Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 63

When Damo Met Can (A Comic)

Over on X/Twitter, Zack Soto uploaded a comic about the late great Damo Suzuki and Can he wrote and Connor Willumsen drew. It was part of a 2014 online collection of comics I edited for Red Bull Music Academy. I’ve edited a lot of comics, and this is one of my favorites.

RIP, Akira Toriyama

RIP, Akira Toriyama (68), creator of Dragon Ball, Dr. Slump, and Sand Land. I met him several times when I worked for Shonen Jump. Truly one of the greats.

Barton IV Scene Report

Thanks for sending me your latest album for review consideration but today I’m just kicking back on Barton IV and listening to the humming of the defense perimeter sensors.

(This is a Star Wars: The Bad Batch reference. Episode 5, “The Return,” of Season 3 was fantastic.)

30 Years, 10 Years

Wow, it’s been 30 years since Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II came out, which in turn means it’s been 10 years since my 33 1/3 book on the album came out (subsequently translated into Spanish and, then, Japanese, which was exciting). Amazing the cultural afterlife this album has had.

Disquiet Junto Project 0636: Left (1 of 3)

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 appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0636: Left (1 of 3)
The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio.

Please note: While this project is the start of a three-part sequence that will unfold over the course of three weeks, you can participate in any or all three of those parts. 

Step 1: This week’s Junto project is the first in a sequence intended to encourage and reward collaboration. You will be recording something with the understanding that it will remain unfinished for the time being. Your part will be done, but more will happen. Read on.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music using any instrumentation of your choice. Conceive the piece as something that leaves room for something else — other instruments, other people — to join in. (Keep in mind that your piece would appear panned to the left in the finished recording, after three weeks.)

Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly two to three minutes in length, as described in Step 2. 

Step 4: This is important: be sure to make your track downloadable because it may be used by someone else in the next Disquiet Junto project, and then after that.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0636” (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-0636-left-1-of-3/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Two to three minutes is best.

Deadline: Monday, March 11, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s required for this sequence of projects 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 636th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Left (1 of 3) — The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio — at https://disquiet.com/0636/

This Week in Sound: Pythagoras’ Flaw, Whale Chatter, AWOL Fog Horn

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the March 5, 2024, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.

▰ ROAD WARRIOR: We can spend a lot of time worrying about the direct impact of voice AI, but more intricate scenarios such as this one, reported by the Los Angeles Times and Engadget, suggest a breadth of possibilities way deeper than mere “deepfake scam” anxiety: “Amazon is being sued by the writer of the original 1989 Patrick Swayze version of the film Road House over alleged copyright infringement in the movie’s remake, The Los Angeles Times has reported. Screenwriter R. Lance Hill accuses Amazon and MGM Studios of using AI to clone actors’ voices in the new production in order to finish it before the copyright expired. Hill said he filed a petition with the US Copyright Office in November 2021 to reclaim the rights to his original screenplay, which forms the basis of the new film. At that point, the rights were owned by Amazon Studios, as part of its acquisition of MGM, but were set to expire in November 2023. Hill alleges that once that happened, the rights would revert back to him. According to the lawsuit, Amazon Studios rushed ahead with the project anyway in order to finish it before the copyright deadline. Since it was stymied by the actor’s strike, Hill alleges Amazon used AI to ‘replicate the voices’ of the actors who worked in the 2024 remake. Such use violated the terms of the deal struck between the union and major studios including Amazon.”

▰ OUT OUT: The ShotSpotter is a tool for surveilling gunshot occurrences with a mesh network of microphones around cities. I’ve mentioned it several times, in the context of a lawsuit questioning its utility and a man who spent a year in prison until someone sorted out the sound that sent him away had been a firecracker. Last month, a leak unveiled the network behind ShotSpotter: “Until now, the exact locations of SoundThinking’s sensors have been kept secret from both its police department clients and the public at large. A leaked document, which WIRED obtained from a source under the condition of anonymity, details the alleged precise locations and uptime of 25,580 ShotSpotter microphones. The data exposes for the first time the reach of SoundThinking’s network of surveillance devices and adds new context to an ongoing debate between activists and academics who claim ShotSpotter perpetuates biased policing practices and proponents of the technology.”

▰ RADIO ON: “When I was a kid, you could actually look inside a radio and see all sorts of neat stuff in there, like the amazing mechanical linkages of the tuning mechanism, or the mysterious, soft yellow glow of the vacuum tubes (the transistor hadn’t yet completely replaced tubes). Take a radio apart today and all you see is a bunch of little plastic-like blobs called integrated circuits, which sounds neat, although it all still looks like little plastic blobs.” That’s Paul J. Nahin talking about the childhood wonder that got him into engineering. His new book, from Princeton University Press, is The Mathematical Radio: Inside the Magic of AM, FM, and Single-Sideband.

