February 2021 – Disquiet

Disquietude Podcast Episode 0004

Ambient music by Belly Full of Stars, Christian Carrière, Femi Shonuga-Fleming, Jeff Rona, Jostijn Ligtvoet, and Patricia Wolf, plus interviews and commentary

February 28, 2021March 1, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the fourth episode of the Disquietude podcast of ambient electronic music.

The goal of the Disquietude podcast is to collect adventurous work in the field of ambient electronic music. What follows is all music that captured my imagination, and I hope that it appeals to your imagination as well.

All six tracks of music are featured with the permission of the individual artists. Below is the structure of the episode with time codes for the tracks, the spoken annotation of the tracks, interviews with two of the musicians (Jeff Rona and Patricia Wolf), and a brief essay about voice assistants.

02:07 Belly Full of Stars’ “Pattern 5”

06:20 Christian Carrière’s “Sacred Acoustics T004”

08:02 Femi Shonuga-Fleming’s “Ambient Live Looping Drone with Eurorack and Elektron Octatrack”

15:50 Jeff Rona’s “Vapor 6”

23:37 Jostijn Ligtvoet’s “Twilight and Fire”

32:02 Patricia Wolf’s “Snow Falling on Rough Horsetail and Dead Oak Leaves”

33:28 Annotation Begins

35:25 Patricia Wolf Interview

43:23 Jeff Rona Interview

46:11 “OK, Giggle”

48:11 Credits

49:10 Closing Music

49:36 End

All the music here happens to be by solo musicians. These consist of Belly Full of Stars (aka Kim Rueger), of Nashville, Tennessee; Christian Carrière, based in Montréal, Québec; Femi Shonuga-Fleming, a RISD student based in New York; Jeff Rona, a favorite film composer of mine, who is based in Los Angeles; Jostijn Ligtvoet, a cellist based in the Netherlands; and Patricia Wolf, who provided a wintry field recording from near where she lives in Portland, Oregon.

All the music heard here is instrumental, which is to say there is no prominent vocal part – or at least there’s no intelligible vocal part – and thus it’s suitable for background listening. It’s all ambient, which is to say it’s also suitable for close, concentrated listening. That dual sense of potential uses, both inattentive and attentive, both background and foreground, is the hallmark of fine ambient music.

Belly Full of Stars’ “Pattern 5” is off the album Aura: triplicaterecords.bandcamp.com.

Christian Carrière’s “Sacred Acoustics T004” first appeared on his SoundCloud account, soundcloud.com/christiancarriere/.

Femi Shonuga-Fleming’s “Ambient Live Looping Drone with Eurorack and Elektron Octatrack” first appeared on YouTube.

Jeff Rona’s “Vapor 6” is from his forthcoming album, Vapor, due out March 5, 2021.

Jostijn Ligtvoet’s “Twilight and Fire” first appeared, at roughly twice the length heard here, on YouTube.

Patricia Wolf’s “Snow Falling on Rough Horsetail and Dead Oak Leaves” first appeared on her SoundCloud account, soundcloud.com/patriciawolf_music

Thanks for listening.

Produced and hosted by Marc Weidenbaum. Disquietude theme music by Jimmy Kipple, with vocal by Paula Daunt. Logo by Boon Design.

twitter.com/disquiet: Mars, Chernobyl, Nothing

From the past week

February 27, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each week, collating the tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet (which I think of as my public notebook) that I want to keep track of. For the most part, this means ones I initiated, not ones in which I directly responded to someone. I sometimes tweak them a bit here. Some tweets pop up on Disquiet.com sooner than I get around to collating them, so I leave them out of the weekly round-up. It’s usually personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud, especially these days, when a week can feel both like a year and like nothing whatsoever has happened or changed.

▰ Most excited I’ve ever been in my life to hear a fluid pump

▰ Judging by the moon’s brightness tonight, it has heard the news about Mars and it’s determined to remind us it exists.

▰ It’s not a “todo list.” It’s a “you’ll log.”

Bwa ha ha ha.

Yeah, a bit stir crazy today.

▰ RIP, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021). Impossible for me to encapsulate what he and City Lights have meant to this city, and around the world.

▰ Just happened to see my automated Tuesday tweet right at noon (the one mentioning that the Outdoor Public Warning System siren is on hiatus for repair), and experienced the strangely intense absence of sound that is Tuesday at noon right now in San Francisco, if you’d long since become accustomed to the Tuesday noon siren. It is like a vacuum, a vertiginous void.

▰ Not gonna bother to try to screenshot it, given Netflix’s arduous restrictions. I’ll just note it’s delightful when Benedetta Vitali comments in Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat that listening to the dough-rolling process is an essential and pleasure-rich phase of pasta-making.

▰ On the one hand, I am a functioning adult.

On the other hand, I more than occasionally type things such as “thonk plinky” into my browser’s search engine.

(Don’t worry, it’s fully SFW.)

▰ When I first saw this, it made me think of those sad tadpoles that had the misfortune of growing up near Chernobyl. Now I’m wondering about balanced tadpoles versus unbalanced tadpoles, and the impact of radiation on granular synthesis.

