Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Tony Passarell’s Hang Time

New music from one of Sacramento's greats

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=1308921412 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

Tony Passarell gathers a quartet on the album when that isn’t his usual jazz outing. It’s pure outing, as in outward bound — and like much outward bound music, inward as well. The record’s title suggests both a manner of being and a rhetorical question. The music is peaceful, languid, and somehow also unnerving. It has the vibe of snippets left behind by the late legendary producer Teo Macero after a long overnight fusion session: pure mood, pure tone. Building blocks to be admired and experienced rather than employed as mere elements of construction. Chords hang in the air, as does time itself. The group features Passarell on keyboards and percussion, instead of his usual horns, along with Kim Nguyen (flute, voice), Robert Kuhlman (guitar, effects), and Tim Onorato (bass, effects). A times, as with the ceremonial crashing cymbals at the start of “shins to orion,” there is a consciously vexatious quality, but in general the music here is more harmonic than rhythmic, more static than active. From the slow vamp of “galaxy blues,” to the meandering flute line of “whats that up there,” to the feedback-edge guitar on “resolve,” the album is track after track of slow exploration, and a testament to the group’s mutual attentiveness. Get when on Bandcamp.

RIP, Achim Szepanski (1957-2024)

Clicks + Cuts 4 ever

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The record label Mille Plateaux meant the world to me back in the mid-1990s, and it still does. Albums from Oval, Cristian Vogel, Microstoria, Snd, Thomas Köner, and Porter Ricks, just to name a few acts, and later the essential Clicks + Cuts compilation series (the first one, which came out in 2000, had 25 tracks, from the likes of Vladislav Delay, Frank Bretschneider, Alva Noto, Pansonic, Curd Duca, Jake Mandell, Kit Clayton, and Kid 606, among others) were central and defining to my listening, especially in regard to glitch and ambient techno. The label’s founder, Achim Szepanski, died this week at age 67. I interviewed him once, in 1996, back when I was an editor at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazines, for an overview of electronic music labels, when the sheer number of them was exploding, often creating myriad sublabels in the process. “Our label gives the artists the possibility to control the production from the beginning to the end,” Szepanski told me at the time. Read the full piece here.

Flying That Flagg!

And there's so much I didn't have room to mention

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I wrote another piece for the great hilobrow.com website, and it’s about Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!

I’m one of 25 authors writing about “science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema).” Other participants include Deb Chachra on The Hyperion Cantos, Adam McGovern on Kid Eternity, Jessamyn West on the Mars Trilogy, and Peggy Nelson on Virtual Light. I initially wrote a draft of something about Challengers of the Unknown (specifically the first team-up of writer Jeph Loeb and the late artist Tim Sale), but then I decided it wasn’t science fiction enough a topic. Here’s how my piece on American Flagg! begins:

It’s 2031. America is a fractured nation ruled by behemoth corporations, terrorized by militarized cults, and hypnotized by messages piped subliminally into always-on televisuals. The planet is scarred by climate change. The government is an absentee landlord, having retreated to Mars. Only one man can save the day: a former TV star named Reuben Flagg. Rendered professionally redundant by CGI actors, Flagg instead fights crime when he’s not shacking up with one femme fatale after another (or maybe the other way around). He’s been conscripted by a private police force called the Plexus Rangers, the military wing of the sort of mega-corporation that doubles as atmospheric bogeyman in dystopian fiction. This is the world of the comic book American Flagg! (indeed, the exclamation point is part of the title).

Actually, it’s 2024 as I type this, and… well, things are somewhat familiar …

Read the full article at hilobrow.com. I have another piece there (on what I’ll describe, for now, as a movie from 1978) due out by the end of the year, and another one after that already in the works (on what I’ll describe, for now, as a TV series that debuted in 1991).

Scratch Pad: Fog, Auth, THX

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 funny thing about the marine layer is how you hear foghorns on sunny days, because the bay is filled with fog while the city skies are clear. Funnier still — odder still — are the days when it’s incredibly foggy out, and yet you hear no foghorns.

▰ The thrill of entering an auth-code while the number is red

▰ Morning trio for dishwasher, shower, and [some sort of sidewalk repair being done by the city involving trees and concrete].

▰ In the center lane of a three-lane street, with a school bus to the left and a city bus to the right, the car’s windows down, and it felt less like real life and more like I was in a THX audio demo

▰ The Disquiet Junto is two weeks from the 666th consecutive weekly project. You might say it’s an omen.

▰ End of day, end of week: