Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 71

On the Line

"Her own sound was singular, in life as in print. If you called her, as I often did while working with her as a fact checker, a decade ago, and then as an editor’s assistant, you got used to waiting out a dozen rings and the answering-machine greeting — she screened the old-fashioned way — followed by the sudden burst of that rich, deliberate voice picking the conversation up midstream.

That is Alexandra Schwartz memorializing the late critic Joan Acocella, who died on Sunday, in The New Yorker.

. . .

"He cut the tape, built a loop, excised the guitar, slowed it all to a narcotized pace, and played along, augmenting the phrases where he saw fit."

That is Grayson Haver Currin writing about the process behind Brian Eno’s album Ambient 1: Music for Airports for Pitchfork’s Sunday review. 

. . .

"Now came an auditory impression. It must have been there all along, but I was only now processing it. Low voices, coming from the other side of the door. Footsteps, doors opening and closing. Beeps and electronic tones. Telephone sounds, hospital noises. The ordinary, busy clamour of a large institution. It could be a school, a government building, our own project. It didn't sound like the past."

That is from Permafrost, the first novel I’ve read by Alastair Reynolds. I’m currently 79% of the way through, according to my Kindle. It’ll likely be the first novel I finish reading in 2024, unless Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky comes to a close sooner. It’s a fantastic story of time travel, especially in terms of how it depicts perception, as shown here, when the protagonist is transported several decades into the past (more to the point, this being time travel, into “a” past). I’m a big fan of heavy in medias res storytelling — “hard science fiction” being a recognized subgenre, I kinda wish “hard in medias res science fiction” was a subgenre — and it’s an approach that is particularly useful in Permafrostbecause we experience the book with the same initial bewilderment that several characters experience in the scenarios they find themselves facing.

New Year, New Blogs

I’m under no illusion that a practice initiated at the turn of the year will extend long enough to become a habit, whether diet, exercise, meditation, or phone-use diligence. Nonetheless, the green shoots of resolution-adjacent blogging is always a pleasure in early January — and by “blogging” I don’t solely mean writing posts on standalone websites, though I do prioritize them. A certain breed of email newsletter counts, as well, when the issues double as URL-specific posts, and — and this is key — there is an RSS feed to access them. I remain convinced that an RSS feed is an essential component of a blog — that, alternately, to require people to repeatedly visit your website of their own volition, and in the process for them to recall precisely where they left off reading the last time they were there, is simply too much to ask of a reader. It was too much to ask in the late 1990s, and in our cellphone-mediated, notification-riddled present, it is all the more so. RSS brings the writing to the reader, and in some ways isn’t that distinct from email. How different is the interface of my email application (Mimestream currently, in large part because it matches the keyboard shortcuts of the browser-based Gmail app) from that of an RSS reader (Feedly for me at the moment, though I am looking at options)?

And while writing is the core of blogging, there are other forms of self-expression. Blogs that are mostly pictures or math or music are still blogs. The key thing is that blogging is not about final drafts. Blogging is as much a public notepad as social media is at its best (to be clear, most of social media is social media at its worst). It’s not a magazine; it’s a journal.

Which is why I am happy to see several musicians take up newsletters recently, and to do so with sketches, rather than finished work, on their minds.

Taylor Deupree has started up The Imperfect, a series of studio journal entries, a recent issue of which includes a reflection on the whole notion of works-in-progress, especially the earliest stages: “notebooks. portable synths. voice memos,” he writes — all lower case. “we’ve got tools to capture and remember these ideas while they strike far away from or studios… but remembering to have those with you while on the go, or beside the bed, or in the car, is another challenge.” That issue includes a brief bit of gossamer ambience to listen to while you read it.

Likewise, Marcus Fischer, who records for Deupree’s record label, 12k, has launched Dust Breeding, porting over to it the vast archive of posts he made to a blog of that name a decade-plus ago. True to blogging, he isn’t quite sure where the revived Dust Breeding will lead: “This latest incarnation will be something different once again,” he writes. “What that will be, only time will tell. I thought of naming it something else but I’ve kind of grown attached to it.”

