Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 408

From the Wilds of Southernmost Japan

The ingredients: “Elegant scops owl, Ryukyu flying fox, Yaeyama harpist frog, Ryukyu ruddy kingfisher, cicadas, Ryukyu green pigeon, Ryukyu crow, white breasted waterhen …”

The setting: the remote Japanese Island of Iriomote, which is so far south on the archipelago that it looks more like a neighbor of Taiwan.

The recordist: Rodolphe Alexis traveled to Iriomote this past summer, and returned with a four-channel document of the luxurious habitat, all bleating and crooning, welping and whizzing, croaking and cawing. It is an enticingly remote sonic postcard, available for free download as an MP3.

Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. More on Alexis, who is based in Paris, at rodolphe-alexis.info.

A New Boxhead Ensemble Album Surfaces

The best of the group Boxhead Ensemble has always been the sound of a band just tuning up, a band just on the verge of a song beginning to gain traction, but holding back as if by some tantric popular-music attenuation, the instruments — generally those of a homespun country outfit, all fiddle, harmonica, guitar, trap-set drums — slowly joining in unison, but never quite proceeding to a proper song. That is no less the case than ever than on the recently released The Unseen Hand: Music For Documentary Film, which just popped up this week on Rdio, though not yet on Spotify. The record label that released it, Hired Hand, posted two sample tracks from the album back on July 18, according to its Facebook page, and that material was only, to date, liked twice and shared twice. In fact, as of this writing, there are just 19 results on Google for a search that combines “unseen hand” + “boxhead ensemble”: a wrong that needs to be righted. The band toured a series of living room shows earlier this year with Califone. While the full Unseen Hand release is streaming on Rdio, the two tracks remain available for free download: the characteristically atmospheric “Western Wishes Intro,” with which the album opens, and the slightly more structured, though only by degrees, “Adriano’s Theme.” Neither track evidences that as many as a half dozen musicians are present; listed on the cover are Wil Hendricks, Eric Heywood, Michael Krassner, Bruce Licher, Rob Moore, and Tim Rutili. More on the release at hiredhandltd.wordpress.com, which is selling a limited edition of 330, which includes three extra tracks. And, yes, I’ve ordered a copy.

via instagram.com/dsqt

Pre-SFEMF warm up. Excited to see Nicolas Collins live for the first time. #1985

Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

The Hamlet of CMS Cross-pollination

There’s probably no one who cares about this but me, but I wanted to mention that for the time being I’ve turned off the IFTTT “recipe” that automatically would take new posts from my sound.tumblr.com site and then post the material here at Disquiet.com. The reason is simple: there’s a lot published at sound.tumblr.com on a daily basis, because it’s a linkblog, and it can overwhelm Disquiet.com. I came to this realization this month: my sensitivity to not overwhelming the Disquiet.com editorial balance was actually keeping me from posting more frequently to sound.tumblr.com site. And the point of the sound.tumblr.com site is to have as little in the way of a filter as possible — to just use it as a repository for lightly annotated links about the role of sound in the media landscape. On occasion I’ll do roundups here at Disquiet.com of highlights from sound.tumblr.com, and if a given sound.tumblr.com takes on a little heft, I’ll cross-post it here, as I did earlier today with the piece on the sound of dining.

Global Time Stamp of Listening

Despite the fairly geographically dispersed nature of my Twitter feed, it has its own evident cycles. Each day around 6pm in California, where I live, the feed quiets down, and when I wake in the morning, generally around 6am, not a whole lot appears to have transpired, despite the presence of plenty of Australians and Japanese, among others, in my mix.

Last night, to probe the dark hours, I set an automated tweet as a little experiment, to find out what people were hearing elsewhere. (I used the same IFTTT.com tool that auto-tweets for me the Tuesday noon civic warning siren here in San Francisco.) I wrote, just shy of 140 characters:

It’s 2:15am (this tweet’s automated). If you’re reading it, you’re likely not in the U.S. Please tweet back what you hear. #listening

The replies were gratifying, like transcriptions of recordings of utterly failed stake-out surveillance from around world.

Martin Dittus, whose account doesn’t list a location but whose desktop.de URL sports the German suffix, wrote:

@disquiet i hear a machine learning geek talking about L1 norms

Beth, who lives in Newcastle, in the U.K., wrote as follows. Her parenthetical — “(distant)” — serves as a nice summary of this entire little endeavor:

@disquiet Autechre, birds, plane (distant), voices (distant).

Darren Shaw, who lives in Rochdale, in the U.K., wrote:

@disquiet office chatter, computer fans, whine of HMI lights, phone notification beeps.

Nathan Thomas, who has a UK URL (afternoondust.co.uk), wrote:

@disquiet photocopier, keyboard clacking, an apple being bitten into, computer fans #officedrone

Inevitably, the middle of the night in the U.S. doesn’t entirely limit North American participation.

Chris Hutson of Peoria, Illinois, wrote:

@disquiet i’m an insomniac in the USA and i hear crickets and frogs

Lee Rosevere, who’s based in British Columbia, wrote:

@disquiet Simple Minds “Don’t you forget about me” playing in the studio.

