Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 81

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Scratch Pad: Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Silences

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. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I take weekends off social media. 

▰ Morning duet for refrigerator hum and lawn mower

▰ The occasional instance when a music publicist sends an album and you explain that you purchased it a couple days earlier

▰ Whatever the word is for being both utterly mystified and not remotely surprised, that is my state of mind after yesterday’s news about Bandcamp’s direction following its sale to yet another company

▰ I’m sorry if you followed me recently on SoundCloud and make exactly the sort of music I might listen to and I didn’t follow you back but SoundCloud still has its follow limit set to 2,000, and provides no real tool to whittle the dead accounts one already follows. I do bookmark some newer accounts.

▰ This week’s Disquiet Junto music community project was informed by my current Duolingo efforts, specifically trying to sort out the difference, in German, between “leise” and “ruhig.”

▰ The haiku of the “notable deaths” on Wikipedia from the few couple days:

“Moldovan pan pipes player”

“New Zealand aviation entrepreneur”

“Dutch darts player”

“Romanian freestyle wrestler”

Some Other Guitarists

Rolling Stone this week published a now widely discussed list of “The 250 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,” and while I have little interest in debating its merits, I will use the opportunity to mention some other guitarist deserving of inclusion. (Also, it was great to see Yvette Young in there so prominently. She spoke in my sound class a few years ago — back when I was still teaching it — about her social media activity. Minor point, but I think she connected even more with younger fans on Instagram than on YouTube, as stated in the RS coverage, but I could be mistaken.) I think the following aren’t in the Rolling Stone listicle, but the website’s advertisements were playing weird with my web browser, so maybe I missed some of ’em. At first I didn’t see Adrian Belew, for example, but he is, of course, in there. I’ve included a bit of punctuation for emphasis:

Not new at all:
Derek Bailey
Elliot Easton !!!
Fred Frith
Henry Kaiser
Robert Lloyd !!
Elliot Randall !
Elliot Sharp

Not new, but not “old” either:
Eivind Aarset
Christian Fennesz
Ben Monder

Slightly “more new” than the above:
Julian Lage !
Sarah Lipstate
Ava Mendoza !
Jamie Stillway

Disquiet Junto Project 0616: Definition Jam

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, October 23, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 19, 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 0616: Definition Jam
The Assignment: Explore, in music, the nuanced differences between two closely related words.

Step 1: Think of two words in any single language of your choosing that mean “quiet.” For example, in English you might choose from “quiet,” “silence,” “hush,” and “tranquil,” among others. (Alternate: You could choose any base word for this project. “Quiet” is simply a recommendation. You might, instead, choose two words that mean “noise,” or something else entirely. Given the nature of this project, it may be best to choose a word related to sound.)

Step 2: Spend time coming to understand the nuanced differences between the definitions of the two words you selected in Step 1.

Step 3: Think about how you can render, through sound, the two different definitions, based on the thinking that you developed in Step 2.

Step 4: Record a piece of music that begins with the sonic rendition of one word and morphs slowly into the other.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0616” (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 “disquiet0616” (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-0616-definition-jam/

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.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.

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, October 23, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 19, 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 616th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Definition Jam (The Assignment: Explore, in music, the nuanced differences between two closely related words), at: https://disquiet.com/0616/

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-0616-definition-jam/

About Last Night

The evening’s concert venue was, um, fairly large — at Saint John the Divine in Manhattan (concert details: stjohndivine.org).

Station to Station

Imagining how it might play out if I said to everyone standing here waiting for this train that I’d appreciate them being quiet for 30 seconds so I can record the loud hum from this exterior light fixture.

Cyberpunk 2023

Nothing today is quite as cyberpunk as a dozen or so cheap tablet computers attached to the interior wall of a fast food joint that, in its tiny kitchen, manages to pump out the menu offerings of four different restaurant franchises. This truly could be a comics panel from Katsuhiro Otomo, Geof Darrow, Giannis Milonogiannis, or Paul Pope.

Model Cover

Now that’s a book cover

Scratch Pad: Duolingo Music, Air Commerce

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. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I take weekends off social media. 

▰ I’m on day 157 of Duolingo German and year six(ish) of guitar lessons, and I’m looking forward to giving this upcoming Duolingo Music tool a go.

▰ Not a tragedy of the commons

▰ Even before Duolingo Music has been released, the app is doing wonders for my music education, because my inability to grok German sentence structure makes me realize how far my (still limited) grasp on guitar chords has come

▰ Nothing quite like purchasing an album at 35,000 feet, in this case Andrew Tasselmyer’s diary #1, methodically glitchy combination of Octatrack and iPad, on the French record label Sonic dialogue

▰ I’ve been trying out this social network called Pebble (pebble.is). If it’s of interest, I’ve got some invites, apparently. It’s being built by people who used to work at Twitter. Nothing fancy so far, but I’m keeping an eye on it. DM me if you want an invite. I’ve also got a few from Bluesky. And as for Threads, the site seems fairly quiet (in a negative sense) to me, but to remain active there is a simple matter of copy and paste, so for the time being I am expending those three or four seconds.

Hometown Vinyl

The big new (largely) used bookstore in my hometown also sells vinyl, and it has this turntable to preview the current stock