If you’ve recently started a blog related to sound or music, please let me know. Thanks.

Warning

I’m not sure if this is the most David Lynch photo I’ve ever taken, the most Wes Anderson, or the most Stanley Kubrick, or simply some antiseptic Venn diagram of them all.

Scratch Pad: Social Media Detritus

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.

▰ My kingdom for Boxhead Ensemble to cover Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors

▰ I  never miss the opportunity to check out the Earth Wall installation by Andy Goldsworthy when I’m nearby in the Presidio. If I’m not mistaken, 2024 marks the 10th anniversary of its installation.

▰ I went to bed well before midnight on December 31, 2023, and I wasn’t woken by fireworks at midnight, so either it was an especially quiet New Year’s Eve here in my little swath of San Francisco, or I was even more deep asleep than usual

A Criterion Blooper

The Criterion Collection and its streaming service, the Criterion Channel, are synonymous with excellent taste in film, and so it’s all the more confusing that the company’s year-end “Room Tone” roundup from 2023 fails to actually deliver any substantial room tone. The otherwise cute supercut collects brief snippets of Criterion interviewees — among them Laura Dern and Martin Scorsese — sitting quietly and self-consciously as film crews record room tone for whatever video production was underway. In what is essentially a purposeful blooper reel, we hear the subjects occasionally joke about the discomfort inherent in staying still and we witness the unease on some of their faces and in their posture. Room tone serves the editing process: it provides background sound that can later be used to fill gaps during the assemblage of a film (or video — and it’s a necessity for audio-only projects, too, such as podcasts). Room tone is unique to a given place and moment — the physicality of the space, including what time of day it is, who’s in the room, even what they’re wearing. However, instead of getting to listen to the various room tones, we hear instead what appears to be a bit of a Nino Rota score. This seems like a missed opportunity on the part of Criterion. More to the point, it seems “off brand” for Criterion to employ a proper film term and to not make good on it (then again, Letterboxd has its “Rushes” and “Call Sheet,” which are neither). As one commenter on YouTube put the Criterion situation, “This was not the ASMR feast I was expecting… but I enjoyed it nevertheless.” Same here — and I hereby request a director’s cut that removes the repurposed background music entirely.

Looking Ahead to 2024

The main place I hang out online is the llllllll.co, which is a message board mostly for people who work in music and sound. At the end of each year, artist and musician Marcus Fischer starts a new thread for people to discuss their goals for the coming year. The following is what I wrote on Lines, as the message board is called, ahead of 2024:

-How was 2023 for you?

Ups and downs. Net up by the end.

-What concepts/principals are you thinking about for the new year? How do they relate to the world around you (locally and globally)?

I think it’s pretty simple: focus, do more but selectively, take more breaks intentionally.

Staying focused — I got a new pair of glasses last month, and even though my prescription has barely changed, the simple fact of them being new (unscratched, un-smudged, slightly adjusted) means everything looks noticeably sharper. I’m taking this observation as a sign to strive to look at things more sharply and concertedly in the coming year. Pretty much by definition, to focus on one thing means to let other things recede.

Keeping my head down — Related to the above: You don’t need to be a time traveler from the future to identify 2024 as a divisive year, at least here in the U.S. I, for one, can easily get caught up in the anticipation of game-changing moments that never come.

Winnowing and organizing — In a novel I just finished reading, Sean Michaels’ Us Conductors, based on the life of Leon Theremin, the inventor suddenly is told he needs to, within 24 hours, return to Russia from the U.S. permanently after many years stateside. Asked by the movers what he’s taking with him, Theremin replies something along the lines of “The oldest, the newest, and the best.” There’s a lesson in that. There’s a term along these lines that has been making the rounds: Swedish death cleaning. I’m not entirely sure how much it even exists, as I’ve had some Swedish students who haven’t known what I’m talking about when I’ve brought it up, but in any case: the idea of trimming back so things are more manageable for others after you’re gone. (That sounds a bit morbid, so to be clear: I just wanna streamline a bit.)

