one of the ones from the seven that were released in 2023.

It’s at disquiet.com/autechre_live_2024, which is the “human-readable” URL for the diary about this very post-human music.

Dawn Break

Anti-eroticism. Architectural literacy. Consumerism finger-poking. And zombies, lots of zombies. I wrote about the original Dawn of the Dead (1978), one of my favorite movies of all time, for Hilobrow’s ongoing horror series. The 25-part collection, titled Scream Your Enthusiasm, has some great contributors, including comic book artist and playwright Dean Haspiel, film editor Crockett Doob, author Lynn Peril, and series editor Heather Quinlan, just to name a few. I didn’t have space to get into the music, but of course the film’s classic score was the result of a team-up between the band Goblin (“the Goblins” on the poster) and Dario Argento. I dedicated the short essay (as I did an earlier Hilobrow piece on Celtic Frost) to my late friend Eric Engelhardt.

Car Talk

I’ve been doing a lot of research these past few years into field recordings, those of both the natural environment and the built environment. Bridging, in a manner of speaking, the gap between the two respective realms are the environmental sounds that fill video games, virtual reality, and the like. They are artificially created yet intended to give the impact of something real, something heightened or extrapolated, something — to use the ubiquitous term — immersive. Many of these high-definition sonic studio concoctions are derived from actual field recordings, while others are produced more synthetically. Such recordings are, of course, intended to be experienced in a given context.

However, as with the one heard (and seen) below, in which a driver navigates the nighttime streets of the 2013 game Grand Theft Auto V, there is a large and growing audience for prerecorded video game experiences, and though they are, inherently, audio-visual, many of these fan recordings are couched in sonic terms, like “ASMR” and as “sleep aids.” There is something lulling, indeed, to this city drive, which the title informs us has “NO LOOPS” — which is to say, it is a constant, non-repeating stream of different journeys around the open world of the video game, courtesy of the channel named Video Game Weather ASMR. It is also, per the functional title, eight hours long. The primary things I found myself listening to are the car engines and the rain, and I found myself listening for variations therein. Your mileage may vary. I recommend starting at the beginning and then checking out the different scenarios, each from the point of view of a different driver/character in the game. There is a clickable table of contents to the video, helping situate you should you want to know where you are — or more to the point, who you are — at a given moment.

This is excerpted from the Friday, November 8, Listening Post (0026) issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter.

AE, Matey

The British duo Autechre traffic in abstract music that veers between abstract sound design and challenging club music, which is to say they record what is known as IDM, and this past week they did what they seem to do every few years, which is to unleash an ungodly amount of their music out of the blue all at once. For background: There was the four-hour-plus elseq 1-5 in 2016, and the eight-hour NTS Sessions 1–4 two years after that. And of course, way back in 2015, there were the 28 hours of music comprised by AE_LIVE. Oh, and the nearly eight-hour AE_LIVE 2016/2018 in 2018. Bringing us up to the present: In 2023 Autechre released 7 full sets, packaged as AE_LIVE 2022–, from a tour that occurred mostly the year preceding, and then this week, rather than create a new catch-all title, they simply added another dozen sets from 2023 and 2024, bringing AE_LIVE 2022– (the hyphen still open, no end in sight) to a total of 19 sets, or nearly 23 hours of music. It’s a lot. Like, a lot, even on its own, and especially in the broader context of these 2001-ish monoliths, not to mention their studio recordings and other work. As I’ve done in the past, I’m going to try to tackle — and almost certainly fail — this motherlode by doing so in plain sight, keeping a listening diary rolling in public. It’s at disquiet.com/autechre_live_2024. Now, the point of this Listening Post series is to help pick out items in the vast miasma (sorry, I’m in the midst of reading Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Polostan) of modern music. I’d suggest starting off with AE_MADRID_100424. (I can’t embed it here, but you can check it out at autechre.warp.net.)

This is excerpted from the Friday, November 8, Listening Post (0026) issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter.

Scratch Pad: Craigslist, Oblique, Overload

I  do this manually at the end of each week: collating 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.

▰ Went to the symphony. The orchestra tuned up. My friend: “This is your favorite part, isn’t it?” Me: “Yeah.”

