Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 55

Disquiet Junto FAQ

Membership in the Disquiet Junto is open: just join and participate. 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.

Details: disquiet.com/junto

Used Art

I love used art. You might say it’s peerless.

Picture Perfect

I’m so glad this old audio interface still works — first, because I can leave it in my office for use when I’m there; second, because I love the way the exterior of its casing features a diagram of what’s going on inside.

3 Things in the Works

1: The podcast episode I mentioned recently is almost complete. (Disquietude looks like it’s coming back.)

2: This Week in Sound is about to get rolling again, following a pause for spring book-writing. (Though it feels more like winter in my neighborhood.)

3: I’ve been thinking about this idea I have for an “ambient synth circle,” more on which soon. (There’s no link for it yet, but there may be at some point in the coming months.)

Scratch Pad: Sanborn, Poe, Chords

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.

▰ RIP, saxophonist David Sanborn (b. 1945). Night Music, produced by the great Hal Willner, was some of the best music television of all time.

▰ I love Tuesday mornings because the latest #DisquietJunto project has ended and there’s a playlist packed with music on a specific theme or following a specific approach, in this case: recording a part, slowing it to 50%, then recording something else on top of it.

▰ Been thinking a lot about two authors whose work I admire, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), how closely their lifespans overlapped, how surprising to me that overlap is when I’m reminded of it, and how much more contemporary I always think of Poe as being.

▰ I have no idea why it was only today that I finally thought, “Hey, those Minirig 3 speakers work with your laptop, not just with music-making gear, so why don’t you hook ’em up?” My M1 MacBook Pro 14″ has great sound, mind you, but the additional bass on these is incredible for desktop activity.

▰ I can retain no more information. My brain is full of 7th chords and topped off with some 9th chords.

▰ Yes, I had to order a second cable holder for my synth

▰ The stereo at the barbershop just went from Nazareth’s “Love Hurts” to the Cascades’ “Angel on My Shoulder” and I figure either there’s someone behind the wheel with a broad, generous, and humorous take on pop music, or there’s an ahistorical algorithm at work just kludging stuff together

▰ Guitar practice this week has been half 7th/9th chords, half “Easy Living” by Robin/Rainger (mostly Rainger, since I’m not singing along, though I probably should be), and half trying to get myself to hold the pick between my thumb and index finger instead of using my thumb, middle, and index finger

▰ I haven’t touched a guitar pedal this week, just been practicing guitar through VCV Rack on my laptop with a simple audio interface. Gonna fold in some MIDI foot pedals soon.

▰ The sausage spot during lunch went from a playlist of X-Ray Spex, the Dictators, and the Dead Boys to one of Sade and Tears for Fears, and I enjoyed the ride

▰ I finished reading two novels this past week: HG Wells’ The World Set Free and Anthony McCarten’s Going Zero, published over a century apart, both of them involving technological threat at a global scale, and both of them starting out strong and and eventually get overstuffed. After reading Rebecca West’s book The Return of the Soldier, which is quite good, I wanted to read something by Wells, because I had learned he was her romantic partner, so I sought out a book by him from roughly the time when they would have met. The first third is really good. The second third is so-so, a bit like if Anthony Furst wrote alternate-history military science fiction, but the last third, which takes place further in the future, is a mess, like random story notes were mashed together to complete a required allotment of pages. There is a wistful, fable-like quality in that last stretch that reminds me of Osamu Tezuka (zero doubt Tezuka read it), but that association isn’t enough to excuse the mess.

Goodbye, Dongle

Goodbye to yet another dongle: I have been slowly replacing a lot of old cables with ones that have USB-C on one end, so that they can go directly into my laptop (and iPad, etc.). This one here features the somewhat archaic (yet still prevalent in music technology) USB Type B on the left. I believe that USB Type B dates back to 1996. I purchased four of these cables: two at three feet, two at six feet.

Disquiet Junto Project 0646: Empty Orchestra

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 0646: Empty Orchestra
The Assignment: Interpret the literal translation of “karaoke.”

Step 1: You may or may not be familiar with the literal meaning of the word “karaoke.” The first two syllables are the Japanese word for “empty.” The final two syllables are an abbreviation of the Japanese word for “orchestra.” Consider how the term “empty orchestra” connects with the idea of karaoke.

Step 2: Think about the term “empty orchestra” on its own, apart from its association with karaoke. Come up with a new meaning for it. What kind of genre or musical form would “empty orchestra” be on its own?