-What old things do you want to shed and what new things would you like to cultivate?

Taking the word “things” literally first, I have a heap of old vinyl and CDs I don’t listen to much, so I’ll be ripping much of it and making physical space by getting rid of it. I’ve long joked that if I sold all my vinyl I could easily put an upright piano where the records are, and while I mean it more metaphorically than literally, I think the metaphor is a valuable one.

I recently stepped back from administering a Slack I’d moderated since 2016 and doing so has been a freeing experience. I’m thinking about what else I can step back from. There isn’t much, but I’m thinking about it.

Transition time — bus rides, long lunches, and liminality in general have long since declined in my life, and I need to bring back that attenuated interstitial aspect of existence. Midday walks are an attempt — a step forward, as it were. As is not keeping email open all the time during daylight hours.

Time zones — I am generally more productive in the morning, so I’m trying to schedule stuff involving other people later in the day, to the extent that I can.

Plex time — I recently set up Plex as a means to collate my vast and ever-growing collection of digital audio. Doing so has been centering, though the whole thing may turn out to be a fool’s errand — or in this case, a fool’s chore.

-What would you like to accomplish? Do you have a plan for making it happen?

Finish writing a book. Maybe two.

Send some short stories to magazines.

Write more in general.

Put together some standalone recording projects, adjacent to the Disquiet Junto, along the lines of the commission projects I did before forming the Junto, like Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet, Instagr/am/bient, and LX(RMX) / Lisbon Remixed, among others.

Put my podcast back together. That appeals to a whole different constituency than reads what I write. (I say this every year, but maybe this year I’ll do it.)

As for the plan, the plan is what I wrote at the top: focus, as well as giving myself meaningful breaks. Also, do more project proposal outreach — I tend to do things I’m invited to do, rather than inquire about collaborations and opportunities.

Disquiet Junto Project 0627: Just Ice Society

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just under five days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 8, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 4, 2024.

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 out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). Note that this service will change shortly, likely to Buttondown, due to Tinyletter shutting down.

Disquiet Junto Project 0627: Just Ice Society
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.

Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto communal music projects. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one step:

Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

It’s great if you can record your own ice sounds, but if you want some help, the always awesome Jason (Bassling) Richardson has provided some:

WAV:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/e8qpnf0i1r2xhw1/bassling_-_pindari_glasses.wav/file

MOV:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/swq09kq409qhecg/bassling_-_pindari_glasses.mov/file

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each January ever since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. By now, it qualifies as a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0627” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0627” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0627-just-ice-society/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 8, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 4, 2024.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 627th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Just Ice Society — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at: https://disquiet.com/0627/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0627-just-ice-society/

Inbound: Celtic Frost

A fun multi-author series of mini-essays has begun at Hilobrow on “metal records from the Eighties.” My piece on Celtic Frost will be up later in the series. I’m stoked to see my old friends Dean Haspiel and Erik Davis are part of it. You can read the introduction by Heather Quinlan, the series’ editor, now, as well as the first entry, on Metallica, by Crockett Doob.

Roy’s Radio

I always love coming upon this three-dimensional piece by Roy Lichtenstein at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Painted in 1962, it’s a great example of how the artist, best known for his oversized appropriations of comic book illustrations, found beauty in the geometries, textures, and purpose of everyday commercial objects. The dots that depict this radio’s speaker here bring to mind the signature dots of Lichtenstein’s famous paintings, dots that were themselves investigations of the patterns inherent in the printing process. He blew up what was previously invisible, ignored, taken for granted, or merely a subset of a larger story in a different context, and drew attention to details in a manner that made them alternately abstract or hyperreal — sometimes both simultaneously. For the first time, I found myself focusing on the radio station to which this imaginary device is tuned, just above 94 on the clearly selected FM dial. I wonder what station that was at the time, presumably in New York City.

Rhythm in Three Dimensions

I dug the raised lettering on the wall text at the Botticelli exhibit at the Legion of Honor. (“Marc goes to an art exhibit and takes pictures the typography” is a corollary topic to “Marc goes into nature and takes pictures of signs/infrastructure.”)