Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 83

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.

Scratch Pad: Killer, Scavengers, Fretboard

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. I take weekends and evenings off social media. 

▰ I thought it was funny that the billionaire in Fincher’s The Killer wears a Sub Pop t-shirt, but wondered if it shoulda coulda been Wax Trax! since he lives in Chicago.

▰ Hey, Apple Reminders added a “relative” date to the system, so I no longer need to manually update the date that defines my “Tomorrow” list. (I truly, for over a year, did this every morning.)

▰ I really enjoy reading books on my Kindle, but organizing virtual books isn’t much less time consuming than managing a large physical book collection

▰ Scavengers Reign episodes 1 – 6: Wow, there’s a lot of great sound in this TV series.

Scavengers Reign episode 7: Hey, let’s have the robot improvise a duet with one of the characters.

Scavengers Reign episode 8: Now let’s give one of the characters an audio recorder …

▰ Using Wikipedia to find a photo to accompany a field recording means selecting a Creative Commons image and then realizing that the Wikipedian who uploaded it was one of the inventors of the optical mouse and wrote a book titled Human and Machine Hearing: Extracting Meaning from Sound

▰ It’s 2023, and SoundCloud still caps the number of accounts you can follow to 2000 while providing no tools to root out accounts that have gone inactive.

Related:

Q: It’s 2023, so are people even using SoundCloud?

A: Yes they are.

▰ I generally try to practice guitar by looking at my fretboard as little as I possibly can. Finger-picking is the first thing I’ve done with guitar where it’s just plain better for me to not look at the fretboard. Watching my right hand when I’m picking is a bit like asking a centipede how it manages to walk.

▰ Honk if you’re waiting for the rain

▰ It’s that time of the year when I count how many weeks until the last Disquiet Junto project of this year and the first of next year, since they’re always specific projects (“journal” and “ice,” respectively). And there’s the anniversary of Disquiet.com, which turns a ripe 27 years of age on December 13.

▰ If you go back in time and see young me, let him know there’s this gadget in the future you can read comics on and listen to music on simultaneously

Pace and Plot

I’m slowing down for winter, and I can feel it. Some of this slowing is conscious, but not all of it. Much of it is animal instinct: the mornings quieter, the days shorter, the late afternoons darker, the evenings their own special blend of hush. I usually sleep close to exactly seven hours a night. That has, quite naturally, extended to eight, and sometimes longer.

I have mentioned on my This Week in Sound email list that if I don’t get an issue out, it’s because I’m deep in work on a book project, which is a methodical practice, quite different from the annotated clipping service, short thought pieces, and recommended listening that my Substack consists of. I recently recognized that a Slack dedicated to the Disquiet Junto was one element too many in the long-running community than I could dedicate back-burner mental time to, and I worked with members of the community to change the admin structure of the Slack so as to lessen my cognitive burden.

And there’s a funny thing about doing less: when you’re successful at it, you want to cull even more. So I wonder what else I can do less of. But I don’t wonder too much, because wondering likewise requires an allocation of time. Wondering can be reflective, but it can also be active, and active isn’t conducive to slowing one’s pace.

I see this slowing in various aspects of my day. I’m reading a bit more attentively, and I’m exercising for longer stretches, so to speak, going for even more and further walks — walking being my primary non-digital vice (though it is digitally adjacent, since I often have an earbud in one ear piping an audiobook). I’m also plotting: reengineering my work processes, tidying (atoms and bits), planning. Because to do less now is in service of doing more later, later being this coming calendar year.

0620 Out of 0619

This was a fun visual sequence, since project 0620 builds on material that Disquiet Junto music community participants recorded as part of project 0619. Oh, and the streaks of blue in this week’s project “cover” collage are from a photo I took of the lights at an Atarashii Gakko! concert I attended last week. It was a lot of fun.

TWiS Listening Posts (0014, 0015, 0016)

Most Wednesdays I send a special thank you to paid subscribers to the This Week in Sound email newsletter, and I usually do a short summary here. I fell behind on those summaries, so here are the three most recent:

TWiS Listening Post (0016)
November 15, 2023

This issue is an experiment. Technically every issue of This Week in Sound is an experiment, because I’m always fiddling with structure, and also a lot of the concepts and subjects are themselves still at a stage more about experimentation and theory than about certainty and canon. This issue is an experiment because it’s unlike the first 15 weeks of the TWiS Listening Post, which consisted of three (or more) tracks (or albums or videos) I happened to recommend, most of them fairly fresh. There wasn’t a theme, per se. This week, however, the intent is to share three tracks to help a listener new to Scott Tuma triangulate, as it were, what makes him special.

