Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 65

Scratch Pad: NY(C), Diploma, Block

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.

▰ I was in New York for the past week — a few days in the city, then out on Long Island for family time — and thus I posted very little to social media. Back in San Francisco now. I’ll catch up with some items in the coming week.

▰ If keeping a journal is a struggle for you, I can’t express how much it helps to make a list of topics at the end of the day, just before bed — a list of words or phrases (events that occurred or ideas on your mind) that the next morning you can flesh out into brief (or not so brief) commentary. I will either jot these down or record myself stating them as they occur to me.

▰ This is the paragraph from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography/memoirs that focused my thoughts on what eventually became the Disquiet Junto music community:

▰ Always looks like a record album to me:

▰ I’ve been reunited with my high school diploma, which means I’ve been reminded of the ever so slight distinction between how the r and c in my first name are depicted. And no, despite this typeface’s appearance, I was not raised in Germany during the early 1800s:

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep by Lawrence Block, several of whose Matthew Scudder novels I read recently. This one, while also the sort of crime story that fits in a back pocket, was more whimsical. The conceit that the main character can’t sleep didn’t seem to matter much to the story, except as a way to explain on occasion why he happened to be able to be awake, but made for occasional interesting asides. I may read the sequel.

Cage & Comics

Went on a trip, managed to purchase only two books

Disquiet Junto Project 0641: Re-re-re-re-revise

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 0641: Re-re-re-re-revise
The Assignment: Take an old track and make it better.

Step 1: Listen through some of your recent recordings.

Step 2: Choose one you think would benefit from being updated.

Step 3: Revise the track you selected in Step 2.

Step 4: Document the changes you made in Step 3, how you came to conceive the changes you wanted to implement, and how you achieved them.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0641” (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-0641-re-re-re-re-revise/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, April 15, 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 641st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Re-re-re-re-revise — The Assignment: Take an old track and make it better — at https://disquiet.com/0641/

Into the Distance

On the Grid

Grid of oscillators in the structure of a building’s air conditioners

Ambient : Sounds

Did a little record browsing. This section is from Paradise of Replica on Grand Street in Manhattan.

Infrastructural Snore

The phone’s microphone doesn’t do justice to the experience of how being in this hotel room means being immersed in the building’s HVAC drone, the way the tonal utterances of the multi-story edifice cycle over and over, and how with each new cycle there is a brittle whir like an infrastructural snore. But it’ll do.

Scratch Pad: Belew, Dissonance, Roden

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.

▰ Kinda wish sleeping laptops snored

▰ Adrian Belew was great as David Byrne for the Remain in Light tribute. I imagine he’ll be at least as good as Adrian Belew.

▰ My guitar teacher, stating what should be patently obvious to me: “So, we can agree this chord is more dissonant.”

Me: “Er, not if you listen to the music I do, apparently.”

▰ Step 1: I use Chrome.

Step 2: For privacy I’ll use Safari. A few things run better in Chrome.

Step 3: Safari’s slow. I try Brave, but it’s not great with sound. I’ll use Safari and Chrome, too.

Step 4: I try Firefox, but I’m too busy to tweak all its privacy stuff. Now I have four browsers going.

▰ I spent the morning scanning documents related to comics I edited in the 1990s, which led to me using an ancient device called a staple remover. For lunch I wanted some lentil soup, and the pull-top broke, so I had to use a can opener. I swear the day won’t end before I am required to fax something.

▰ Just listening to an old Steve Roden album in the car while it rains

Mehldau in the Mix

Whew, I have finally seen Brad Mehldau live, in saxophonist Walter Smith III’s quintet, with Matt Stevens (guitar), Harish Raghavan (bass), and Kendrick Scott (drums). Apparently Robert Glasper was there during the previous set. At the jazz club Smoke in Manhattan.

Disquiet Junto Project 0640: Time Vault

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.

There is usually a playlist for these projects. This week is kind of an exception, more on which below.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0640: Time Vault
The Assignment: Record a track for eight months in the future.

Step 1: Record a piece of wordless music for yourself eight months from now. Think of where you are now and where you will be — or may be — then.

Step 2: Send the track to me (marc@disquiet.com — as a private link, not as an attachment) with your artist name, the track title, and a brief description (up to roughly 200 words) you’d like to annotate it with. The idea is the track will not be available to you or anyone other than me for the next eight months.

Step 3: When I reply to confirm receipt of the material from Step 2, delete the file from your laptop. (This step may feel drastic, so if you’re not comfortable doing so, please don’t.)

In eight months, on December 9, I’ll post a playlist of all the tracks, and you can then listen with fresh ears to what you — and everyone else — recorded.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0640” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Don’t Upload: Usually you would upload your track. Instead, per the above, send it to me.

Share: You won’t be posting your audio publicly now, but you might make a comment in the thread on Lines about what you were thinking and doing when you recorded your piece: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0640-time-vault/

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you, but please consider keeping it to under six minutes.

Deadline: Monday, April 8, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

License: When I post the track in eight months, I’ll do so as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license), unless you request otherwise.

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 640th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Time Vault — The Assignment: Record a track for eight months in the future — at https://disquiet.com/0640/