▰ 7:41am sounds: buzz of modest traffic a few blocks away; muffled hum of person talking on phone across the street; thud-infused whir of car passing house; and the house, as it warms, producing crackles, like nothing so much as a piece of paper gently being crumpled

▰ If there’s a badge for falling asleep while practicing guitar and then waking up a split second or two later fairly certain that you continued to play while asleep then I unlocked that badge last night.

▰ 1968 Apple Records
1976 Apple Computers
2001 Apple iPod

1992 Nothing Records
2020 Nothing (.tech)
202? Nothing Something

▰ The cover image of this week’s Disquiet Junto project, 0478, is by the late Jeffrey Melton, a very early participant in the Disquiet Junto whose photos remain on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

▰ – – – mental palate-cleansing tweet – – –

▰ And on that note, have a great weekend. I just may be able to get a new episode of the Disquietude podcast out. We shall see. The tracks are more or less set, and I even may include audio from one or more of the musicians talking about their work. Baby steps.

Livestream Reviewstream

On Twitter of Lesley Flanigan at Roulette

February 26, 2021February 27, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

I live-tweeted this livestream this evening. Here it is, lightly edited:

Lesley Flanigan is performing live (at 8pm East Coast, 5pm here in “we make the future but we live in the past” San Francisco).

I highly recommend tuning in. She’s looping her vocals, creating beading layers of choral intensity.

There are also sine wave generators in the mix.

I noticed she’d donned headphones at the start, despite the space, Roulette, being devoid of a live audience.

Explanation from the video note: “Though Flanigan will be performing live at Roulette for this event, there will be no sound amplified within the performance space. Why should there be? There is no audience to hear it.”

Also: “Playing with the closeness, directness and stereo image of the headphone space, Flanigan brings the intimacy of performing alone with her headphones to the solo listener at home.” (A livestream that is cognizant of its livestreamness.)

I love drones. All the more, I love music that takes drone as the foundation, and grows from there. That’s what Flanigan is up to here, singing atop and amid the hovering clouds she has patiently summoned.

The beading has hardened, has been focused into something pulse-like now, the minimalist of minimal techno, underlying some ancient folk hymn.

This may not be the exact model of audio generator she is employing, but it’s close. She’s using two of them, and adjusting during the performance.

I always say Twitter is my public notepad. This may be the most true that statement has been. Aside from Google image search, these are the sorta notes I’d be taking in a notepad if we were all sitting in the audience. And you might complain about the scratch of my pen on paper.

And now the glitch is on.

And now the glitch is off, supplanted by a hybrid of classic minimalism and early polyphony.

Presumably, roughly 40 minutes in, it’s coming to a close now, though perhaps not. The density has softened considerably, reduced virtually to a hum, maybe just one vocal line and one oscillator now.

This is so beautiful, both rapturous and restrained, deliriously so in both cases.

These aren’t exactly the notes I’d be writing down in a live auditorium, because they’re in full sentences and have fewer spelling errors, and are entirely legible. But this is an interesting experience, using my public notepad as a public notepad during the performance.

I’ve reviewed several livestreams during the pandemic. I just submitted a review for publication in The Wire this week. This, though, is the first reviewstream I’ve written.

Speaking of spelling errors, here’s a circuit diagram of a progenitor of the brand of audio generator, a solid state oscillator, that Lesley Flanigan employed a pair of during the concert.

And here’s one more shot from the ancient manual, this one of the “waveshapes” produced by the audio generator, of the sort Flanigan used in the show.

And that’s it. The concert has ended. And thanks to the magic of livestreams, I can immediately go do some dishes without having to bother with public transportation.

Disquiet Junto Project 0478: Collage of Collages

The Assignment: Make a collage that will become part of a larger collage.

February 25, 2021February 27, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 1, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 25, 2021.

Tracks will be added to the playlist for the duration of the project.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0478: Collage of Collages
The Assignment: Make a collage that will become part of a larger collage.

Step 1: Create a “musical collage,” however you might define it, likely using the equivalent of cut and paste. When doing so, consider the sense in which your collage might itself become part of a subsequent collage.

Step 2: If you’d like your piece excerpted for a broadcast on the Austrian community radio show Kopfkino (translated: “cinema in the head,” and also available as a podcast) by Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka, make sure your track is set for download when you post it.

Background: Margarethe has offered to produce an online segment in collaboration with the Disquiet Junto. The theme of the Kopfkino episode will be “collage.” The episode will itself be a collage of tracks produced in this week’s Junto project.

More on Kopfkino at: https://cba.fro.at/series/kopfkino

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0478” (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 “disquiet0478” (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 tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0478-collage-of-collages/

Step 5: Annotate your tracks 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.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 1, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 25, 2021.

Length: The length is up to you. (With collages, relative density is arguably as important as length.)

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0478” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

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 478th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Collage of Collages (The Assignment: Make a collage that will become part of a larger collage.) — at:

https://disquiet.com/0478/

The project is a collaboration with the radio show Kopfkino, initiated by Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka. More on Kopfkino at:

https://cba.fro.at/series/kopfkino

A Pair of Sloths

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

February 24, 2021February 27, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Got labels prepped for when the modules arrive. I should mention, those are the actual names of the modules. There’s a third in the trio. It’s called Inertia, the slowest of the three. Collectively they’re called Sloths, for the slow waveforms they emit.