Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 5

Kenneth Kirschner in Four Parts

Bracing. Ecstatic. Borderline impossible. Impeccably minimalist on the surface. Substantively abstract down below. This is often the experience of listening to the music of Kenneth Kirschner, and it’s most certainly the case with July 19, 2024, which he posted on Bandcamp late last month. The album, which consists of four tracks, is nearly three and a half hours long, and I will not claim to have yet listened to the full thing myself, but I do recommend starting, as I did, with the first — and shortest — track, “July 19, 2024 – i.” This opening section sounds like a quintet for strings and piano as reflected in the freshly wiped screen of a broken cellphone, turning everything into a frenetic kaleidoscope. It’s brittle and lively, vibrant and exploratory, and impossible to pin down. The themes flow by rapidly, and your ear has to retrain itself to a different sort of listening, not so much following as succumbing. Highly recommended.

End of the Road

An unfortunate end to an otherwise stellar weekend

Scratch Pad: Concerts, Spiders, Glaspy

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.

▰ Afternoon trio for two air filters and a ceiling fan

▰ I’m seeing Marc Ribot on Friday, Nick Lowe on Sunday, and Autechre the following Thursday — it’s the mid-1990s all over again.

▰ The start of October in San Francisco is when you traditionally sweep away the actual spiderwebs in order to then put up fake spiderwebs

▰ An under-appreciated feature of Apple’s Find My Phone service is that after using it to play a sound on your lost phone you are left with an earworm of Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”

▰ I briefly thought the shutdown might mean a quiet Fleet Week, but no, there still will be jet fighters (Canadian ones) LARPing WWIII (see: sfgate.com).

▰ Most of the time in an interview, if the interviewee says, “That’s an interesting question,” what they mean is “I don’t have a prepared answer for that, and so I’m gonna buy myself a few valuable seconds of thinking time by instinctively complimenting you.”

▰ I don’t need to put Bandcamp Friday on my calendar. I can tell it’s Bandcamp Friday first thing when I look at my inbox that morning and there’s a 100 more emails than usual.

▰ Current status, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2025:

▰ Read a bunch, finished nothing. In the middle of many books.

Hardly Strictly Report (Part 1 of 3)

Every year (pandemic excepted), San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is host to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, a three-day free (!) extravaganza of American roots and roots-derived music. I live close to the park, and marvel that many years — including this one — I get to walk on over and see Nick Lowe play outdoors. Today, the first day of the festival, I caught two acts: Margaret Glaspy and, shown above, the great Marc Ribot. The week’s fog and rain had disappeared overnight, and these sets made for a fantastic start to the weekend. Glaspy (in a trio) and Ribot (solo) were just two of numerous acts on two of the festival’s six stages, the others much larger than this one.

Disquiet Junto Project 0718: Planet Jam It

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 0718: Planet Jam It
The Assignment: Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization.

The year is 2126, and your spaceship is on a routine science expedition of the outer reaches of previously unexplored parts of the universe. Your crew has encountered, for the first known time in human history, a planet that is home to sentient life that has developed an advanced civilization not unlike our own. After settling into geosynchronous orbit, you send down a stealth drone to explore. The drone captures audio and video. Please share the audio of your drone’s reconnaissance mission.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0718” (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-0718-planet-jam-it/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How many years have transpired?

Deadline: Monday, October 6, 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 718th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Planet Jam It — The Assignment: Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization — at https://disquiet.com/0718/.

Endora Endures

A makeshift shrine I stumbled upon in the Lower Haight

Sachi’s Mirror & Angoisse Magazine

I had a darn good time at the Stork Club in Oakland on Friday, September 26. Caught two performances:

Sachi’s Mirror, a local band, is either violinist/vocalist Shaina Pan’s project with supporting musicians, or the name of the trio, but in either case was thoroughly engaging. She routes her electric violin through a variety of guitar pedals, and the drummer did a great job of playing in a manner that sounded trip-hop-ish, the way it resembled precisely sampled beats, while the guitar player provided texture and patterning. Pan’s voice had a shoegaze-y quality to it, and the songs were well-constructed. You could really hear what they are working toward.

