Author: Marc Weidenbaum

A WFMU Tribute to Steve Roden

With Daniel Blumin, Stephen Vitiello, and Michael Raphael

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

WFMU ran a tribute to the late Steve Roden on October 14, 2024. Roden died in September 2023, and for this show, its host, Daniel Blumin, played tracks selected with Stephen Vitiello and Michael Raphael, and he interviewed them, and the show also includes interview segments featuring Roden himself. I was excited to see here the recording “Sandy,” which Roden and Vitiello collaborated on for the 44th Disquiet Junto project, way back in November 2012, following Hurricane Sandy’s assault on the East Coast. The project, and this track, utilized field recordings made by Raphael. The WFMU show opens with a recording of Roden singing as a child, and includes numerous pieces of his own work, plus 7” records from his personal collection. Roden was an instigator of what came to be called “lowercase” sound, music that emphasizes small noises and quiet gestures. He was also a visual artist, and a collector, and a wonderful human being, whom I got to spend time with over the years. This broadcast is a great introduction to Roden and his music and the way he thought about and worked with sound.

Check out the archived WFMU show at wfmu.org. More on the Disquiet Junto project that led to the track “Sandy” here at disquiet.com. Far as I can tell, the first mention of Roden on my site was back on October 29, 2000, a year and a couple weeks shy of a quarter century ago.

Refresher Course Set 6: Reviews, Best of 1999

A methodical pass through the Disquiet.com archives

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I continue my light edit pass through the 7,500+ posts that have accumulated on this website since I founded it at the end of December 1996. This set of 20 posts — I’m working through them chronologically — are mostly album reviews, including several favorites from this period of time (1999-2000): Breakbeat Era’s debut, Gavin Bryars’ Cadman Requiem, Jake Mandell’s Parallel Processes, Bernhard Günter’s Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue (For Mark Rothko), the great Raster-Noton 20′ – 2000 series (which I mentioned here in standalone not once but twice), Mouse on Mars’ Niun Niggung, μ -Ziq’s Royal Astronomy, plus Spring Heel Jack, Nobukazu Takemura, Matmos, Twine, Steven (J.) Kane, Beastie Boys, DJ Spooky, DJ Krush, and Eulb, and the compilation Brassic Beats USA from the label Skint.

And a software mention that really takes me back, PCDJ (it’s still around: pcdj.com!), which I used to use to play MP3s on top of each other. Doubling up Philip Glass recordings was a fetish of mine around the turn of the millennium.

And my 10 favorite records of 1999, which included Underworld’s Beaucoup Fish, DJ Krush’s Kakusei (which was, along with Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, a CD I always had with me when I traveled), and the Mille Plateaux label compilation Modulation & Transformation 4. There’s a tag (#years-best) that brings up my top 10s from over the several past decades.


Scratch Pad: Apostrophe, Allergy, Angel,

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media 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.

▰ Truly odd. What seemed to be a car alarm on loop turned out to be from a bus stop. It had gone off accidentally. A call to 311 (San Francisco) led to a call to the police (non-emergency). The noise was sorted out quickly. Unlike (most) car alarms, this didn’t stop after a minute or so. Kept looping.

▰ The absence of an apostrophe in the title to this great 1997 David Holmes album always bugged me, but the apparent after-the-fact introduction of an apostrophe bugs me even more

▰ Love when my microphone during a call thinks my allergy-induced coughing is me trying to talk and alerts me to turn on my microphone

▰ This new Jeff Parker album is a reminder that when it comes to my favorite music, the whole is often seemingly less than the sum of its parts

▰ Insane heat. A few days of chill. Then the Blue Angels show up.

▰ The Blue Angles are back for more World War III pre-enactment, canine incitement, and remote-triggering of car alarms

Refresher Course Set 5: Autechre, Photek, Coldcut

A methodical pass through the Disquiet.com archives

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the fifth set in the Refresher Course series. I’ve begun going back through the archives of this website from the very beginning, about 7,500 posts ago. The first four sets consisted of 10 posts each. Posting every day seemed a bit much for the site’s readers, so I decided for the fifth set I’d wait until I had read back through 30 posts. However, I now think 30 posts is a little much in its own right, so I may try 20 next time. Anyhow, this latest tranche includes:

Reviews of Oval and Christophe Charles album Dok, an Up, Bustle and Out record, the compilation Blip, Bleep (Soundtracks to Imaginary Video Games), Underworld’s Beaucoup Fish, Funki Porcini’s The Ultimately Empty Million Pounds, a Hollowman project, Chessie’s Signal Series, Michael Nyman’s The Piano score, Orbital’s The Middle of Nowhere, Borden Raczynski’s Boku Mo Wakaran, Bill Laswell’s Panthalassa — The Remixes, and Moby’s Play, which I gave a particularly negative take on, but over the years I came to really enjoy the album. Also, my favorite releases of 1997 and 1998.

A ton of interviews: Autechre’s Sean Booth (1997), Coldcut’s Matt Black (1887), DJ Food talking about a David Byrne remix (1997), Amon Tobin not once but twice (1997, 1998), Photek (1998), Rob Zombie of White Zombie (1999) talking about sampling and personal memory, Dub Assassin (1999), Moby (1999), Bogdan Raczynski (1999) in an email interview (unusual at the time), and an essay with four different interview subjects about jazz and electronica (Beth Custer, Jack Dangers, Nils Petter Molvaer, and Ben Neill). That last one was only just recently added to this site, and such are the time-warping complexities of datelines.

And a grab bag of other items: a riff on the use of “NP” (for “now playing”), and apparently I thought emoticons were over; the music-slowing software Slow Gold II; how to listen to pi (the number); an essay in the mock-style of the For Dummies series, so sort of a joke, except the recommendations are real; and what I think is the earliest “sounds of brands” piece on this site, a mention of music in VW ads.