Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 7

Aphex Twin (032c Edition)

Back at the start of the year, a special issue of 032c, the culture magazine named for a Pantone color, included writer Cassidy George’s lengthy A-Z of the great Aphex Twin. The roundup, which ranged from “Acid” to “Zealous,” with stops in between for “Chris Cunningham,” “IDM,” and “Xtal,” among other topics, included a quick little Q&A with me. Here’s my section:

That bit was filed under “Ambient,” in between “Analord” and “Bank.” This is from the Winter 2024/25 issue. The full run-down is online at 032c.com.

Price Tag

When I got back home from the store — with a gift receipt — I carefully peeled off the price tag, only to find a second and, in fact, a third tag underneath. The sandwiched price tag was inaccessible. The lowest of the three was from my former employer, Tower Records. This close-up photo, unretouched, better reflects my aesthetic-emotional experience of peeling off the labels than did the actual object in my hand at the time. There is so much detail here, notably those little slits, which I believe existed to make it impossible to remove a tag and affix it to another, more expensive item. The archeology of tactile media, the cycle of records being sold again and again back into the used bins, the visual wonders of mechanical typography — it’s all there, smaller than a postage stamp.

On Repeat: Glitched, Prepared, Installed

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.

▰ There is seemingly nothing Matt Madden can’t do. He’s foremost a highly inventive cartoonist, and also an expert guitarist. This is an ambient glitch track of shifting drones that I’ve been playing on repeat. Matt, an old friend, is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

▰ I owe thanks to Bruce Levenstein for introducing me to For renstemt klaver, a collection of contemplative recordings by Jo David Meyer Lysne, based in Oslo, Norway, utilizing a remarkable prepared piano of his own invention. I include the cover here to give a glimpse of what is going on. More information in the album’s liner notes, available on the album’s Bandcamp page.

▰ I owe a debt to Patricia Wolf for introducing me to the work of Pablo Diserens. This video is a concise documentation of a 2024 exhibit by Diserens, alytes, at Espacio Vilaseco in Lugo, Spain. The pinging calls are those of the midwife toad. Diserens is based in Berlin, Germany.

Scratch Pad: Fog, 707, STT

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.

▰ It’s one thing to think the sounds from neighboring construction kinda resemble experimental percussion music. It’s a whole other level when it all starts to sound vaguely like the muffled vocals of an unidentifiable singer-songwriter.

▰ The city’s Tuesday noon sirens are still out of commission, but the bay fog horns appear to have gotten a new subwoofer

▰ A happy 707 Day to all who celebrate

That’s for the Roland TR-707 Rhythm Composer, which was first released 40 years ago, way back in 1985. The above INXS track came out two years later.

▰ I love when my speech-to-text tool identifies two different speakers, even when it’s just me rattling off notes verbally. There should be an LLM STT tool called Black Swan Fight Club that identifies your various sub-personalities for you.

▰ Been digging having my phone on grayscale mode. For one thing, it looks nice. For another, I find myself less drawn to wasting time on the device. For a third, the setting obviates the remotest consideration I might have had for a “dumbphone,” not that I had much of such a desire in the first place.

▰ The fog is so intense today. I wrote all day and then went for a walk and it felt like I was still indoors.

I kinda love it.

▰ Sometimes I just think about how much toast is consumed in the book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, engineer/producer Geoff Emerick’s excellent memoir

▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: (1) Yuri Suzuki, sound artist and designer formerly of Pentagram, mentioned on Instagram that his partner, Amy Croft, founded a bed and breakfast in Margate, England, called Modja Modja House, and it now has artist residencies. He writes: “I’ve long had a passion for music and sound, and an ever-growing collection of synthesizers that really needed to be put to good use… so we thought: why not invite artists to stay and create?” ▰ (2) Robin Rimbaud is one of the OG electronic solo musicians from the 1990s, a peer — in time, impact, and sui generis quality — to Aphex Twin, Oval, and Squarepusher. His Instagram posts are regularly filled with his creative activities, as well as with a generous serving of what he is, himself, enjoying in terms of art and music. He writes detailed posts each time, such as this week about a visit to Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s “Clinamen” exhibit in the rotunda at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.

End of Week

I’ve been doing my best to really contain my social media use. This means not just limiting when I post (that is: not on weekends, nor on weekdays before breakfast or after dinner — with, of course, occasional exceptions, because being too strict is its own problem) but also frequency and range of topics. These end-of-day and end-of-week posts I make occasionally are a subcategory that just arose naturally, as I found myself at the edge of land on a regular basis, at the midpoint of a walk, whether to the Pacific Ocean or the San Francisco Bay. To a degree, these will all the look the same, which can also be said of most days. But at the same time, they’re quite distinct, as here given the awesome intensity of the fog down at China Beach. I watched a half dozen crows fly overhead, chatting nosily, and I could tell their relative distance from me because the closest ones were nearly black, the ones a little further were gray, and the ones furthest away seemed almost white, so deep were they in the fog.