There were three other acts on the bill that night, one earlier and two later, and of them I only also saw Angoisse Magazine, a quartet (though often described as a trio, so perhaps they expanded for the tour). If you’re familiar with pop-psychedelic movies of the 1960s and early 1970s, then you have a sense of a certain type of louche score (essentially, stylish background music) and how those films might also feature a rock’n’roll band at some key point (like the Yardbirds pop up in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup). Angoisse Magazine is as if the score and such a band were one and the same, and they segued charmingly back and forth between the two modes.

Lorelei x Ordway: North Woods

In advance of the album’s release on October 17, the first track off North Woods from composer Scott Ordway and Lorelei Ensemble, conducted by Beth Willer, Lorelei’s artistic director, is up on Bandcamp. Lorelei is an adventurous group of vocalists who have recorded and performed music by such maverick composers as David Lang, Maggi Payne, Steve Reich, and Toru Takemitsu. Ordway’s North Woods has, apparently, been part of the group’s repertoire for more than a decade. The eight voices come across like sweeping winds, layers ever-shifting, as tones come in and out of sonic focus. Its lyric was sourced from Tacitus, Roman historian whose life bridged the first two centuries AD. More from Lorelei ensemble at loreleiensemble.com and Ordway at scottordway.com.

A Last Visit to The Visitors

I don’t carry slips of paper much anymore. I photograph them, and if they’re needed for regular reference, then I add them to my phone’s favorites. This one has been on my phone for almost a year.

The document lists the show times for Ragnar Kjartansson’s installation The Visitors, which has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for the last few years. (At some point in the past, I was asking the ticket salesperson at the museum when the next showing was, and she pulled out this sheet. With her approval, I took this quick shot of it.)

That extended stay at SFMOMA came to a close on Sunday, September 28. I managed one last visit on Thursday, when the museum is open late. If you’re not familiar with The Visitors, look it up. It’s a fantastic, hour-long work in which members of a musical ensemble, led by Kjartansson, perform a single, slow piece of music. Each musician in the group is given their own screen, showing a different setting in a massive old home — equal parts dilapidated and stately — and there’s an additional screen that shows a view of the building from the outside, where an audience has gathered on the porch. The whole thing was recorded in real time in one take.

I notice different things in the sound and the images every time — at this point countless — that I take in The Visitors, and two things stood out this visit:

One was that the roadie seen at the very end of the hour is also there at the opening. I love the closing bits of the experience, as he walks around the house, thus making it possible for the audience to, finally, connect the various screens’ relative proximity based on his path.

The other was that the audience at SFMOMA came, at the end, to collectively focus on that outside-view screen, and in turn came to resemble the audience within the work. By watching together, we had, in effect, turned the gallery into a porch. When I noticed this, I stepped back into the furthest corner, took a photo of what I was witnessing, and recognized that Kjartansson has engineered a scenario in which is audience became a tableau just like the one he had filmed.

I can’t wait to see The Visitors again, likely in some other city, and to see how the audience responds there.

Scratch Pad: Quake, Venues, Listening

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 can confirm that the 4.3 earthquake that occurred at 2:46am Monday morning, September 22, did significant damage … to my sleep.

▰ I wish more experimental music venues around the world had subscription services for folks who lived far away but liked what the places did, sort of like what Cafe Oto is up to in London. You pay something, it supports them, you get recordings, maybe live feeds, maybe a zine, or a newsletter, “merch,” etc. You’re in the loop, informed. “Patreon for clubs.” “Bandcamp for venues.”

Thanks to responses to the above comment, I learned about several venues, and also about something called venuecms.com, which is, per the name, a content management system for venues, and the person who told me about it said that this sort of subscription model is, in fact, the “next feature on the list.”

▰ On a positive note, if I’m getting targeted ads for Go boards featuring noticeably antiquated laptops, the Algorithm is telling me I’ve made some OK life decisions

▰ I acknowledge that when I opened this article in New Scientist, I wondered if I could listen to it.

▰ Oblique Strategies are generally right about what to do on a given day

▰ Another week during which I read a ton in a variety of books but did not complete one of them.