Step 3: Record a piece of music exemplifying the ideas that arose to you during Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0646” (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-0646-empty-orchestra/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, May 20, 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 646th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Empty Orchestra — The Assignment: Interpret the literal translation of “karaoke” — at https://disquiet.com/0646/

The depicted theater in the cover image is the Teresa Carreño Cultural Complex in Caracas, Venezuela.

Darren Harper’s Generation Ship

Darren Harper’s second most recent track on his SoundCloud account dates back a year, so the one that popped up today may be the first in a long time — or he has deleted some others to make room. Either way, “Generative.01~Spring” is a welcome arrival. The 18-minute piece marks a new direction for Harper, who explains, “I’m embarking on a new project series that will focus on long-form generative eurorack pieces.” Powering his pursuit is a relatively new piece of equipment called Generations, which is a generative MID controller. The creator of Generations, who goes by Innesti, has explained that the device “creates the patterns autonomously once the user has configured the starting conditions.” Harper’s track is a slowly evolving collection of tones, such as hushed piano and picked guitar, as well as orchestral swells and deep drones. There are also gentle processes applied to these sounds, resulting in a lovely and cohesive suite.

You can watch an overview of the Generations tool in the following video. The device, currently sold out, first became available at the start of February 2024.

Keeping a Modular Synth Journal

It’s been just shy of 10 years now that I’ve fiddled with a slowly growing, sometimes contracting, and always morphing modular synthesizer. The playing has greatly informed my work interviewing and collaborating with and writing about musicians — and it’s a lot of fun. I know this anniversary is coming up because Marcus Fischer sent me a photo a few days ago from when I gave a talk in Portland, Oregon, at Powell’s Books, an event at which he performed, along with Brumes (aka Desiree Rousseau) and the OO-Ray (aka Ted Laderas). Fischer used a modular synthesizer for his piece, and the next day he took me by the store Control Voltage, tucked off of N. Mississippi Avenue, to look at what felt to me, for the first time, as meaningfully proximate and approachable — and, yes, enticing.

In the intervening years, I’ve regularly failed at one thing in particular in this regard, which is documenting for myself my experiments with the synthesizer. Recently, I’ve come upon a system that works for me. Now, those last two words are the most important ones: “for me.” There are lots of different ways to track one’s work, and what I’m outlining here is just something that I’ve found works for me. For context, I am a big note-taker, but I am not a big written-note-taker. I jot words on paper regularly, but just as loose fodder for typing. I’ve typed for far too long to be a written-journal keeper. Also, I like the opportunities that computer files provide for searchability and cross-linking.

So, what I use is Obsidian, a free cross-platform document-editing tool that works with files in the markdown (.md) format (if it’s not familiar, more here). I format my synth journal documents very much like the one I use for my daily personal journal, though in this case also employing embedded images. (My personal journal is all text, no pictures — though my success with this Obsidian synth journal may feed back, so to speak, and inform my personal journal efforts down the road.) My system is to keep one file per month, with an entry within that file for each day, including a running checklist of next steps to pursue. (There’s also a separate to-do list for longer-term activities.) The approach yields a page that looks like this:

And if you have had success keeping a synth journal, I’d love to know what works for you.

Music for and from the End

I’m writing this under the assumption that the “sr” to whom the new Loren Chasse track, “The Sun and the Earth Together,” is dedicated is, in fact, the late musician Steve Roden, as the music is very much in the “lowercase” mode that Roden helped pioneer, and because the years in the accompanying liner note, 1964-2023, align with the span of Roden’s time on the planet, as does the characterization of the final phase of his life (that he was “in a long state of transition before passing on this past fall”). It’s a beautiful tribute to Steve (who was also a friend of mine), the cycling passages of droning tones overlapping and drifting. Nearly 12 minutes long, it takes its time, and asks you to drift along with it.

“The Sun and the Earth Together” was released on the Petit Bardo label (petitbardo.xyz), which has also put out work by Francisco López and Gregory Whitehead, among others. Fitting to the subject at hand, half the label’s earnings from sales go “to end of life care organizations.” The label’s modus operandi is a heavy one: “The artists were asked to create a sound work that can be heard by a person in existential finitude (in a relatively short period of time) or a sound work to be heard while someone dies or a sound work that the artists themselves would like to listen to while they die.”

https://petitbardo.bandcamp.com/album/the-sun-and-the-earth-together