Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 83

The Bandcamp Conundrum

“I’m all lost in the supermarket / I can no longer shop happily”

I’ve been working on an essay about how broken modern consumer technology (software and hardware) is when it comes to downloadable files, like MP3s and FLAC. And then Bandcamp.com, a leading retailer of DRM-free audio files and a cultural force in independent music, goes and gets re-sold by the company that bought it just last year. Bandcamp began as a self-owned entity, then it was bought by Epic, the video game company, and now it’s been sold to Songtradr, a music licensing firm. The word “precarious” has been floating around in my imagination all day.

Let’s be clear: companies get bought and sold every day. That is business. But for musicians and music fans alike, Bandcamp plays a special role. Its social tools are quite minimal; it makes no claims to be, say, the internet’s town square. But if there even is such a thing as the internet’s town square, then Bandcamp is the record store on the corner.

Disquiet Junto Project 0613: Test Drive

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 2, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 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).

Disquiet Junto Project 0613: Test Drive
The Assignment: Do something you’ve been meaning to do.

Step 1: Think of something related to making music that you’ve been meaning to finally get around to.

Step 2: Do it. Don’t worry about messing up.

Note: The image is from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:B11112P009.jpg

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0613” (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 “disquiet0613” (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-0613-test-drive/

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. Maybe length is, in fact, something you’ve been meaning to experiment with.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, October 2, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 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 613th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Test Drive (The Assignment: The Assignment: Do something you’ve been meaning to do), at: https://disquiet.com/0613/

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-0613-test-drive/

Super Powers

Upcoming on Hilobrow: Proto-Punk

I’m very excited to have a short piece on Ornette Coleman in this upcoming online series at hilobrow.com about “proto-punk records from the Sixties (1964–1973).” And what a lineup of contributors, including Stephanie Burt, Jonathan Lethem, Lucy Sante, and Mike Watt. When I was invited to contribute, my initial idea was to write about “Excursion on a Wobbly Rail” by jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, because I’d read that its title was used by the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed as the name of his radio show on WAER 88.3 FM (at Syracuse University in New York), but that track wasn’t in any evident way “punk,” and it came out too early to slot into this Hilobrow conceit (1959 — it closed out his Taylor’s sophomore record as a leader, Looking Ahead!). I’d also read about Reed’s affection for Ornette Coleman around the same time, and then this track came to mind. My piece will be out in maybe a couple months?

Call Me

These miniature photo essays on doorbells that I’ve now been writing for years, perhaps a decade if not longer, tend toward the neutral. The subjects are mundane, and they are purposefully so. That is what catches my eye, and my imagination. Often what makes the images — and their subjects — interesting to me is less the human factor than what the elements have brought to bear. Then again, what the elements have done reflects, generally, a lack of concern on the part of humans — lack of concern itself being a human factor, perhaps a defining human factor. Taking no action, making a poor decision, not planning ahead — these are themselves examples of agency.

Every once in a while, though, there’s clearly a different sort of human factor at play. The “call me” seen here expresses an act of desperation, one that is unfamiliar from all the doorbells I’ve studied or, for that matter, glanced at over the years. Each letterform here is the result of multiple layers of scrawl, an emphatic cry; to see the letters is to hear the scratching. And if the urgency of the writing isn’t evidence enough, then the paperwork in the background — the trespassing notice, the additional material taped to the front door, the image of a municipal seal — along with the heavy chain and lock says that something life-altering has occurred.

A doorbell, at its most basic level, is a means for someone outside a home, or business, to send an audible signal to someone inside a building. Occasionally a doorbell will include some form of writing, in addition to an address or apartment number, often affixed with tape to a gate or door — such as instructions to delivery services, or a note that the bell itself has ceased functioning. Circumstances here, however, have turned a doorbell into a platform for communication in the opposite of its normal, intended direction — not a loudspeaker, more a bulletin board. Here, in stark contrast with mundane daily life, the doorbell has been repurposed by someone who has been removed from their home, and who needs to get a message out.

I Watched My Voice Take Form on the Screen

One of my nighttime habits is to record myself speaking at the very end of the day before I go to sleep. I used to scribble notes, but after a day spent writing, the act of writing yet again at the very end of the day, just before sleep, can feel like one task too many. I generally sleep quite soundly, but part of preparing to sleep is winding down. To write, much as I enjoy writing — much as I am compelled to write — is to invoke work, which is not conducive to sleep. Also, my scribbles often prove illegible come morning, much as dreams can’t always be fully recalled.

In contrast, by simply recording stray thoughts with my voice at the end of the day, I can with ease unpack the day. To write is to work; to speak is to put work behind me. Speaking is unwinding, even if I’m only speaking to myself — well, to myself and to my phone. When I record my thoughts, I capture reflections on recent occurrences, and I make plans for the next day, and I collect extraneous bits of ideas. As with my scribbles, some of these I can’t even comprehend the next morning. If I’m particularly tired, the recordings can veer into the surreal, sometimes enjoyably so. (It can be an out-of-body experience, though that isn’t my goal.)

After simply listening to these recordings come morning, for years, I started using — or more to the point, beta-testing, a state many of us seem to be in in perpetuity — speech-to-text software tools. I spent a lot of time making the most of the tool built into Google Drive, and then the Recorder that comes with Android, and then the tool built into Apple Notes, among others. These are real-time recording tools: they transcribe as you speak. They trained me to speak more clearly, because as I spoke I watched my voice take form on the screen, and I self-corrected if the software was misunderstanding me. This was a positive feedback loop, but it also required me to observe my thoughts, which wasn’t as freeing as simply speaking aloud.

More recently I’ve gotten in the habit of using tools like MacWhisper and rev.com. These tools allow me to simply record something, and then after the fact have it transcribed into text. The quality of the results — the “fidelity,” to repurpose an audio term — is even higher, in my experience, than that of “real-time” tools such as Google Recorder and Apple Notes.

Now, one interesting thing about revisiting these auto-transcribed notes the next morning is that I also receive emotional cues: Was I terse or rhapsodic, prone to imagery or sticking to line items? I’m not recording my thoughts to keep track of my emotional state, but I can’t deny that is part of what I learn as the sun rises and I pull up the transcribed files. And, as it turns out, this is just as true about what happens between the words. The MacWhisper tool, in particular, lends an additional means by which I find myself gauging my emotional state: It actually characterizes my breathing and it notes the extended silences. The software is reading, so to speak, the way I communicate non-verbally, as then identified for me with brackets and parenthesis: “[sighs],” “[breathing],” “(yawns),” etc. It is eerie, fascinating, and, at a basic level, informative. And in my experience, not incorrect about what it observes.

Snazzy

On loan from a generous friend. Any tips, recommendations, or experiences with what is contained here? Note the heavy emphasis on modules from Snazzy FX. These are all new to me, with the exception of the Doepfer, the Make Noise, and the Tiptop.

Scratch Pad: Triptych, Guitar, Bandcamp

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. 

▰ Mid-afternoon sonic triptych through the open window, since it’s 67º out: heavy metal blasting from a convertible briefly paused(ish) at the stop sign, distant emergency vehicle siren, dog barking down the block

▰ Things I found myself saying in guitar class today: “I really like the shapes of diminished chords.”

▰ The Spanish Prisoner really holds up. I don’t think I’ve watched it since I saw it in a theater when it came out. I especially love how the artificiality of it all makes everything feel suspect as the story unfolds. And bonus points for a noir-tastic Carter Burwell score.

▰ I never before noticed that there’s a Disquiet Junto tag on Bandcamp:

https://bandcamp.com/tag/disquiet-junto

▰ (From Wednesday) Maybe I don’t go for my walk today?

This is what I use to map air quality locally:

https://map.purpleair.com/

▰ Reminder: On Friday, Sept. 29, from 7pm to 9pm, I’m hosting a listening session at the Berkeley Alembic of music by recording artists who explore “the poetics of the buffer”: capturing sound and toying with it while it lingers in the mind’s ear.

▰ Notice: I made it to inbox zero. If you’re currently expecting an email from me, I respectfully ask you remind me what the subject was, because far as I can tell, I’m caught up. Thanks. (This doesn’t count requests for editorial coverage, because I can’t reply to all of those.)

Lia Kohl’s Cult Jam

Lia Kohl’s excellent 2022 album, Too Small to Be a Plain, has been reissued by the Florabelle record label, the music itself having been recorded alone by Kohl in late 2020 through early 2021 — which is to say, deep pandemic time. It is a superb collection of pristine tiny moments, combining her cello and voice with electronic sounds and processing, as well as field recordings and, if the word plaintive can be attributed to technology, bits of plaintive radio. Warbling lullabies and gently pleading Morse code, muted strings and enveloping drones, fragmented snippets and otherworldly effects — all are layered and sequenced, jumbled up and laid bare, as if in a tidy sonic exhibit of cherished wonders.

https://florabelle.bandcamp.com/album/too-small-to-be-a-plain

Lisa Kohl’s Cult Jam

Lisa Kohl’s excellent 2022 album, Too Small to Be a Plain, has been reissued by the Florabelle record label, the music itself having been recorded alone by Kohl in late 2020 through early 2021 — which is to say, deep pandemic time. It is a superb collection of pristine tiny moments, combining her cello and voice with electronic sounds and processing, as well as field recordings and, if the word plaintive can be attributed to technology, bits of plaintive radio. Warbling lullabies and gently pleading Morse code, muted strings and enveloping drones, fragmented snippets and otherworldly effects — all are layered and sequenced, jumbled up and laid bare, as if in a tidy sonic exhibit of cherished wonders.

https://florabelle.bandcamp.com/album/too-small-to-be-a-plain