Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 6
July 25, 2025
Dave Scott, Live
Great evening on Wednesday, July 23, at the Black Cat in the Tenderloin, catching the jazz quartet of trumpeter Dave Scott, in from Brooklyn with bassist David Ambrosio, plus, up from Los Angeles, pianist Leonard Thompson and drummer Mark Ferber. Fantastic performance, all Scott originals.
July 24, 2025
Disquiet Junto Project 0708: Vocal Chords
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 0708: Vocal Chords
The Assignment: Do something with layers of the sound of your voice.
Step 1: Create simple chords by layering the sound of your voice.
Step 2: Do something with those chords.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0708” (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-0708-vocal-chords/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. How long can you go without taking a breath?
Deadline: Monday, July 28, 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 708th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Vocal Chords — The Assignment: Do something with layers of the sound of your voice. — at https://disquiet.com/0708/.
July 23, 2025
Communal Generative Ambient Music
This website I’m about to describe won’t necessarily be up for very long, and I only just learned about it over the past 24 hours, thanks to a Disquiet.com reader named Josh, so I want to mention it here expediently. The account that goes by whilemus on Reddit posted on July 22 a communal ambient experiment. It’s currently housed at whilemusic.net, but the announcement mentioned it won’t be up for a long time (“I’m planning to wind this down in a month or two due to server costs”). The idea is that the site is constantly pumping out music, and user votes nudge it in one direction or another.
“All listener feedback is combined to ‘democratically’ influence the direction the melody is going. You may vote as often and frequently as you like. Clip evolution is relatively slow, so it takes about 30 seconds to a minute to hear changes. Repeated negative votes will eventually lead to ‘rolling the dice’ and making changes more rapidly.”
Check it out at whilemusic.net.
July 22, 2025
RIP, Ozzy Osbourne (1948-2025)
The first time I gave any real thought to Ozzy Osbourne was when, back in high school, a kid a year younger than me stuck a pair of soft foam headphones over my ears during lunch period and made me listen to the opening of “Crazy Train.” Something about the song, Ozzy’s first single as a solo artist, evidently meant a lot to my schoolmate, so I listened for what that might have been. Maybe the echoes, or the rattle, or the opening riff? I don’t know. He rushed off, and we never spoke of it again.
Less than a decade later, as a professional music critic, I attended a heavy metal summit, a few days of panel discussions and performances in Southern California. I remember Lemmy from Motörhead was at the bar. I remember Pearl Jam was due to play, and then the band’s record label reportedly removed them from the event’s line-up. Many attendees sensed this decision was made because the label didn’t want the band to be thought of as “metal.” I remember a representative of the label saying, from the stage, that they were going to “break” this band, as in turn them into something big, and the statement felt like an ultimatum, like even though it was an affirmative (i.e., the band had bright commercial prospects), inherent in it was the violence of the other meaning of “break,” separating by force into pieces. In a way, the label was separating Pearl Jam from metal by force.
At that same summit, which coincided with one of Ozzy’s many comebacks over the years, he performed to a small and adoring audience. During the verses of each song, he would look lost, sad, tired — and then, when the chorus came around, the whole audience sang with him, and he would get energized, glowing from within … and then the verse would come back around, and the audience would quiet down, and Ozzy would again look depleted, forlorn. I was struck by how much he was not merely buoyed but invigorated, given a semblance of self, by connection with his audience — not the adoration, but a sense of community. He both fed and fed on the power of the gathering.
Years later, I was at a venue outside Chicago to write a long feature about Rob Zombie, who was playing on the same bill as a revivified Black Sabbath. Before the day’s concerts began, I walked by Ozzy backstage, and was directed to a tour bus in which to hang out. Ozzy’s then quite young son, Jack, was on the bus, and we got to talking about Star Wars. I made a dismissive comment about the franchise novels, and he put me in my place with detailed commentary about various books in the series. The imminent start of the concert helped me save face.
I had never paid extended attention to Sabbath until then, even though I was already in my mid-20s. Tony Iommi’s guitar proved captivating, and I made plans to see them later on the tour when I got the chance, which I did soon after returning home to the Bay Area. I was officially a fan.
While Ozzy, throughout his solo releases, flirted with various phases in popular music, Sabbath largely remained steadfast. I still rank “End of the Beginning,” the opening track off their final studio album, 2013’s 13, alongside much of their classic material. I’m not alone in recognizing that one way bands reach mass popularity is that fans find different bands within a given band. While I appreciate the essential role Black Sabbath played in the overall development of heavy metal, I think of them foremost for their status as progenitors of doom metal, as much for the group’s often leaden pace as for the way Ozzy’s vocals always sounded sludgy, and all the more threatening for it.
One of the big lessons of Ozzy’s celebrity — especially during his reality-TV phase as the world’s favorite weird dad — was how, over time, the familiarity of Sabbath’s music revealed it as something entirely different from the absurd Satanic panic with which it had once been associated. Sabbath was comfort music to the core.