▰ Me earlier this morning: it’d be a good week to catch up on some recent and upcoming album releases.

Autechre just now: here are a dozen new hour-long concert recordings.

▰ Definitely a first for me: I saw a pair of great used speakers on Craigslist. The guy selling them was 30 miles away. Arranging a meet-up was difficult. He was like “How about I mail them?” I was like “I trust you. Let’s do it.” They arrived today, well-packed. It’s the little things.

▰ Every morning I pick an Oblique Strategies card at random. Today’s? “Just carry on.”

▰ I pull up Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon (which it is, I notice after the fact), and my streaming service is like, “Oh, it’s you again. You paused at 16:46 last time. Wanna start from the beginning, or pick up where you left off? Ha, doesn’t matter. We know you’re just gonna let it loop for hours.”

▰ The odd comfort of a siren screaming by, a reminder there is a world outside my home office

▰ I know how to turn off auto-play. I don’t know how to turn off the thing that turns auto-play back on.

▰ I did make a top 10 albums list this year — top 25, actually. I’ll post it in a bit. Still reconciling it with my general disinclination to do such a thing. The main benefit, for me, was how it’s helped me think about tracking my listening slightly differently. Maybe something good will come of that.

▰ Readers: “You never write negative reviews anymore.” Me: “I do. I just only send them to the publicists.”

▰ The hard part about there being so much music is that there is so much music that sounds nearly the same. In 1996, a record of birdsong and ambient tones stood out; now there’s like 10 a week. Ditto arpeggio-heavy synths. And jazzy breakbeats. And laptop-baked “avant-pop.” And so forth. The overload isn’t about numbers; it’s about a handful of siloed monocultures within which the differences between albums has become somewhat minimal.

While I’m at it: I think from a certain perspective, avant-pop is where something might shine through by combining elements toward a unique artistic point of view. But in the end, a lot just sounds like it’s using such elements as window dressing for what is, in effect, a fairly standard song.

▰ Turning up the white noise like a morphine drip

▰ You’d think if computers could do one thing, it’d be to count consistently. I love Obsidian as a text editor (among other features), but it persistently has these slight deviations between word counts. This file registers as both 928 words and 929. Call it Schrödinger’s calculator.

▰ Funny thing about the excellent desktop speakers I got on Craigslist (iLoud Micro Monitor) is only one has an “on” light. I find I tilt my head to the right, wondering if that one’s on. (It is. Fantastic separation.) Love my M1 MacBook Pro speakers but this levels up my desk-time listening big time.

▰ Been reading a lot but not finishing much. I finally finished reading not one but two novels: First, Charles Portis’ widely celebrated True Grit. I’ve never seen either movie (the John Wayne one or the Coen Brothers one), but I will see them now. It’s quite thick with vernacular, and the narrator’s voice is interesting, in that it is that of both the teenage girl who is driving the events of the book, and of the same person a half century later thinking back to her youthful adventure. So, the dialog is her when she was young, and yet the framing narrative is her elder self. And it’s a good story, and the depiction of the late-1800s American west makes me very glad to live in the modern world, even with all its own tensions and shortcomings.

And I finished Neal Stephenson’s brand new and refreshingly brief and breezy (some violence and horrific incidents excepted) novel, Polostan, which is the first third of a novel or, as it’s being packaged, the first book of a trilogy. Like True Grit, it focuses on a young woman who ends up teaming up with men committed to a hard life. It’s written in the third person, but the woman, who goes by several names, Russian and American, is on almost every page, to the extent that it almost feels first-person. I think the main reason it’s in the third person is that, strong as she is, she only has so much control over her life. The third person narration boxes her in, and the manner that suits the story. And, in any case, Stephenson uses — unless I am forgetting something — the third person very rarely in any of his fiction. Polostan is structured as an interrogation, and then the interview ceases and the remainder of the story proceeds. It works well, though a lot of the drama for the first two thirds involves the narrator simply not telling us what happens because, conveniently, we have to flash back to the story being told, such that the answer to whatever question spurred the given reminiscence doesn’t arrive until the end of the segment, if not later still.

And I should finish Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories shortly.