Disquiet Junto Project 0706: Tile One On

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 0706: Tile One On
The Assignment: Make the most of your bathroom.

This week’s project has just one step: record something that makes use of the acoustics of your bathroom. (Or someone else’s bathroom.)

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0706” (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-0706-tile-one-on/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long do you shower?

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 706th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Tile One On — The Assignment: Make the most of your bathroom — at https://disquiet.com/0706/.

Sentry

This sentry stands atop a hill in San Francisco. Not a sentry, really. One of the city’s many outdoor public warning system (OPWS) speakers. Except not speakers, really, either — because the speakers don’t function. They were turned off years ago in advance of being updated. Then the pandemic hit, and budgets got hit, and now the speakers are remnants of best laid plans. The recent floods in Texas are a reminder that as archaic as such systems may seem, they are an essential component of life — rural and urban alike. I’m hopeful the San Francisco OPWS will eventually get fixed, and that the Tuesday noon siren tests, which were silenced toward the end of 2019, will once again be part of our local soundscape.

“gl-i-iv-v-tched”

A simple drone and I IV V progression, both from electric guitar, the latter part glitched thanks to a somewhat chaotic LFO, the former frozen from a single opening chord, the combination done live in VCV Rack over lunch. Very simple, a lot of fun.

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This setup has proved useful at the office. It’s an elegant way to get the guitar, via a simulated guitar amp cabinet, into the laptop:

14 Miles Across San Francisco

There’s little chance that Saturday didn’t amount to the longest continuous* walk I’ve undertaken, nearly 14 miles across San Francisco, from the southeast (Fort Funston, which had so many dogs walking their humans that you’d think you’d stepped into a chapter of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials) to the northwest (Pier 23, following a trail-ending descent of the twisty Greenwich steps).

This route is called the Double Cross Trail, and it’s a twin to the Crosstown Trail, the two meeting atop Miraloma. By my iPhone’s telling — and these things differ by device generation, even by device, so I’ll note mine is an iPhone 13 Pro — the urban hike amounted to 71 flights and well over 30,000 steps. We started off at 10:41am and were done at 5:50pm, or just over seven hours. The trail is designed not for expediency but for green spaces and variety and vistas. It’s marked in blue in the image shown here: beginning at Fort Funston, then on to Lake Merced, then Stern Grove, then up through West Portal to Miraloma, up and down through Twin Peaks, Tank Hill, and Buena Vista Park, over to Alamo Square, then up Van Ness and over into Chinatown and North Beach, past Washington Square, up to Coit Tower, and down.

The next day I felt fine, though my calf muscles registered the impact. Two days later, I’m back to normal. Gonna try the Crosstown Trail next, likely starting in the southeast corner and continuing northwest, where it ends near where I live in the Richmond District.

I can’t recommend the Double Cross Trail highly enough. It’s fantastic to experience in one stretch of time not just a sense of the range of people and places here, but also how interconnected they are. I have never stood in Washington Square and thought, “Hey, let’s head over to the Embarcadero,” or driven down Sunset Boulevard and realized just how close Fort Funston is, even by foot. Long familiar landmarks, such as the statue of Juan Bautista de Anza at Lake Merced and the Painted Ladies alongside Alamo Square, took on new meaning as I thought of them not just as proximate to other areas, but as points along a greater, city-spanning itinerary.

I expected to take tons of photos and record lots of audio, but I only took a dozen or so of the former and one of the latter, this bit of a wind chime as we we approached West Portal. On the one hand, I can be disappointed when a sound can’t easily be isolated from apparent noise; on the other hand, I found myself reflecting on the combination of all the sounds, and how that correlated with the numerous connections (geographic, cultural, environmental) revealed over the course of the walk.

More on the trails at crosstowntrail.org.

*stopped briefly for lunch in West Portal and tea in Alamo Square

On Repeat: Jaw, Hyperglyph, Orcutt/Corsano

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.

▰ HuiChun Yang performing live with a jaw harp, which she’s processing in real time.

▰ Chicago Underground Duo is Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek, and they have their first album in over a decade due out, Hyperglyph. One track, “Click Song,” is already out. To me it sounds like if the children of the Master Musicians of Jajouka had enrolled at Northwestern University or the University of Chicago and hooked up with the local music scene.

▰ The guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Chris Corsano, a nearly 18-minute live recording. On the surface it’s wild, but if you give yourself over to it, it’s quite meditative: