Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 76

Some Sounds on My Mind

Some sounds and sound-related things I’ve been thinking about:

▰ When I open the refrigerator in the morning, it makes a sound like a Star Trek spaceship warp core cooling suddenly when coming out of hyperspace. That’s what it sounds like, though I don’t think that specific sound effect actually correlates with what my appliance sounds like. It’s more of an association.

▰ Elsewhere at home: the washing machine has, with the correct balance of preparation, a sudsy seesawing that can lull me to sleep any time of the day.

▰ When I listen to an audiobook while going for a walk, occasionally I miss a word, even just a syllable. The app will, with the push of a button, bounce back 15 seconds, but that’s a lot of words — as many as 30 or 40. If I hit it immediately, my being distracted due to having missed a word means I miss subsequent words, as well. So what I have to do is wait, listen some more, and then hit rewind, within the 15-second window. When I have this down, it’s as natural as my stride.

▰ I record audio notes for myself throughout the day, much as I jot down notes throughout the day. I have been trying out a variety of apps to transcribe my audio recordings, and one thing I’ve noticed is how much context matters. When I record a few words, the machine can’t always make them out suitably. It’s in my interest to make a full statement, so that the machine can form the correct words from the syllables.

▰ My phone (an iPhone) has too many options to mute sounds, including alerts and alarms. These variables have varying impacts that I can’t always keep track of: the little slider on the side, the volume, the “focus” level, the app-specific “notification” settings. It gets confusing. It’s like different committees control each of the options, and these committees haven’t met in a while.

▰ Speaking of my phone, I use the Background Sounds option quite a bit, to aid concentration, and a recent update to the software has made the tool oddly difficult to access: you have to swipe once and then hit four subsequent buttons simply to turn on the noise. It’s quite odd.

Gray on Red

Vestige of a great evening at Gray Area. It’s from earlier in the month. I’ve washed since.

Life Imitates Bechtle

When I exit an art exhibit or a film, one means by which I find myself gauging its impact on me is the extent that the world seems transformed by the aesthetic of what I had just been immersed in. Does the neighborhood outside the museum somehow correspond visually with the paintings I’d just spent hours staring at? Does the street outside the theater look as if framed and lit by the filmmakers? Does the impression kick in immediately, or take a beat to surface — and how long does the halo effect last? Today, when I left the De Young Museum — where I went specifically to check out a show of prints and drawings by the photorealist Robert Bechtle — I wandered out of Golden Gate Park to Fulton Street, where I was immediately faced with what could very well have been a Bechtle painting itself: the old-school car, the late-afternoon light, the perfect geometries, the muted palette. San Francisco is, of course, a city from which Bechtle drew vast inspiration throughout his career, so the deck was stacked for such an occurence, but the appearance of this scene was striking, nonetheless. Photorealism brings a certain complexity to the idea of life imitating art, especially when the art in the first place was such a perceptive depiction of life here.

Scratch Pad: Houston, Scalzi, Doctorow, Welsh

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. 

▰ I’m in the supermarket squeezing produce when Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” comes on, and I’m like: Yup.

▰ Me: I’ve bought enough (e)books for 2023.

Me 10 seconds later: there’s an $18 sale for 21 John Scalzi books on Humble Bundle for charity, and the new non-fiction book by Cory Doctorow (The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation) is $2 at Verso.

▰ The TV series Irvine Welsh’s Crime: in which the captioning does a fine job of deciphering the Scottish accents, but then you still need to look up plenty of words

Dirty Dozen

Something about the positioning of the lock box next to the exceedingly generic dozen-unit doorbell, in combination with the multiple segments of black wrought iron gating, makes this entryway look less like that of a residence and more like a penitentiary. Someone has tried to lend some levity, but it’s a sloppy bid, muted by its surroundings. I’m trying to decide whether that Godzilla-spine outline drawn around the intercom speaker is supposed to look like Bart Simpson’s head, which the “HA” suggests.

Disquiet Junto Project 0621: The Leftovers

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, November 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 23, 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 0621: The Leftovers
The Assignment: Use recently discarded material to make something new.

