Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 72

Novels Read, 2023

I read a lot more than novels this year, but these are the 30 novels I read. I have several more I’m almost done with, but that I won’t complete until early 2024. The books with the + signs next to them are the ones I particularly recommend. (I kept a list last year, too.) This is the order in which I finished reading them:

1: Carole Stivers: The Mother Code
2: Lauren Belfer: And After the Fire
3: Daniel Nieh: Take No Names
4: +Amor Towles: A Gentleman in Moscow
5: +Elmore Leonard: City Primeval
6: +Malka Older: The Mimicking of Known Successes
7: +Benjamín Labatut: When We Cease to Understand the World
8: Stephen Blackmoore: Dead Things
9: Fernanda Melchor: Hurricane Season
10: +Charles Cumming: Box 88 (Box 88 Book 1)
11: Annalee Newitz: The Terraformers
12: Weike Wang: Chemistry
13: Lauren Wilkinson: American Spy
14: +Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
15: Charles Cumming: Judas 62 (Box 88 Book 2)
16: Hiron Ennes: Leech
17: Yeo-sun Kwon: Lemon
18: Kristin Chen: Counterfeit
19: Alan Furst: Night Soldiers (Night Soldiers Book 1)
20: John Darnielle: Devil House
21: +Alan Furst: Dark Star (Night Soldiers Book 2)
22: Yukito Ayatsuji: The Decagon House Murders
23: Lauren Oyler: Fake Accounts
24: Charles Cumming: Kennedy 35 (Box 88 Book 3)
25: Richard Powers: The Overstory
26: Lawrence Block: The Sins of the Fathers (Matthew Scudder Book 1)
27: Lawrence Block: In the Midst of Death (Matthew Scudder Book 3)
28: Lawrence Block: Time to Murder and Create (Matthew Scudder Book 2)
29: +Lawrence Block: A Stab in the Dark (Matthew Scudder Book 4)
30: +Sean Michaels: Us Conductors

Scratch Pad: Noise, Agent, Home

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.

▰ Synth patch experiment: process audio so it sounds like when you call the banh mi shop with an order and the cashier answers but puts the phone face down (rather than hitting mute) so as to first complete an earlier order and you hear everything including a muffled conversation with another customer

▰ My current favorite retronym is “live agent.” When one contacts tech support one is informed that one’s interlocutor isn’t a chat AI reared on repair manual PDFs and episodes of The Big Bang Theory, but in fact an actual human. One is not told “This is a human.” One is told “This is a live agent.”

▰ I worked in an office once where it seemed like Pandora eventually resolved to a song by Fleetwood Mac, no matter where we started.

At home, my YouTube often resolves to Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon.

This is my argument in favor of working from home.

And It Looks Like This on the Flip Side, Too

I’ve wanted to try one of these since 2007: the Tenori-on from Toshio Iwai, also creator of the Nintendo game (or “game”) Electroplankton, and Yu Nishibori. Just got this in a trade.

“A Piano That Plays the Echoes of Whales”

It’s safe to say I’ve been enjoying the novel Us Conductors, written by Sean Michaels. It tells the story of Leon Theremin, of his namesake instrument, and of Clara Rockmore, one of the instrument’s principal virtuosos. This moment occurs on a ship that Theremin is taking back to Russia after tumultuous years in the United States.

Interviewed for Experimental Trash

Final interview of the year — I had the great pleasure of being invited to speak with Nat Lyon for his excellent Experimental Trash podcast on listen.camp. We talked about field recordings, and sound studies, and the Disquiet Junto, and digital publishing, and the creative process, among numerous other topics. Nat has a post up on his website outlining the episode.

Disquiet Junto Project 0626: Audio Journal 2023

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 1, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 28, 2023.

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 0626: Audio Journal 2023
The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.

As has become the tradition at the end of each calendar year, this week’s Junto project is a sound journal: a selective audio history of your past 12 months.

Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2023 — or you might opt for even more elements, choosing a segment for each week, or each day, for example. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, your own devising, and not drawn from third-party sources.