I should note that Tuma was one of the first musicians I ever interviewed professionally. I moved to New York City after graduating from college, and the first articles I wrote for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine, in 1989 — before moving to Sacramento, California, and joining the magazine full time — included an interview with the band Souled American, of which Tuma was a member (they were in town to perform). As I recall, he was the quietest of the group’s line-up when we met in person (the other two interviews I did at that phase were cellist Hank Roberts, whose excellent Black Pastels had just come out, and the hip-hop/rock band 24-7 Spyz, who had just released an excellent cover of Kool & the Gan’s “Jungle Boogie”).

Tuma is a master of quiet music, often mixing simple recording techniques, rough hewn guitar, and an ear for minimalism. These three tracks exemplify his work, both solo and in collaboration. If I were to have added a fourth, it would have been from his tenure as part of the ever-changing Boxhead Ensemble.

. . .

TWiS Listening Post (0015)
November 8, 2023

This issue included (1) my top 10 of 2023 (I’ll post a more detailed top 20 soon), (2) the fantastic collaboration, LP2, between electronic musician and producer Joseph Branciforte and vocalist Theo Bleckmann, and (3) Jeannine Schulz’s recent album Elements, Cycles.

. . .

TWiS Listening Post (0014)
October 25, 2023

This issue included reflections on (1) a lengthy soundscape recording from midtown Manhattan by the prolific Nomadic Ambience, (2) the electronics/cello album Wave Cycles by Mikael Lind and Johanna Sjunnesson, and (3) a drone I recorded in an apartment.

Disquiet Junto Project 0620: Beat Accrual Accrual

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 20, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 16, 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 0620: Beat Accrual Accrual
The Assignment: Turn someone’s slow-build beat into a finished track.

Step 1: In the previous project, people built beats that accrue slowly over time. Familiarize yourself with the instructions at disquiet.com/0619.

Step 2: Several of the musicians who participated last week have allowed their tracks to be reused for this project. The majority are in this playlist. If you’d like your track from the previous project included this week, just get in touch and let me know.

This track is also available:

https://raincat.bandcamp.com/track/heartbeat-of-the-sun-disquiet0619

Step 3: Make a new track by adding material to the track you selected from Step 2. Do as little as possible to the source track. Try to just, for the most part, add to it directly, rather than processing or editing the earlier track.

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0620” (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 “disquiet0620” (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-0620-beat-accrual-accrual/

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. Your track should be roughly the same length as the source track you built upon.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, November 20, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 16, 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 620th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Beat Accrual Accrual (The Assignment: Turn someone’s slow-build beat into a finished track), at: https://disquiet.com/0620/

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-0620-beat-accrual-accrual/

TWiS: “Understand the World Through the Vibrations in Their Webs”

These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the November 14, 2023, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.

▰ WHOLE LAVA LOVE: The magazine Quanta profiled Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a volcanologist in the geology department at Western Washington University: “I study the earthquakes that take place in volcanic systems, which I describe as the songs of the volcano. I’ve always loved sound. And I’ve always loved resonance and standing waves. A classic example of standing waves is when you take a beer and blow over the top of the bottle, and it hums — or it’s when you run your finger on the top of your wineglass, which is more to my boozy tastes, and the glass sings. Everything has a hum that is associated with its shape and its material properties, and volcanoes are no different. Their conduits have hums.”

▰ DANCE ON: Fascinating article on the potential for voice description in dance performances: “Since emerging as a formal access tool about 45 years ago, audio description in the United States has become increasingly available across the arts, bolstered by broader movements for accessibility and disability rights. But while you’re now likely to find it in movie theaters, on streaming services and at Broadway shows, it’s less common in dance. Developed for dialogue-driven media like theater and film, the conventions of traditional audio description don’t necessarily translate to a largely nonverbal form of expression. Which is perhaps one reason that dance artists, and especially disabled dance artists, are devising their own alternatives.” The article also profiles dancer Krishna Washburn and choreographer Heather Shaw, who co-directed a new film, Telephone, “exploring the creative possibilities of audio description for dance.”

▰ SPIDERS, MAN: Attempts to understand how spiders benefit from a web’s vibrations yielded a musical instrument, thanks to the research of scientists Ross Hatton (“Spiders that weave webs often have very poor eyesight, and so they understand the world through the vibrations in their webs”), Damian Elias, and Andrew Otto. The device shown here resulted from Hatton wanting “something tangible he could use to translate the abstract language of engineering to a wider audience.” Check out the video and article for more detail. (Thanks, Rod Stasick!)