Joshua Anderson, who lives in Buffalo, New York, and was up early, wrote:

@disquiet crickets, a fan, my wife moving a plastic bag

And Chicago-based Cinchel weighed in after the fact:

@disquiet i’m 3hrs late..but at 5am CST i was listening to cats running around my apt playing with a pen

I may do this again, either the same way, or with a different query and with a different time stamp.

(Globe photo by Kenneth Lu, thanks to flic.kr and Creative Commons.)

How Silent Is the Silent Meal?

It seems fair to say that a meal without good conversation is never going to be a great meal. It’s arguable that good food is, in fact, just part of a good meal. But there’s another point of view on the topic. A New York City restaurant, named Eat, via bostonherald.com, is emphasizing food in exclusion from conversation, with an emphasis on a kind of monastic experience (well, monastic aside from the cost of entry). Eat, based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, holds a “silent meal” one Sunday each month, organized by the restaurant’s Nicholas Nauman.

As Richard Morgan points out in The Wall Street Journal, the individuals doing the dining aren’t the only source of noise, and Eat is onto this:

In a New York magazine essay in July on the “Great Noise Boom” at city restaurants, food critic Adam Platt pointed out the on-purpose loudness of top-dollar spots including Babbo and Le Bernadin, noting that Midtown’s Lavo restaurant “was measured at 96 decibels, louder than the whine of a suburban lawn mower.”

Perhaps, though, the patrons themselves are as much to blame as the establishments, with their awful offal blather and endless prattle about every nuance and sub-nuance of the food. And that’s not to mention the all-too-familiar smartphone zombie meal, where diners are glued to their iPhones and Androids.

Mr. Nauman’s goal was to call out dining’s sound and fury on both sides of the kitchen.

There’s also some great listening notes in Morgan’s piece: “At 8:12, the first muffled sneeze. At 8:20, the first throat cleared.”

And Julia Kramer in Bon Appétit notes that silence can lead to other forms of civility:

While guests at the Brooklyn dinner were reportedly texting, making paper airplanes, and sustaining conversation through hand gestures, there was absolutely none of that at the silent dinner I attended.

Hermione Hoby at theguardian.com mentions Honi Ryan’s traveling silentdinnerparty.com feast as a point of comparison, and touches on what could be perceived as a resulting alienation from the world:

for the next 90 minutes, the only human voice I hear comes from a woman talking loudly into her phone as she walks past on the street. If she had happened to have looked to her left, she would have seen an illuminated restaurant and 21 silent heads turned to look at her.

Perhaps the diners were merely turning their heads at the intrusion, though it seems like a kind of received righteous indignation — external quiet apparently doesn’t always lead to internal quiet.

Details at eatgreenpoint.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0140: Solo Swap

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com and at Disquiet.com, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This assignment was made in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, September 4, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, September 8, 2014, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0140: Solo Swap
The Assignment: Take a recent track of your own and “cover” it with different equipment.

Last week’s project was about sharing a technique you have developed. This week’s is about looking at one’s work from the outside.

Step 1: Choose a recent piece of music that you both composed and performed.

Step 2: Perform a “cover” of the piece of music from Step 1, but use none of the same equipment that was used to create the original. (Yes, “none” and “equipment” are broad terms. Clearly you needn’t purchase a new laptop. Just, if you used Ableton on it, use another piece of software. You can use the same amplifier; just replace that guitar with … well, something else, and preferably not just another guitar.)

Step 3: Upload the track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud. If possible, include a link to the original piece of music on which it is based.

Step 4: Listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow participants.

Deadline: Monday, September 8, 2014, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be roughly the length of the original piece of music on which it is based.

Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this assignment, and include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0140-soloswap″ in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 140th Disquiet Junto project — “Take a recent track of your own and ‘cover’ it with different equipment″ — at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/09/04/disqui...

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

The image associated with this track is by Antinephalist and was used thanks to a Creative Commons license. Originally posted here:

https://flic.kr/p/bNpTrT

via instagram.com/dsqt

The city no doubt makes especially intense generative music here.

Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

via instagram.com/dsqt

One of the saddest doorbells I’ve come across. I think it must play doom metal.

Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

Why There’s a @djunto Twitter Account

I don’t generally post from my @djunto Twitter account. I post from my @disquiet account. I will respond to messages sent to @djunto, but even then I try to redirect the response account so it comes from @disquiet. My general plan for @djunto is as follows: the way Twitter works is that any two people who follow the same account, in this case @djunto, will see any communication either one makes to @djunto. That’s an encouragement for people who participate in the Disquiet Junto to pay attention to each others’ posts, and to discover each other. Ultimately, a core component of the Disquiet Junto is communication among participants, and the @djunto account is one leg of that table, along with the request that members comment on each others’ tracks, perhaps check out the Faceboook page (facebook.com/disquiet.fb), and that they participate in the join in the discussion that occurs on Disquiet.com posts and in the disquiet.com/forums threads.