Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 93

Infrastructure Is Beautiful

Command Z

Starship Organ

Went to Saint Mary atop Cathedral Hill here in San Francisco on Sunday for the weekly 4pm Musical Meditations, which meant listening to this starship of an organ fill the enormous interior space for us and maybe 17 other people, not counting the young organist, his teacher, the church’s guard, and some apparent janitorial staff. The sound was massive and consuming, the colors and tones rich and thick, thorough and luxurious.

On Repeat: Live Minimalism, Foley Volcano

Been a while since I did one of these. Brief mentions (optimally each Sunday) of some of my favorite listening from the week prior:

▰ The Polish keyboardist Hania Rani performs live with a large ensemble (Ziemowit Klimek, Wojciech Warmijak, Adam Jełowick, Kacper Krupa, Jarosław Kawałek) in the sunlit courtyard of a nearly 350-year-old building in Paris. She’s a consummate performer, with her own blend of pop-informed minimalism and muted neo-classical.

▰ Davide Bernardi sets drones in luscious, gleaming motion with a small set of devices.

▰ The Christoph Möckel Trio is named for its founding saxophonist, and also features Oliver Lutz, on six-string bass, and Moritz Baumgärtner, drums. This would be great modern, composed chamber jazz unplugged, but what pushes it over the edge is how both Möckel and Lutz employ a battery of guitar pedals to treat their instruments. The set is barely 18 minutes long. Take the whole thing in.

▰ Another great Aphex Twin transcription performed by classical guitarist Simon Farintosh: “Rhubarb” off Selected Ambient Works Volume II. When a cover really works, especially one purposefully trailing in the wake of the original, I wonder how much I’m mentally “hearing” the original while listening to the new take. It’s like a very good version doubly benefits by echoing the source material in the mind’s ear.

▰ There’s white noise, brown noise, and pink noise, among many other noises. My current favorite is molten red noise. (I checked in with the videographer, after discussing the video with my friend Mahlen Morris, and confirmed that in fact the audio was added after the fact. Still, it’s quite evocative.)

Scratch Pad: Radio, AI, “Nang”

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others, including Bluesky (disquiet.bsky.social), which remains behind a beta firewall at the moment, and, yes, Threads (threads.net/@dsqt).

▰ I certainly have significant concerns about music streaming services. I also sometimes listen to Elvis Costello’s “Radio, Radio” to be reminded that this “shared culture” that nostalgists long for was “anesthetizing” in its own right. (Understood there are other concerns, too.)

▰ This is what this speech-to-text tool I’m trying out inserted when it heard silence:

[ Silence ]

I like the extra two spaces fluffing out the brackets.

▰ My expectations were low, but I still was surprised that entering “nature sounds, ambient drones, shortwave radio” into one of those text-to-music AI prompt engines still yielded five beat-heavy tracks. Just imagine if I’d actually requested percussion.

▰ “nang” — new-to-me slang, with a sonic etymology (and which I first heard thanks to the solid Australian TV show Deadloch), “a Nitrous oxide bulb, derived from the sound distortion that occurs when one is under the influence of the drug” (via urbandictionary.com)

Outside, Outsider

Some doorbells count as, perhaps even aspire to the status of, outsider art.

Disquiet Junto Project 0602: Choice Words

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four 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, July 17, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 13, 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 0602: Choice Words
The Assignment: Make a piece of music that strives to express a specific word.

Step 1: Choose a word — either a favorite word, or one at random from a dictionary, a book your reading, or any such source.

Step 2: Compose a short piece of music that expresses that word as best you can. Perhaps it communicates an underlying concept, or follows the shape of the word when spoken, or utilizes it as an extremely short lyric. Come up with your own approach, which might be determined by the word, rather than imposed on the word.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0602” (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 “disquiet0602” (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-0602-choice-words/

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. Some words speak volumes

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, July 17, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 13, 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 602nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Choice Words (The Assignment: Make a piece of music that strives to express a specific word), at: https://disquiet.com/0602/

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-0602-choice-words/

Online Activity

These are public online locations where I hang out. I tend to take weekends off(line), with the exception of this website. Dwelling: disquiet.com ▰ Frequenting: instagram.com/dsqt ▰ soundcloud.com/disquiet ▰ youtube.com/disquiet ▰ bandcamp.com/disquiet ▰ llllllll.co ▰ Venturing: tiktok.com/@disquiet.com ▰ Assessing: post.lurk.org/@disquiet (Mastodon) ▰ disquiet.bsky.social (Bluesky) ▰ t2.social/disquiet ▰ threads.net/@dsqt. ▰ I’m also on a bunch of Discords and Slacks, and I have accounts on a variety of public BBSs, most of which run on Discourse (such as llllllll.co, mentioned above). These days it’s more common than not for a service to have a login, even a message board, so if I’ve left any out, it’s because either they’re not places I spend a ton of active time, or I have forgotten I’m logged in in the first place.

Habit: YouTube

I’ve been thinking through why YouTube is such a prominent part of my daily media consumption. I hesitate to put it that way, because the term “media consumption” puts media in the realm of food, which can include fast food, and is really (just) a biological imperative. That is, you have to eat, and it almost doesn’t matter what. I’d put most of my YouTube time in a more civilized category, much more on the order of my reading diet. (And yes, I’m aware that with the word “diet,” the consumption metaphor persists. Metaphors will do that.) It wasn’t that long ago that I didn’t even watch YouTube very much. At some point, I recognized it wasn’t a bland let alone neutral medium; despite some vile corridors, it can be a usefully temperate one. I started exploring, and more and more I found myself drawn back to material — both “native” and “archival,” both born on YouTube and housed there after the fact — I couldn’t find elsewhere.

As I think through how I spend my time on YouTube, this is what comes to mind:

Live music performances (concerts, home studio sets)Music technique, music gear overviews, and tutorials (music, coding)Essays (music-related and not)Rare recordings not on general music streaming services (e.g., Spotify, Apple Music)Videos of people wandering neighborhoods*Musician/author/filmmaker/etc. interviews**Movie/TV/game/etc. trailers

That list is in declining order of frequency. (I also sometimes post to YouTube, but that’s not what this consideration is about.)

*I’m working on some long-form writing about field recordings (more correctly, perhaps: sonic environments), and coverage of these is part of it. Also, I am long a fan of the multi-monitor work mode, and sometimes I just have one of these running on a side screen as visual background noise. (Not unrelated: the tiny office I rent doesn’t have a window.)

**I particularly recommend the Amoeba Records series What’s in My Bag? and the Criterion Channel closet series.

Readymade Installation Art

You could say this is litter. Or you could say it’s like Dan Flavin teamed up with Andy Goldsworthy.