Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 46

“Flesh Noise”

I had a few hours to spare so I grabbed a table at a hotel downtown where I passed, far too easily, as a participant of the ongoing professional conference. The wifi required a room number and a corresponding name, but my phone worked fine as a modem. Quite suddenly, an hour and a half into my stint, myriad doors opened and the hallway was packed with actual conference participants, marked by shiny lanyards and purpose-built smiles. The chatter was like rainfall, like a rushing stream, like a flock of chatty birds — dense, rapid, and unintelligible. I recorded 45 seconds. This isn’t white noise (too slow) or brown noise (too shrill). It’s flesh noise.

Humorously, both my laptop and my phone recognized the presence of human speech in the recording, and the Voice Memos app registered this with the little speech bubble icon, which signals that a transcription is available. I wondered what marvel might await, as I went to click on the button. Perhaps the processing power of my five-year-old laptop would be able to discern multiple individual streams of conversation from the tightly packed, overlapping speech. I was disappointed if not surprised. The transcription yielded merely “…..” — an extended ellipsis.

On Repeat: Clarinet, Stasis, Crimson

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.

▰ Just Duet: The musician Linus Fung, born in Hong Kong, has been doing some fantastic work folding his clarinet playing into a modular synthesizer format, essentially dueting with himself and transforming his melodic approach live. Here he is heard — and seen, bird’s eye view — building on the Canonic Duets of composer Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767).

▰ ’Tis the Season: Glacial stasis these days doesn’t necessarily come too easily. I’m not certain I would put it that way. But with so many available tools to achieve it, listeners can benefit from recordings that explore now common granular lushness as an element or a context rather than an end unto itself. Case in point, the way metallic slurry and vibrant shifts in tonality push beyond standard harmonic haze on autumnal_city_01 by autumnal_city.

▰ Back in Court: Half of the classic early-1980s lineup of King Crimson is currently touring music from that trio of great albums: Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair. I’ve been spending a lot of time tracking fan uploads of video from the various concerts, and a highlight is this rendition of “The Sheltering Sky,” with original guitarist Adrian Belew and bassist (and Chapman Stick player) Tony Levin, plus Steve Vai riffing on Robert Fripp’s work, and Danny Carey (of Tool) playing — literally, I believe — Bill Bruford’s drums. The quartet goes simply by the name Beat.

Scratch Pad: Hyperviolent, MP3s, Morgantown

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 cashier turns up the music at the restaurant and my first thought is: this is usually when a movie’s wordless, hyperviolent scene kicks in

▰ There’s a misleading rhetorical meme that floats around about how you don’t remember your first MP3. Whenever I rip an old CD to my hard drive, I clearly remember the first time I witnessed someone burn a CD (a mixtape they were making for a friend). I remember the first audio file I force-downloaded. I remember the first track I ripped (and then layered on top of itself).

▰ My main experience of that Richard Powers profile in The New Yorker is I want him to publish a vegan cookbook

▰ Me: Yow, it’s getting dark early.

Me a moment later: Oh, the shades are drawn.

▰ Finally made it to the new location of Kayo Books in the Tenderloin today. Fantastic selection, as had been the case at their previous spot. I picked up this 1953 paperback treat.

▰ End of day:

▰ After a spell focused on the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers,” guitar class has moved on to Joni Mitchell’s “Morning Morgantown.” I’m probably, at best, the second worst guitarist on the full length of my street (not block, street), but I’m having fun and learning a lot. “Buy your dreams, a dollar down.”

A Subsumed Cacophony

A city is often a cacophonous space. Of course, cacophony comes in many forms. The roar of the ocean can feel cacophonous, as can the intensity of surrounding bug life in the wild. The cacophony of the city is unique from those other forms because the noise comes not from manifest dense uniformity but from myriad distinct, often unidentifiable sources acting as if at once. All this was running through my mind as I stood on a corner in San Francisco listening as hotel workers were engaged in a lively strike halfway down the block. The noise of their activity joined with that of passing foot and automobile traffic to create something that was at once noisier than a normal Thursday afternoon, and yet also that perpetuated the city’s ability to absorb all sounds into one sound. No matter the sounds, it was the sound of the city.

(The image is a reworking of a public domain photo via Wikipedia of a 1956 strike.)

Mess[iae]n

Going to a concert tonight. Imagined this t-shirt. And apologies to Loraine James, who’s done something along these lines for her own name.

Image licensed to Zazzle Inc. All unauthorized use is prohibited. e282adde-15b7-45d6-8735-591d73a31df9

Disquiet Junto Project 0665: Clicks + Cuts Music Factory

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 0665: Clicks + Cuts Music Factory
The Assignment: Record a track in honor of the late Achim Szepanski.

Background: Achim Szepanski (1957-2024), founder of the Mille Plateaux record label, among numerous other accomplishments, died this week. This project is in his honor. You needn’t know much if anything to begin this project; just follow the instructions. As always, discussion of the topic at hand in the project’s llllllll.co message thread is encouraged.

Step 1: Listen back to the first Clicks + Cuts compilation album (originally released in 2020). It is streaming on YouTube (the first hour or so of that playlist).

Step 2: Consider the common elements in various tracks: the glitch effects, the sense of space, the attention to tiny details, the industrial minimalism, the emphasis on sampling, the tempo, the groove. What else do you hear?

Step 3: Record a track in the spirit of that first Clicks + Cuts album.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0665” (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-0665-clicks-cuts-music-factory/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, September 30, 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 665th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Clicks + Cuts Music Factory — The Assignment: Record a track in honor of the late Achim Szepanski — at https://disquiet.com/0665/

The image associated with this project was created by Lubomir Panak in 2011. Originally posted on Flickr, it is used thanks to a CC BY-NC 2.0 license. This is a detail of the original image, and it has been tilted at an angle, with the project information superimposed.

Tony Passarell’s Hang Time

Tony Passarell gathers a quartet on the album when that isn’t his usual jazz outing. It’s pure outing, as in outward bound — and like much outward bound music, inward as well. The record’s title suggests both a manner of being and a rhetorical question. The music is peaceful, languid, and somehow also unnerving. It has the vibe of snippets left behind by the late legendary producer Teo Macero after a long overnight fusion session: pure mood, pure tone. Building blocks to be admired and experienced rather than employed as mere elements of construction. Chords hang in the air, as does time itself. The group features Passarell on keyboards and percussion, instead of his usual horns, along with Kim Nguyen (flute, voice), Robert Kuhlman (guitar, effects), and Tim Onorato (bass, effects). A times, as with the ceremonial crashing cymbals at the start of “shins to orion,” there is a consciously vexatious quality, but in general the music here is more harmonic than rhythmic, more static than active. From the slow vamp of “galaxy blues,” to the meandering flute line of “whats that up there,” to the feedback-edge guitar on “resolve,” the album is track after track of slow exploration, and a testament to the group’s mutual attentiveness. Get when on Bandcamp.

RIP, Achim Szepanski (1957-2024)

The record label Mille Plateaux meant the world to me back in the mid-1990s, and it still does. Albums from Oval, Cristian Vogel, Microstoria, Snd, Thomas Köner, and Porter Ricks, just to name a few acts, and later the essential Clicks + Cuts compilation series (the first one, which came out in 2000, had 25 tracks, from the likes of Vladislav Delay, Frank Bretschneider, Alva Noto, Pansonic, Curd Duca, Jake Mandell, Kit Clayton, and Kid 606, among others) were central and defining to my listening, especially in regard to glitch and ambient techno. The label’s founder, Achim Szepanski, died this week at age 67. I interviewed him once, in 1996, back when I was an editor at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazines, for an overview of electronic music labels, when the sheer number of them was exploding, often creating myriad sublabels in the process. “Our label gives the artists the possibility to control the production from the beginning to the end,” Szepanski told me at the time. Read the full piece here.

Pedal Power

Pedal power, going in

Flying That Flagg!

I wrote another piece for the great hilobrow.com website, and it’s about Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!

I’m one of 25 authors writing about “science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema).” Other participants include Deb Chachra on The Hyperion Cantos, Adam McGovern on Kid Eternity, Jessamyn West on the Mars Trilogy, and Peggy Nelson on Virtual Light. I initially wrote a draft of something about Challengers of the Unknown (specifically the first team-up of writer Jeph Loeb and the late artist Tim Sale), but then I decided it wasn’t science fiction enough a topic. Here’s how my piece on American Flagg! begins:

It’s 2031. America is a fractured nation ruled by behemoth corporations, terrorized by militarized cults, and hypnotized by messages piped subliminally into always-on televisuals. The planet is scarred by climate change. The government is an absentee landlord, having retreated to Mars. Only one man can save the day: a former TV star named Reuben Flagg. Rendered professionally redundant by CGI actors, Flagg instead fights crime when he’s not shacking up with one femme fatale after another (or maybe the other way around). He’s been conscripted by a private police force called the Plexus Rangers, the military wing of the sort of mega-corporation that doubles as atmospheric bogeyman in dystopian fiction. This is the world of the comic book American Flagg! (indeed, the exclamation point is part of the title).

Actually, it’s 2024 as I type this, and… well, things are somewhat familiar …

Read the full article at hilobrow.com. I have another piece there (on what I’ll describe, for now, as a movie from 1978) due out by the end of the year, and another one after that already in the works (on what I’ll describe, for now, as a TV series that debuted in 1991).