▰ TASTE MAKER: Big surprise: aesthetics aren’t universal, which is to say Pythagoras was mistaken about the universality of certain musical-mathematical ratios: “This idea has shaped how Western musicians play chords, because the philosopher’s belief that listeners prefer music played in perfect mathematical ratios was so influential. ‘Consonance is a really important concept in Western music, in particular for telling us how we build harmonies,’ says Peter Harrison at the University of Cambridge. But when Harrison and his colleagues surveyed 4272 people in the UK and South Korea about their perceptions of music, their findings flew in the face of this ancient idea.”

▰ COMIC RELIEF: Susannah Clapp rhapsodizes over Posy Simmonds in the London Review of Books: “England has been slower than France to realise that the term ‘graphic’ in front of novel is not (in the manner of ‘lady novelist’) diminishing, that it might actually signal a double dose of imagination. The speech that snaps out of these drawings (‘snog Ryan … bet you … he’d be like a donkey eating an apple …’) makes the dialogue of much contemporary drama look pallid. Some pictures create their own sonic boom. As a child, and mimic, Simmonds’s role in school plays was to supply the sound effects by voicing the creak of the stable door and the honk of the donkey. Her drawings have some comic splat — the !!!!s and ****s of the Dandy and the Beano with newer ‘Thunks!’ and ‘Gargs!’ They also reverberate graphically.”

▰ QUICK NOTES: War of Fog: A local letter writer makes the claim that San Francisco’s fog horns are gone. It hasn’t been particularly foggy lately (just rainy), so I’m trying to sort out if this is the case. ▰ Play Time: It’s a good sign when the demo of a music app makes for perfectly good listening all on its own. ▰ Alert Alert: A bit on the “chirping Facebook app” issue some people faced. ▰ TV Guide: Listen to a podcast episode about how the Hulu audio logo, or sonic brand, evolved. ▰ Field of Dreams: I always love the roundup of recent field recordings on Bandcamp, this time written by Matthew Blackwell. ▰ The Shriek of the Week: It’s a bird called the chiffchaff, a bird whose “whose name in English is a direct description of [its] song — ‘chiff-chaff, chiff-chaff.’” ▰ Pipe Up: NPR had an episode about that John Cage piece for organ (“Organ2/As Slow As Possible”) that’s been playing non-stop for 21 years in the German town of Halberstadt. (Thanks, Rich Pettus!) ▰ Whale of a Story: The effort to not just learn to understand what whales are saying, and to speak with them. (Thanks, George Budd!) ▰ Eye Patch: “Prototype smart glasses can track people’s eye movements using a technique similar to sonar, an approach that uses 95 per cent less power than other methods.”

On the Line: Lightning, Poem, Hell

"You hear a sharp crack, like the sound of a batter hitting a home run, or a low rumble reminiscent of a truck driving down the highway. A distant thunderstorm, alive with lightning, is making itself known."

That is from an Atlantic article by Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist, on lightning.

. . .

"Light me down to the long meadowto where the new snow taps on the fallen snowwith the fingers of the lost tribe.Who would want us to listen?"

That is the opening of a poem by the late writer Jean Valentine (1934-2020) published in The New Yorker last month. A collection of her work, Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine, is due out in early April from Alice James Books.

. . .

"One day, while rehearsing the 'Dies Irae' from Verdi’s Requiem, she grew fixated on the sound of the bass drum, thinking that it was not agitated enough to evoke hell."

That is from a New York Times profile of symphony orchestra conductor Elim Chan written by Javier C. Hernández.

Sound Ledger: Japanese Noise, Voice AI

466,000,000: Amount paid, in $US, by the Japanese government to its citizens suffering from noise pollution due to proximity to US military bases

75: Percentage of that amount due to be paid by the US government (there is reportedly no evidence such payment has been made)

180: Percentage that the shares of the publicly traded voice AI company SoundHound have risen in 2024

Sources: Noise: scmp.com. Shares: fool.com.

My Pitchfork Reviews

I’ve contributed to some group writing and year-end voting, but these are the four byline reviews I’ve written for Pitchfork, the latest being this past weekend’s All Life Long from Kali Malone, the other three being Dissolution Grip by KMRU, Myuthafoo by Caterina Barbieri, Romantiq by Oval.

Current Status