Step 1: At the end of the calendar year, people often participate in holidays that result in lots of leftover food. Think about the leftovers — discarded tracks, or MIDI files, or ideas — that result from your music-making process.

Step 2: Scrounge around on your hard drive and recording equipment, and in your memory, to access the sort of creative leftovers that came to mind in Step 1.

Step 3: Make a new track primarily using the resources that surfaced in Step 2. You can, of course, add new material. And be sure to reheat sufficiently.

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0621” (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 “disquiet0621” (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-0621-the-leftovers/

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. How far can you stretch your leftovers?

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, November 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 23, 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 621st weekly Disquiet Junto project, The Leftovers (The Assignment: Use recently discarded material to make something new), at: https://disquiet.com/0621/

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-0621-the-leftovers/

KOs, BPMs, Dreams

This Teenage Engineering KO II is pretty sweet. I have the OG KO and love it. As is generally the case with these multi-track samplers, I wonder why different tracks can’t run at independent BPMs. When I asked TE’s Jens Rudberg this, about the OP-1, he had an interesting answer that had to do with the virtual tape format underlying the system. But that does not appear to apply to the KO II. Not a hill I’ll die on, but one I sit on and ponder. I asked a question along these lines about tiny MIDI controllers, and then Tom Whitwell developed one. So … I can dream.

Sometimes when I ask this BPM question, someone asks why, and then I say that this long after Steve Reich’s phase music, and the rise of generative music and sound art and ambient music — well, that’s, in essence, my answer to the question.

Step Wise

Apparently went, perchance, for a John Cage walk — it was even in three movements.

Caution

What is this construction worker listening to?

(Best answer I’ve heard so far is “paint drying.”)

On the Punk in Ornette Coleman

I love writing for hilobrow.com, where the coverage usually takes the form of a multi-author series on a loose yet narrowly conceived theme. Most of these series are pop-culture-ish, though I also contributed the opening chunk of a novel-in-progress during the first year of the pandemic: “Zeffirelli Wand Shop.”

My most recent piece for the site is just out. The series this time, titled Stooge Your Enthusiasm, is about “proto-punk records from the Sixties (1964–1973).” There’s an incredible list of participants, like Jonathan Lethem (on the Monkees’ “Your Auntie Grizelda”) and Mike Watt (on the Stooges’ “Shake Appeal”). I mention Watt’s early band, the Minutemen, in my piece, which is on “We Now Interrupt for a Commercial,” off an old Ornette Coleman album, New York Is Now!, from 1968. The album features a trio of Coleman with drummer Elvin Jones and saxophonist Dewey Redman.

I have mixed feelings about punk, feelings I wasn’t particularly interested in exploring at this time. I don’t generally care to yuck people’s yums, and the arguments about the politics of punk are a key part of the self-conscious ouroboros that I find unappetizing about punk and, more to the point, punk discourse — at this point, punk discourse and punk being virtually identical — in the first place. I just wanted to take the best — or most-appealing-to-me — aspects of punk to heart, and write about a song that predated punk and satisfied them.

I had in mind the activities of two mavericks, the unbridled delirium of Yoko Ono and the self-direction of Pauline Oliveros, but both of them were already claimed by the time I was invited to participate (by Nicholas Rombes and Stephanie Burt, respectively). I’d already written about punk once before for Hilobrow, on the topic of thee great Billy Childish’s early work, and I wanted to push into the topic from a different aesthetic angle.

Where that thinking took me was Ornette Coleman, who could be, as I write in the piece, “proto-punk every which way.” In the case of this particular song, it comes down to “the frenzy, the anti-consumerism, the snarky humor.”

Here’s the first paragraph of my piece:

There are various milestones in the early discography of the late Texan saxophonist Ornette Coleman where you can hear him pushing firmly back at jazz convention and using the resulting elastic tension to propel himself toward something bold, something new, and, to borrow the title of his debut album as a band leader, Something Else!!!! (1958). His was, from the start, a perpetual outward-bound event horizon deserving of no fewer than four exclamation points. You can recognize in these discordant instances a precognition of the more difficult and intractable approach Coleman would eventually become synonymous with: cacophonous, angular, vivacious — which is to say: punk.

Read the full thing at hilobrow.com.