▰ FAKE OUT: There are tools being developed to help ward off AI, such as AntiFake, which focuses on audio content: “AntiFake scrambles the audio signalso that it confuses the AI model. The modified track still sounds normal to the human ear, but it sounds messed up to the system, making it hard for it to create a clean-sounding voice clone.” The tool was developed by Ning Zhang, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

▰ BROACH THE TOPIC: A new phone-less phone, a wearable gadget called the Ai Pin, has gotten a lot of coverage lately. Because it does away with the idea of holding a phone, it depends a lot on the sounds that the user experiences (what’s known as “UX”). This bit is from an overview by Erin Griffith and Tripp Mickle in the New York Times (gift link): 

A haunting whoosh filled the room, and two dozen Humane employees, seated around a long white table, carefully concentrated on the sound. It was just before the Ai Pin’s release, and they were evaluating its rings and beeps. The pin’s “personic” speaker (a company portmanteau of “personal” and “sonic”) is critical, since many of its features rely on verbal and audio cues.

Mr. Chaudhri praised the “assuredness” of one chirp noise and Ms. Bongiorno complimented the “more physical” sounds for the pin’s laser. “It feels like you’re actually holding the light,” she marveled.

Less assuring: That whoosh, which plays when sending a text message. “It feels ominous,” Ms. Bongiorno said. Others around the table said it sounded like a ghost, or as if you made a mistake, almost. Someone thought it was a Halloween joke.

Ms. Bongiorno wanted the sound for sending a text to feel as satisfying as the trash-can sound on one of Apple’s older operating systems. “Like ‘thunk,’” she said.

WORD PLAY: Tongue twisters could become ways to check sobriety: “Whether it is the story of Peter Piper and his pickled peppers or a woman selling sea shells on the seashore, tongue-twisters tackled when sober can sound rather different after a drink. Now researchers believe such changes, in particular those relating to pitch and frequency, could be used to alert people to their level of intoxication. Dr Brian Suffoletto, the first author of a study from Stanford University, said the approach has a number of potential future applications. ‘The most obvious one is as a form of ignition lock on cars which would not allow someone to start their car unless they could pass the “voice challenge” which could be used in certain high-risk workplaces like school bus driver or heavy machine operator to ensure public safety.’”

▰ QUICK NOTES: Bud Light: X-rays (see above) show the relative density between actual Apple AirPods and knockoffs. ▰ Oz Noises: A popular “Slip Slop Slap” ad campaign about skin cancer has been added to the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia registry for 2023. ▰ Hot Lips: A faked recording of London Mayor Sadiq Khan “dismissing the importance of Armistice Day events this weekend is circulating among extreme right groups, prompting a police investigation.” ▰ Hot and Heavy: Low-flying helicopters in Queensland, Australia, are arousing the local reptile fauna — “they’re like Viagra for crocodiles.” (Thanks, Matthew Nix!) ▰ Noise Police: “This year is supposed to be quieter. Neighbors are still on edge” — neighbors of a Providence, RI, police shooting range complain about noise. ▰ Good Grief: The term “grief tech” is being applied to tools that can, by employing “voice cloning technology” and other resources, simulate the dead in service of the mournful living. ▰ Hydro Phone: “Divers could soon communicate underwater over large distances by sending radio messages along the water’s surface, getting around the fact that radio frequencies can’t travel far through water.”

On Repeat: Killer Glitch Hum

I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ To Die For: Pretty much all I’ve been listening to the past few days is the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for David Fincher’s new movie, The Killer. At the opening of the film, the title character talks about how he listens to music as a tool to concentrate. His repertoire of choice is the Smiths. Me? I listen to Reznor and Ross’ scores when I want to concentrate. 

https://trentreznor-atticusross.bandcamp.com/album/the-killer-original-score

▰ Signal Booster: Glitching, atmospheric, percolating — Tomotsugu Nakamura’s new album, Antenna, on the great Audiobulb label, is endlessly listenable. And for all its gentleness, it’ll keep you alert with unexpected fissures, textures, and switchbacks.

https://tomotsugu.bandcamp.com/album/antenna

▰ Hum Bucker: My friend Mahlen Morris recorded this excellent assemblage of “field recordings of humming sounds, from commercial refrigerators to restaurant bathroom fans to San Francisco’s cable car track, all looped and blended together.” (And he kinda named it for me, which is super nice.)