Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 54

Ken MacLeod’s Ear

Yes, I’m enjoying Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod. It’s the first book in his Lightspeed trilogy. And l love this reminder that included among the sounds of nature are the trademark sounds of the people who tell us about nature.

15 Minutes

Happiness is when one of your favorite neighborhood dumpling shops (we have more than our fair share) also sells them frozen

Disquiet Junto Project 0648: Shadow Boxing

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.

These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com). 

Disquiet Junto Project 0648: Shadow Boxing
The Assignment: Employ shadow boxing as a musical metaphor.

Step 1: Familiarize yourself with the concept of shadow boxing, in which one exercises as if there were an opponent.

Step 2: Record a piece of music that explores the idea of shadow boxing — of acting out an interaction, violent or otherwise, in which the opponent is imaginary.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0648” (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-0648-shadow-boxing/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How many rounds can you go?

Deadline: Monday, June 3, 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 648th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Shadow Boxing — The Assignment: Employ shadow boxing as a musical metaphor — at https://disquiet.com/0648/

More from the New Old Web

There’s plenty of great writing and music-making happening on the web, folks acting like it’s still the mid-1990s (through the early 2000s). No clickbait, no press release regurgitation, no hot-topic parasitism/bandwagoning, no SEO-optimized topic laundering, no artificially typed word salad, no social media histrionics, just deep dives into topics the individuals have spent meaningful time exploring. Two recent examples:

▰ Ethan Hein writes about isolated tracks (like the ones in which you can listen to just Paul McCartney’s bass line from a Beatles song) in the context of his work as an educator:

“It’s too bad you have to violate copyright law to share these things, because they are incredibly valuable resources for teachers of music technology, theory, songwriting and popular music history. I use these multitracks in every class I teach, every semester.”

▰ Andrew Tasselmyer interviews Chris Carlson, creator of the great iOS music-making app Borderlands:

“[T]he thing that comes to mind when I think about how I want Borderlands to feel when you’re interacting with it is the way it feels to pinch down a guitar string and feel it resonate beneath your finger. Or even having a good subwoofer in the room with you, when you feel that vibration…the experience of holding down a note, but then also adjusting an effects pedal parameter and listening to that process.”

Waiting on a Friend

It felt like if I waited long enough, Max Headroom would make an appearance

McQuarrieville

It’s nice living in Ralph McQuarrie’s imagination

Beauty Comes in Many Forms

Ghost Dog

Scratch Pad: CD-R, E, Books

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ There was a period of time during which I’d receive “dark ambient” releases on CD-Rs and it felt totally appropriately futuristic and now I receive “dark ambient” releases on CD-Rs and it feels totally appropriately retro

▰ I love how an “E” rating for music means “Explicit” but an “E” rating for video games means “Everybody”

▰ My guitar teacher: “I know you know this.”

Me: “There are different meanings to the word ‘know.'”

▰ My browser (Safari) keeps triggering websites to think I’m not me, and I must repeatedly pass tests. Today such a test involved sliding a jigsaw piece to complete a puzzle. Several times I mistakenly thought this meant to slot the piece next to the one it fit alongside, not filling the evident hole.

▰ I finished reading four books this week: two graphic novels and two non-fiction. The graphic novels were Mark Millar’s Kings of Spies (about an aged secret agent exacting revenge at an institutional if not societal level), which I mostly appreciate for having reminded me of how talented illustrator Matteo Scalera is, and Samir Dahmani’s Seoul Before Sunrise, a watercolor-rich story about a lonely college student in Korea grappling with growing up and apart. The two non-fiction books were Susie Ibarra’s Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm (my review will appear soon in The Wire) and Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, which I read for a funny reason, which is I thought it was by a different author, but I stuck with it when I recognized my error. It’s well-written, if loosely so, like a series of public journal entries. More importantly, I have long agreed with its conclusion, which she mostly attributes to Alan Watts, whom I’ve only read a little of (a smidgen of The Way of Zen, which I should get back to). In May’s words, “When we endlessly ruminate over distant times, we miss extraordinary things in the present moment.” More easily said than done, certainly, but worth ruminating on.

Lost in the Waves

Sorry I haven’t downloaded the advance copy of your album yet, but I’m mesmerized by the promotional website’s waveform depictions of your individual tracks.