On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ Beautiful live session with lightly glitched and always shimmering piano samples from Andrew Tasselmyer. Watching him at work is always a pleasure.
▰ There is little I enjoy as much as I do music that combines more recognizable musical elements with field recordings and found sound, which is what Natalia Spiner is up to on her quiet new album, Dolmen (on the label Puddle). She’s from Buenos Aires. The label is in Berlin.
▰ Daniel Lanois continues the slow steady drip in advance of the full release of his forthcoming album, Belladonna Nocturne, due out June 19. This time it’s “Warp Sustain,” the title providing a useful description of how the melting grungy guitar evaporates as the track unfolds.
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
Another light week. Been busy.
▰ Slightly distracted during the How to Rob a Bank trailer because I became convinced that the Zoë Kravitz character’s apartment is the same one a different Kravitz character lived in in the Soderbergh movie Kimi. (Different windows, as it turns out.)
▰ The great Michael Jang has my aesthetic number. Which is to say, that’s not my actual number up there, but this fine slice of Clement Street made my week.
▰ I don’t think I’ve had freshly ground matcha before. Very tasty, and the green is hyperreal. Welcome to the neighborhood, Constance Tea.
▰ I’d like the e-ink Boox Go 7 to get popular enough that someone makes a slim keyboard case for it. I upgraded to it from my Kindle Paperwhite. The tablet/reader hybrid works well with Obsidian, and since the last page you look at remains (in most cases, though not all) as the sleep screen, the device has quickly become (as had been my test-case intent/hope) a small project white board (slash to-do list).
▰ I finished reading two manga tankobon (aka paperbacks) this week: Mohiro Kitoh’s Bokurano Ours volume one (2003), which I read some of in the past but never finished, and Time Killers (2000), the standalone collection of one-shots (aka short stories) by Kato Kazue (she’s best known for the long-running, and ongoing, Blue Exorcist).
Having listened at length to — though by no means for the full extent of — the 10 hours of underwater ambience extracted from the video game Subnautica 2, I can state that there is not a lot of variety, at least not of the sonic sort. I also jumped around the timeline, and perhaps like the non-digital ocean itself, the gargantuan gurgling immersive space of it is pretty consistent: low rumble, the vibration of passing bodies, plus odd little sounds, perhaps vocalizations, that pop up. The video does vary its visual setting, tracking presumably the course of the day, though there may be more to the sequence than that, since the shifts between light and dark can be quite stark and sudden. All of which is a reminder that gamer ASMR videos like this are as much video as audio, and it’s the combination that draws many viewers (though I was just the 30th or so here, as this one is quite new) and likes (3 as of this post). Another reminder: popularity in one medium doesn’t immediately translate to another. This video with 37 views, as of this writing, is from a brand new game that sold two million copies within the first half day of its release, the middle of last month.
The Assignment: Write outdoors hold music for a single-lane tunnel entrance delay.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.
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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.
Disquiet Junto Project 0753: 5 Minute Wait The Assignment: Write outdoors hold music for a single-lane tunnel entrance delay.
Perhaps you’ve experienced the pleasures of a single-lane, two-way tunnel yourself. They way they are usually situated is that there is a signal for when you can go through, and for when you can’t. Traffic proceeds in one direction, leaving enough time at the end of the cycle for all vehicles to pass. Then after a pause, the direction changes. At the tunnel where this project’s cover photo was shot, the phase for each direction is five minutes, and at each end there is a warning sign about the wait. The sign reads “5 Minute Red Light.”
Now, imagine you were commissioned to write “outdoors hold music” for the delay experienced by drivers at either end of the tunnel. Consider the circumstances of the delay for automobile drivers and their passengers. Now, record a five-minute piece that fulfills that creative brief.
Bonus if you record the track in a manner that reproduces the sense of it being heard outdoors — and, perhaps better yet, from inside a parked vehicle.
Note: Cover photo shot at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, California.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0753” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 753rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, 5 Minute Wait — The Assignment: Write outdoors hold music for a single-lane tunnel entrance delay — disquiet.com/0753.
It’s pretty common that when I’m talking with someone about the Disquiet Junto, the weekly music community I have moderated since January 2012, the question arises as to where Junto projects come from — how is it that the ideas originate, week after week, some 753 in a row as of this writing. I’ve answered this question various ways over the years, and one key explanation is that the Junto projects rarely if ever originate because I’m trying to come up with an idea. I have a huge backlog of potential projects. Most projects originate instead based on an observation, one that is then turned into a kind of interrogative, flipped from something that is or seems to something that might be. For example, the third Junto took the origin of the Junto itself, as inspired by Benjamin Franklin, and tried to imagine what one of his inventions, the glass harmonica, might sound like today. The 120th project came about because I saw reproductions of the heartbeart of artist Marcel Duchamp and wondered how musicians might interpret it. This week’s project, which launches tomorrow, June 4, came about, as did one a couple of weeks ago involving a snail, because of signs I saw on a day trip to the Marin Headlands. The above photo inspired tomorrow’s project, which explores the concept of “outdoors hold music.” We’ll see what comes of it.