July 21, 2025
Revisiting Cyberpunk 2077
There is already a lot of quotidian footage available of the video game Cyberpunk 2077, and more is being uploaded of late, thanks to the recent version 2.3 upgrade of the game, which appears to be tied to the official macOS version finally being released. I don’t know, yet, if there are any particularly interesting new sonic aspects to these updates (aside from “built-in Spatial Audio with head-tracking for AirPods,” per 9to5mac.com). Still, it’s a good time to ride along at night, and enjoy city noises and those of engines idling:
And you can take an extended walk (over an hour and a half) through various neighborhoods, and listen to all manner of industrial and NPC activity. The sheer depth of immersive environmental sound in Cyberpunk 2077 remains highly impressive. In a given moment, you can hear footsteps, and HVAC drones, and various vehicles, and conversations, and gunfire, and on and all, all shaped by the space you’re in and specific to the given neighborhood and the state of the gameplay.
A lot of videos purporting to share in-game ambience are actually marred by inclusion of the music, but if you hunt around, you’ll find pure diegetic recordings such as these.
July 20, 2025
On Repeat: Duo, Quartet, Solo
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ This duet between guitarist Eivind Aarset and electronic musician Jan Bang was recorded early in the pandemic, but I believe has only just now appeared online. A lot of the music Aarset makes is deeply indebted to Miles Davis’ electric era, and to the subsequent work of Jon Hassell; this track is a reminder that Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which bears the influence of Hassell, also looms large. The piece, “Witness,” originally appeared on the duo’s fantastic 2020 album Snow Catches On Her Eyelashes.
▰ A very tight saxophone quartet performance, by the Amstel Quartet, based in Amsterdam, of a segment of Philip Glass’ score to Mishima. This is Vitaly Vatulya, soprano; Olivier Sliepen, alto; Bas Apswoude, tenor; and Harry Cherrin, baritone. There are moments when the highest part, which I assume is Vatulya’s soprano, chiming away, puts this over the top. Just tremendous.
▰ Ted Laderas, aka the OO-Ray, is back — or will be soon — with the forthcoming solo album Marginals, on the great Beacon Sound label. It’s due out August 15, 2025. Laderas plays solo cello with an array of electronic accompaniment and processing. Two tracks are up for pre-release listening. Especially recommended is “Harrow,” which has a quiet pulse and thick layers of playing.
July 19, 2025
Scratch Pad: Fog, Metadata, Earaches
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’m not saying the fog isn’t thick today. Thick it is: no bridge, no Headlands. But when it’s this thick and there’s no fog horns, I wonder if I’m overestimating its thickness, like it’s so thick that it’s muffled the sound. A tugboat drones along China Beach, simply to confirm my ears haven’t gone.
▰ I’m reading Moby Dick, which is way funnier than I expected: “cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical” (actual quote). I’m 18 (short) chapters in, and there is much comedy gold. I love how Ahab’s cartoonish henchmen are like “No cannibals!” Then the cannibal, Queequeg, throws a touchdown. And they’re all: “We want the cannibal!” (Those last two are paraphrases.) Also, how they call Queequeg “Hedgehog.” OMG.
▰ MP3s, FLACs, and WAVs: “Music metadata is a mess”
ebooks: “Hold my beer”
▰ I’m prone to earaches when it’s windy, and I’ve been amazed by how earbuds essentially solved this problem: I set the earbuds to ambient* mode and then go for a walk.
*that is, enhancing the environmental sounds, not listening to ambient music at a high volume
▰ I often read a novel over breakfast, but there are better ways to start the day than a protagonist’s dog and (human) oldest friend both dying within a few paragraphs of each other.
▰ I’ve switched browsers on a test basis (Zen, a streamlined take on Firefox). With a heavily used tool like a browser, such a switch means a lot of muscle-memory revisions and habit shifts. Emerging from a week of UX decompression, I find myself still not recognizing the new browser’s logo as my browser when I tab through the open software on my laptop. Otherwise, I feel at home.
▰ I finished reading one novel this week, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I enjoyed it, even though I ventured in due to the suggestion of science fiction, which then becomes an either-or decision on the part of the individual reader, and I found myself erring on the side of it not being science fiction, which meant the book’s end proved quite dark, which is an interesting effect, amounting to an encouragement, after the fact, for the non-believing reader to retroactively believe the protagonist, in order for the end to be recast as a positive one.
July 18, 2025
SF Art Book Fair 2025
Some of my favorite tables at this year’s SF Art Book Fair.
July 17, 2025
Disquiet Junto Project 0707: Chain of Practice
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 0707: Chain of Practice
The Assignment: Make music from how you make music.
This project is the third of three that are being done by the Disquiet Junto in collaboration with the 2025 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 3 through 7. The festival topic this year is « Kette » — which translates, as the organization explains, to “Chain”: “Chains connect but they also bind. They create relationships but also restrictions. As a gift they look nice, feared when used in vice, and yet they can span bridges across fire and ice.” All three Junto projects this year engage with the work of Svetlana Maraš, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 festival.
We are working again at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the seventh year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern. Tobias helped prepare this week’s compositional concept.
Step 1: Think about your artistic practice.
Step 2: Write down one sentence that in some manner describes your artistic practice.
Step 3: Record yourself, or someone else, reading the sentence that resulted from Step 2.
Step 4: Use the recording made in Step 3 as the sole source material for a new musical/sonic composition.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0707” (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-0707-chain-of-practice/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you.
Deadline: Monday, July 14, 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 707th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Practice — The Assignment: Make music from how you make music — at https://disquiet.com/0707/.
