Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 75

Friday Evening

YouTube Music tells me something I already know

Tiny Office

A sizable percentage of the floorspace of the tiny office I rent

Disquiet Junto Project 0623: Kinda Bluetooth

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 11, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 7, 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).

Disquiet Junto Project 0623: Kinda Bluetooth
The Assignment: Experiment with the sonic qualities of a failing signal.

The end of a calendar year is often a time of reflection. With that in mind, this week we’re revisiting an old Disquiet Junto project from back in early 2019.

Step 1: Find some sort of Bluetooth-enabled audio connection that is available to you. It might be headphones or a microphone or some other device. The important thing is that audio can be sent to one device from another device by Bluetooth.

Step 2: Experiment with a sound sent via Bluetooth using the connection decided upon in Step 1. Work to find situations in which Bluetooth begins to fail — that is, where the sonic signature of that signal failure becomes apparent. This will likely be due to distance, but you may find other creative approaches to achieve the distortion.

Step 3: Use the situation(s) located in Step 2 as the basis for an original piece of music, stressing an audio signal and then recording the way that signal distorts due to the failure of Bluetooth.

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0623” (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 “disquiet0623” (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-0623-kinda-bluetooth/

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, December 11, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 7, 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 623rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Kinda Bluetooth (The Assignment: Experiment with the sonic qualities of a failing signal), at: https://disquiet.com/0622/

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-0623-kinda-bluetooth/

Los Angeles Drive Sounds

I drove to Los Angeles and back this weekend: one day down, two days there, one day back. I drove an electric car. Charging an electric car en route feels both futuristic and, due to the time required, old-fashioned. While I was there, I entered just one art gallery, and I saw no shows. I just hung out with friends, new and old. I’m looking forward to doing it again. Some quick thoughts and observations about sound from the trip:

▰ The most amazing thing about an electric car, putting aside how inexpensive it was to drive to LA and back, was how quiet it is — not just for listening to music I normally couldn’t even play in a (“traditional”) car, but for audiobooks and conversation.

▰ If you are staying in DTLA — where I tend to stay, and where I’ve been staying since before it was DTLA, a term I can’t quite bring myself to type unselfconsciously — it gets loud at night. There is no widespread pandemic lull in DTLA on weekend nights. And if you’ve driven solo for nine hours, you fall asleep, no problem.

▰ It’s not that I care if a reader of an audiobook does the voices or not. It’s whether they commit to an authorial voice or to a theatrical ensemble approach — really commit. Just reading isn’t reading.

▰ Back in the days of CDs, I had a couple of old — then new — Monolake albums I kept in the car, and they are often what I find playing in my head when I find myself on certain stretches of highway.

▰ I have long joked — more to the point, half-joked — that the song I want played at my funeral is John Cage’s 4’33. I have now attended, in person, a memorial for someone where that took place, and I can report that it is exceedingly moving.

In The Wire: Loraine James, Recombinant

Nice. I’ve got two live concert reviews in the latest issue of The Wire, the Jan/Feb 2024 issue, which came out today: one of the final night of the Recombinant Festival, and the other of Loraine James’ first ever San Francisco performance. Snippet here. I’ll post ’em in full in a month. I like writing for a British publication about the town I live in because a neighborhood I know well becomes a “neighbourhood.”

Love My Neighborhood

Kinda in Love with This E

Inner Workings

Rare internal view of my brain when I am writing

Scratch Pad: Pessoa, MacGowan, Lynch

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.

▰ Annual heteronym joke: Fernando Pessoa died on this day in 1935 — taking with him dozens of others

▰ “Fairytale of New York” will hit extra hard this year

▰ I would have recorded the intense Lynchian HVAC drone of this roadside fast food establishment’s restroom but the piped-in holiday music would have been nixed by copyright bots. (Side note: yes, “roadside fast food establishment” suggests there’s a roadside fast food underground.)

▰ [Rapidly scrambles for mute button prior to sneezing]

▰ Me years ago: This is a nice wallet, especially because it has no logo.

Me now: I need a new wallet because my old one is falling apart but I have no idea what company made my old wallet.

This feels like a broader metaphor about some life lesson that’s been evading me.

▰ C B7 C A7 D7 G7 C G7 — pretty much all I’ll be doing on guitar the next few weeks is cycling through these chords, and variations on them in various voicings, while working on fingerpicking

Scratch Pad

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.

▰ Annual heteronym joke: Fernando Pessoa died on this day in 1935 — taking with him dozens of others

▰ “Fairytale of New York” will hit extra hard this year

▰ I would have recorded the intense Lynchian HVAC drone of this roadside fast food establishment’s restroom but the piped-in holiday music would have been nixed by copyright bots. (Side note: yes, “roadside fast food establishment” suggests there’s a roadside fast food underground.)

▰ [Rapidly scrambles for mute button prior to sneezing]

▰ Me years ago: This is a nice wallet, especially because it has no logo.

Me now: I need a new wallet because my old one is falling apart but I have no idea what company made my old wallet.

▰ This feels like a broader metaphor about some life lesson that’s been evading me.

▰ C B7 C A7 D7 G7 C G7 — pretty much all I’ll be doing on guitar the next few weeks is cycling through these chords, and variations on them in various voicings, while working on fingerpicking