Author: Marc Weidenbaum

On Repeat: Clarinet, Stasis, Crimson

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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

▰ Just Duet: The musician Linus Fung, born in Hong Kong, has been doing some fantastic work folding his clarinet playing into a modular synthesizer format, essentially dueting with himself and transforming his melodic approach live. Here he is heard — and seen, bird’s eye view — building on the Canonic Duets of composer Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767).

▰ ’Tis the Season: Glacial stasis these days doesn’t necessarily come too easily. I’m not certain I would put it that way. But with so many available tools to achieve it, listeners can benefit from recordings that explore now common granular lushness as an element or a context rather than an end unto itself. Case in point, the way metallic slurry and vibrant shifts in tonality push beyond standard harmonic haze on autumnal_city_01 by autumnal_city.

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▰ Back in Court: Half of the classic early-1980s lineup of King Crimson is currently touring music from that trio of great albums: Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair. I’ve been spending a lot of time tracking fan uploads of video from the various concerts, and a highlight is this rendition of “The Sheltering Sky,” with original guitarist Adrian Belew and bassist (and Chapman Stick player) Tony Levin, plus Steve Vai riffing on Robert Fripp’s work, and Danny Carey (of Tool) playing — literally, I believe — Bill Bruford’s drums. The quartet goes simply by the name Beat.

Scratch Pad: Hyperviolent, MP3s, Morgantown

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.

▰ The cashier turns up the music at the restaurant and my first thought is: this is usually when a movie’s wordless, hyperviolent scene kicks in

▰ There’s a misleading rhetorical meme that floats around about how you don’t remember your first MP3. Whenever I rip an old CD to my hard drive, I clearly remember the first time I witnessed someone burn a CD (a mixtape they were making for a friend). I remember the first audio file I force-downloaded. I remember the first track I ripped (and then layered on top of itself).

▰ My main experience of that Richard Powers profile in The New Yorker is I want him to publish a vegan cookbook

▰ Me: Yow, it’s getting dark early.

Me a moment later: Oh, the shades are drawn.

▰ Finally made it to the new location of Kayo Books in the Tenderloin today. Fantastic selection, as had been the case at their previous spot. I picked up this 1953 paperback treat.

▰ End of day:

▰ After a spell focused on the Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers,” guitar class has moved on to Joni Mitchell’s “Morning Morgantown.” I’m probably, at best, the second worst guitarist on the full length of my street (not block, street), but I’m having fun and learning a lot. “Buy your dreams, a dollar down.”

A Subsumed Cacophony

Standing on a city corner on a Thursday afternoon

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A city is often a cacophonous space. Of course, cacophony comes in many forms. The roar of the ocean can feel cacophonous, as can the intensity of surrounding bug life in the wild. The cacophony of the city is unique from those other forms because the noise comes not from manifest dense uniformity but from myriad distinct, often unidentifiable sources acting as if at once. All this was running through my mind as I stood on a corner in San Francisco listening as hotel workers were engaged in a lively strike halfway down the block. The noise of their activity joined with that of passing foot and automobile traffic to create something that was at once noisier than a normal Thursday afternoon, and yet also that perpetuated the city’s ability to absorb all sounds into one sound. No matter the sounds, it was the sound of the city.

(The image is a reworking of a public domain photo via Wikipedia of a 1956 strike.)

Mess[iae]n

Name fugue

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Going to a concert tonight. Imagined this t-shirt. And apologies to Loraine James, who’s done something along these lines for her own name.

Disquiet Junto Project 0665: Clicks + Cuts Music Factory

The Assignment: Record a track in honor of the late Achim Szepanski.

/ 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.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0665: Clicks + Cuts Music Factory
The Assignment: Record a track in honor of the late Achim Szepanski.

Background: Achim Szepanski (1957-2024), founder of the Mille Plateaux record label, among numerous other accomplishments, died this week. This project is in his honor. You needn’t know much if anything to begin this project; just follow the instructions. As always, discussion of the topic at hand in the project’s llllllll.co message thread is encouraged.

Step 1: Listen back to the first Clicks + Cuts compilation album (originally released in 2000). It is streaming on YouTube (the first hour or so of that playlist).

Step 2: Consider the common elements in various tracks: the glitch effects, the sense of space, the attention to tiny details, the industrial minimalism, the emphasis on sampling, the tempo, the groove. What else do you hear?

Step 3: Record a track in the spirit of that first Clicks + Cuts album.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0665” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0665-clicks-cuts-music-factory/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, September 30, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

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 665th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Clicks + Cuts Music Factory — The Assignment: Record a track in honor of the late Achim Szepanski — at https://disquiet.com/0665/

The image associated with this project was created by Lubomir Panak in 2011. Originally posted on Flickr, it is used thanks to a CC BY-NC 2.0 license. This is a detail of the original image, and it has been tilted at an angle, with the project information superimposed.