Step 2: You will then select one segment from each of these (most likely) dozen audio elements. If you’re doing a dozen items, one for each month, then five-second segments are recommended, for a total of one minute. Ultimately, though, the length of the segments and of the overall finished track are up to you.

Step 3: Then you will stitch these segments together, equally weighted, in chronological order to form one single track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.

Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0626” (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 “disquiet0626” (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-0626-audio-journal-2023/

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. It will depend on the approach that you employ.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 1, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 28, 2023.

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 626th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Audio Journal 2023 — The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments — at: https://disquiet.com/0626/

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-0626-audio-journal-2023/

Live Code from Eulerroom

“Live coding” is a term to describe the means by which performing musicians write and alter computer software in real time while sound is being emitted and itself impacted by the software, thus deploying code as an instrument. That approach draws a distinction between “merely” utilizing software as an instrument, and using the underlying code of software as an instrument. In this video from Eulerroom, a combination of software tools eke out swells of drones that, as the quarter of an hour passes, get slowly morphed, evolving into more complex and expressive burps and squelches, like life stepping out of a primordial ooze. It’s somewhat intoxicating, in a The Matrix sort of way, to watch the cursor navigate the right side of the screen, changing variables and turning on and off segments of text, and then we recognize the impact of those decisions in the sound we hear.

20 Great Albums from 2023

I have long since lost the ability to really put together a year-end best-of list. There’s more music available these days than ever before, and in many ways more better music than ever, if “more better” can be considered a thing. I did participate this year in some year-end voting activities, and toward that end I put together a list of what I thought, respectively, represented the better end of more better for 2023. Of course, after I completed the following list of 20 such records, still more music came out — but this is, I think, a solid and representative selection:

Bill Frisell: Four
Dedalus Ensemble: Performing Brian Eno: Discreet Music/Music for Airports/Thursday Afternoon
The Necks: Travel
Lia Kohl: The Ceiling Reposes
Loraine James: Gentle Confrontation
Eivind Aarset and Jan Bang: Last Two Inches of Sky
Between: Low Flying Owls
Markus Floats: Fourth Album
Scott Tuma: Nobody’s Music
Sarah Davachi: Long Gradus
Éliane Radigue: Naldjorlak
Ryuichi Sakamoto: 12
Boxhead Ensemble: Ancient Music
Machinefabriek with Monika Bugajny: Recytle
Philip Jeck & Chris Watson: Oxmardyke
Marcus Fischer: Dodecalogues (vol.1)
Oliver Coates: Aftersun (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Stephen Vitiello with Brendan Canty: Stephen Vitiello with Brendan Canty
John Luther Adams: Darkness and Scattered Light
Earth: Even Hell has its Heroes (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Year-End Reminder

Again, apologies if I didn’t write about your music this year. My inbox runneth over, as evidenced by this snapshot of my email folders in their current state. On a positive note, I’ve been working on putting together a Plex server that will greatly improve my ability to process inbound requests for coverage. Details on the submission policy are in this site’s FAQ.

For context: I focus on ambient music, experimental electronic music, contemporary classical, instrumental hip-hop, sound art, and other vaguely related things, related to the extent that the use of technology feels exploratory, intentional — and I must admit I write about virtually nothing with an intelligible vocal.

I should also mention: I get hundreds of inbound emails about music each week, and so I rarely respond. I do listen constantly, and when I find something I want to write about, I write about it. I’m not a great correspondent.

If I’m not going to write about your music, I will almost certainly not write in reply to tell you so, because doing so would mean literally hundreds of additional emails I would have to write each week — emails that would inevitably spur further correspondence.

Soundtrack Effects

The local public library has a “sound effects” CD category right next to the “soundtrack” CD category, and when the sound effects category is empty — which is pretty much all the time, suggesting all the old CDs are gone — then the two labels, which are on plexiglass, end up overlapping, which in turn yields a merged category called “soundtrack effects,” which is in essence my dream category.