Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 42

Middle Lake

The rehabilitation of Middle Lake in Golden Gate Park here in San Francisco is absolutely gorgeous, like someone put a Monet filter on it during the planning and construction. Bonus: there’s a two-track audio tour, accessible via QR code. I had to hit pause to figure out if birdsong was in the audio or reality.

At the moment, these are the only two tracks in the SoundCloud account of the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department, soundcloud.com/sfrecpark.

On Repeat: Granular, Schulz, Suda

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.

▰ Quanta is the name of a granular synthesizer developed by Audio Damage, and a new version, Quanta 2, is due out soon. This is a demo in which a slow melodic sequence is echoed and otherwise blurred in real time.

▰ I believe the title of the new Jeannine Schulz release, Kanso, is from the Japanese for “simple.” It’s a pair of elegant ambient pieces, one gently industrial, the other more aqueous. Schulz is based in Germany.

▰ Nobuto Suda’s “Gazing the Sun Fading” is a hazy, loping ambient track that sounds like the sonic version of light glistening off a dirty windshield. And to be clear, that’s a compliment. Suda is based in Kyoto, Japan.

Scratch Pad: Pessoa, Foghorns, Corey

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.

▰ A bit of Fernando Pessoa after a very quiet three-day weekend, and as I’ve heard there’s something of a Brazilian social media diaspora underway:

I contemplate the silent pond
Whose water is stirred by a breeze.
Am I thinking about everything,
Or has everything forgotten me?

▰ The foghorns of the San Francisco Bay are doing Jaws karaoke again

▰ Me to my guitar teacher: “Instead of me trying to learn a new song at the same time as I am trying to learn to play it, how about I learn to play a song I already know well?”

Also apparently me to my guitar teacher, unwittingly: “How about I choose a song that changes from 4/4 to 2/4 briefly whenever it wants, and in which the melody is almost never the root note of the chord at the given time.”

▰ We’ve entered consecutive week 662 of the Disquiet Junto — which has been running since January 2012 — and I’m still astounded when within hours of the music prompt going out, recordings begin to pop up online.

▰ Yesterday in the car I got a Silver Alert on my phone at the same moment the driver got one and we were at a stoplight so after we turned off our alerts I could still hear the same alert klaxon ringing from the phone of the driver in the car next to the one I was in

▰ I was practicing on my parlor acoustic guitar and it was making the weirdest noise, a raspy resonance I’d never heard from it before, and I figured out that the snap on my shirt sleeve was resting near the bridge and ever so lightly vibrating. And yes, I’ll be recording, amplifying, and otherwise employing this analog effect in the future.

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, James S. A. Corey’s The Mercy of Gods. Corey is the name for the two authors who also wrote the Expanse books (and TV series).

End of Day

End of week

Disquiet Junto Project 0662: Spin Cycle

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 0662: Spin Cycle
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that pits one bicyclist against another.

Step 1: Imagine a bicycle race underway. Picture two competitors in the lead, running neck and neck for a long distance.

Step 2: Record a piece of music in which two prominent musical elements align, one each, with the two bicyclists in Step 1. How would you depict their rivalry as it unfolds, the give and take as each bicyclist strains to pull ahead of the other?

Note: You need not continue to the end of the race, when one or the other wins. You could simply focus on a segment of the race.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0662” (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-0662-spin-cycle/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Is it a sprint or a marathon? How many loops?

Deadline: Monday, September 9, 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 662nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Spin Cycle — The Assignment: Record a piece of music that pits one bicyclist against another — at https://disquiet.com/0662/

Alien Environment

Yes, I enjoyed the new James S.A. Corey novel, The Mercy of Gods. The depiction of alien life, consciousness, socialization, and habits in the book was very enjoyable. The duo who write as Corey established, in their previous nine-volume Expanse series, a predilection for micro-interactions and interior motivations, and it was excellent to see that play out amid myriad fantastic lifeforms. The main downside to The Mercy of Gods is realizing how much CGI overkill might be required to adapt this to the screen.

Perhaps “Brass Noise”

The musician who goes by the name id m theft able, and who is based in Portland, Maine, does these incredible videos where he places a tuba, amplified by a mic, in the environment and just records the resulting resonance. He does this with other instruments, as well, like the sound of light snow on a drum and freezing rain on a guitar. There’s a lengthy playlist of his tuba videos, which generally have prosaic titles, such as “A tuba by the falls (with a microphone in it) at dusk, April 19th 2020” and “A tuba at Whitney’s Falls (with a microphone in it), September 1st 2024.” The most recent id m theft able tuba video, “A tuba at one of the falls revealed when Dundee Pond was drained (with a microphone in it)” (note the absence of a date), was uploaded on September 3, 2024, and features a metallic drone that has the threatening vibrancy of a distant buzzsaw. It’s nearly 25 minutes of the deeply raspy rumble. The sound is sufficiently routinized and static to qualify as a colored noise, perhaps “brass noise,” rather than merely white or brown.

End of Day

On Repeat

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.

▰ A rich industrial drone performed live on an AE Modular setup by Belgium-based pt3r:

▰ Lovely live cello + synth performance by Brooklyn-based Serafim Smigelskiy:

▰ Norwegian violinist Mari Samuelsen performs works by a who’s who of largely post-classical and minimalist composers — among them Olivia Belli, Bryce Dessner, Ludovico Einaudi, Nils Frahm, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Mário Laginha, Hania Rani, Max Richter and Steve Reich — on her album Life, out last month on Deutsche Grammophon. This is her Rani piece:

Scratch Pad: Foghorn, Silberman, Corey

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.

▰ The first peculiar sound of my week: I was sitting here working on something when I heard a weird noise, like a little conversation. It turned out that I’d received a text message, and my earbuds, placed on the desk next to my laptop, rather than in a case, were verbalizing — that is, speaking — the message aloud. It was part Horton Hears a Who!, part The Conversation.

▰ The sound of foghorn is as thick as the sky is clear. Long live the marine layer.

▰ Very sad to learn of the death of Steve Silberman: science journalist, Wired alum, Grateful Dead authority, Beat scholar, and mensch of the highest order. Last time we talked, he told me stories about helping Allen Ginsberg select a portable tape recorder.

▰ Thing I just said: “I was playing ambient music so loud I didn’t even hear the garage door”

▰ There was a time on Twitter, before it went to seed, when Steve Silberman, who died this week, would comment enthusiastically as I posted music recommendations, which in turn lead to enjoyable conversations. Recordings of Jon Hassell often earned his attention, so here’s a live Hassell set from 2013 in Steve’s honor. Per an old post of Steve’s, now widely shared post, there’s no better time to wake up to one’s own impermanence. On that note, have a great weekend. See you Tuesday.

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, my 20th of the year so far: The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette (original title: La Position du tireur couché). I’m not sure if the issue is inherent in the translation or can be traced back to the original material, but while the lengthy descriptive passages are uniformly solid, a lot of the dialog is almost comically ridiculous. It’s got the quality of J.G. Ballard parodying urbanites. On the sound tip, the title character in The Prone Gunman can’t speak for most of the second half of the book, which leads to some interesting scenarios. I’m almost done reading two other novels, James S. A. Corey’s new one, The Mercy of Gods, which has been pretty great so far (even more than the alien elements, what I love about Corey’s work is the attention to what makes people tick, all the better when part of those people is a sentient alien parasite technology), and Charles Portis’ True Grit. I listened to an hour-long interview with the two authors who write together as Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank) and learned that they refer to this fictional third identity they created, James S. A. Corey, affectionally as “Jimmy” — as in “That doesn’t sound like Jimmy,” and “I think Jimmy would do this.”