Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 73

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.

Scratch Pad: Rain, MP3s, Cooking

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.

▰ It’s not lost on me that a leading metaphor for generative music, of tending a garden, can also apply to the process of dealing with one’s sizable library of digital audio files. Right now I’m deep in the latter weeds, having switched from iTunes Match to a fairly complex implementation of Plex.

▰ Drizzly day means I’m listing to Oscar Peterson while I type. (My keyboard can’t keep up with his.)

▰ Kind of amazing this far into the existence of the MP3 (etc.) that the simple act of associating a cover image with an album can take countless rounds of metadata fiddling for the system to actually recognize it

▰ Eddie Rabbitt: “I love a rainy night.”

Me: “I kinda like the idea but I still have hurricane PTSD after four years of living in New Orleans, and following the long drought here in San Francisco, I’m kinda not used to the noise and in the end I get very little sleep. So, I’m ambivalent at best.”

▰ My YouTube history this week has a consistent color scheme. Half of it is Yule log and the other half is Icelandic volcano.

▰ 1983: cutting art out of magazines to serve as cassette tape J-cards

2023: cropping JPG files into squares to serve as “covers” for collections of music files

▰ According to the liner notes, some audiobooks are “read,” while others are “performed.” Sometimes this is a meaningful distinction.

▰ Cutting onions and listening to Beastie Boys instrumentals

▰ Current jam: The slow, unsteady beat of a crockpot heating beans in an otherwise silent home

Us Audiences

In the novel Us Conductors (2014), written by Sean Michaels, Leon Theremin recalls his first experience of a drum solo. Do you remember yours? (Mine was at an Ahmad Jamal trio concert when I was in my late teens.)

Life After Tinyletter

As I’ve mentioned in recent emails to to the Disquiet Junto music community, I need to move the Junto list to a new service because Tinyletter.com itself is being shut down on the last day of February 2024. I considered Substack, which is where my This Week in Sound newsletter is based, but I have decided I’ll likely go with Buttondown. Unlike Substack, Buttondown isn’t free, but the cost under 5,000 subscribers is reasonable, and Buttondown has a tool by which subscribers can pitch in a little to support the infrastructure — though, to be clear, there will be zero pressure to contribute financially. (We’re at about 2,000 subscribers currently. How quickly we grow will in part be correlated with how good Buttondown’s spam account filtering is.) One nice thing about moving away from Tinyletter is that I can schedule the emails in most modern newsletter services in advance, as is the case with Buttondown, meaning even a few weeks ahead of schedule. That may seem like a small thing but it’s very helpful. Anyhow, it looks like Buttondown is where I’ll land, but if you have other suggestions, lemme know. I’ll do the switchover soon, likely in January.

Disquiet Junto Project 0625: Noise Ceiling

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, December 25, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 21, 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 0625: Noise Ceiling
The Assignment: What does this room sound like?

Step 1: The “cover image” to this week’s project is a photograph. Here it is uncropped and without the text superimposed. Think about what this space sounds like:

Step 2: Record a few minutes of the sound of this room, as you imagine it would sound. Engage with this effort, perhaps, less as a musical project and more as a broader sound design project.

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0625” (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 “disquiet0625” (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-0625-noise-ceiling/

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. A minute or two should do. How long do you want to stay in this room?

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, December 25, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 21, 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 625th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Noise Ceiling (The Assignment: What does this room sound like?), at: https://disquiet.com/0625/

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-0625-noise-ceiling/

Corruption’s Noises

Corruption is nearing 2,000 tracks on the murky, rangy SoundCloud page that the Japanese producer maintains. In between vocaloid weirdness and even weirder video-game tomfoolery is a brief swath of X-Files-eligible moodiness, a cycling patch of cybernetic cicada sound design titled “magical WASTE.” The stamina represented by the Corruption account remains equal parts inspiring and mysterious. Every day or so, often multiple times a day, come bits of left-field sound that don’t so much collectively form a tapestry as accumulate into an ever larger sense of majestic disarray. It’s a true old-school internet marvel.