Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Scratch Pad: Eno, Fog, Obsidian

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ I love when a spam call comes through all glitchy and hard to understand, opening with a phrase along the lines of “This is an urgent message from …,” and it’s briefly like a Skynet warning from the future. Until, you know, it’s just spam about some fake loan.

▰ Among my memories of my grandfather is being left, on visits, to rummage through his desk, which always had many coins, many pairs of glasses, and pencils with erasers so old they’d become useless. I now have a desk full of many coins and pairs of glasses. In lieu of old pencils I have dead gadgets.

▰ Day 365 of Duolingo German. Not sure I’m gonna stick with it, but sticking with it for a year was interesting. We’ll see.

▰ Just been thinking about Steve Albini since the news broke. He was many things, but I realize that I think of him first and foremost as a guitarist.

▰ I get a little (a little) better at guitar when I practice guitar regularly, but I don’t get any better at installing firmware when I install firmware regularly, though I suppose my instruments get better.

▰ If you have trouble keeping a journal, I’d suggest starting a file called “tweets-not-sent.txt” and just put much of your negative thinking there rather than online

▰ More power to you keepers of handwritten journals. I’ve typed for too much of my life, starting with my fascination with my parents’ electric typewriter back in the days before my TRS-80. I’ve tried a handwritten synthesizer journal but I keep going back to markdown files with embedded images.

▰ No idea why I waited so long to really regularly use images in my Obsidian markdown notes, but in any case once you do it’s pretty great. The main thing I need to sort out now is a process for managing the images. Do I use one separate folder, or several, or project-specific, or monthly? I dunno.

▰ There’s a new (2024) Buddha Machine, and the creators, Christiaan Virant and 张荐 (Zhang Jian), who collaborate under the name FM3, put the loops up for free (aka “name your price”)

https://buddhamachine.bandcamp.com/album/buddha-machine-se

▰ OK, let’s see if I can get this podcast rolling again

▰ Obsidian (URL: obsidian.md) is, like, amazing, right? So useful. So efficient.

▰ Of course the fog horns piped up Thursday night: Friday, May 10, marks the birthday of the late Ingram Marshall.

▰ In case there was any doubt, the fog horns are still clearly functioning in the San Francisco Bay

▰ Steps:

make music

buy cables

search “cable management”

make music

buy cables

search “cable management”

[repeat]

▰ Who better to follow Brian Eno, godfather of ambient music, than Sleeping Beauty?

End of Week Notes

Four quick items

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

1: I’m going to see the Brian Eno documentary, Eno, this evening at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre here in San Francisco. As I’ve joked since the movie was announced, I feel like Dieter Rams should have composed the score, since Eno scored the Rams documentary by the same director, Gary Hustwit. Since every showing of Eno is a little different, due to the projection process Hustwit employs, I do plan to see it a second time, but at $40 a pop, I’m going to wait.

2: I’ve been trying to do one audio thing a day, just getting back in the swing of things after spending a way larger percentage of my modest music-making time on guitar practice. This week that included:

  • reorganizing one of my main modular synthesizer racks
  • getting my recently obtained Expert Sleepers ES-9 module hooked up with my laptop and iPad
  • sending audio from the iPad to the synth with the ES-9 (in this case, running it through the excellent reverb module Bunker Archaeology)
  • using some Jacklights to identify activity on some modules so technical their functions have eluded me thus far
  • reminding myself how to use my H4N as an audio interface, and learning by chance that this can be done without batteries (the USB transfers sufficient power to it)
  • I’m trying to get into the habit of ABR (“always be recording) but I’m not quite there yet.

3: I’m plotting the return of my Disquietude podcast. I sent requests out to artists whose music I want to feature, and I quickly (within an hour or so) heard back from most of them. I only feature music by artists who have themselves approved its inclusion, or whose record label or management provided approval.

4: If you haven’t seen the new Paul Simon documentary, In Restless Dreams, I recommend it so far — by “so far” meaning I’m about halfway through the first two episodes. It mostly takes place in the present (and yes, he is quite old, and yes, he seems to be becoming Mel Brooks — and yes, he can still play and sing, boy can he), as a summary of his recent album, Seven Psalms, but also threads a simple chronology of his life. The director is Alex Gibney (The Inventor, Going Clear, We Steal Secrets, Taxi to the Dark Side). There are some exceptional moments, like a hand-drawn grid of the relative chart movements of the top 20 singles made by Art Garfunkel when he was a teenager, a moment when Simon (off screen) tells us he is crying (“weeping”) after summoning up a simple memory, and an instance when Simon recounts going deaf in one ear in October 2023 and at that moment in the film the audio gets muddy in a way that brings the audience into a semblance of his experience. The effect isn’t subtle, but it’s still quite well done. The Garfunkel chart, by the way, is straight outta the “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” section of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (and the related material in The Candy House).

Disquiet Junto Project 0645: Speed Trap

The Assignment: Record something, slow it down, and then record over it.

/ 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 appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com). 

Disquiet Junto Project 0645: Speed Trap
The Assignment: Record something, slow it down, and then record over it.

As always, it helps to read the instructions in full before proceeding, and considering the steps as a whole.

Step 1: Record something to serve as roughly half of a complete track.

Step 2: Slow the result of Step 1 to half its original speed.

Step 3: Record something in addition to the result of Step 2 to complete the track.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0645” (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-0645-speed-trap/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, May 13, 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 645th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Speed Trap — The Assignment: Record something, slow it down, and then record over it — at https://disquiet.com/0645/

Chris Hanlon’s Attenuated Rhythm

A modest percussion technique

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A glistening scintillate largely constitutes the ethereal substance of Chris Hanlon’s “Long While,” which joins a growing amount of recording these days that blurs the line between ambient music and ambient sound. The melty bits of warped tape here, simulated or otherwise, further that instinct by lending a nostalgic quality. But what really makes the piece, what distinguishes it, is a sequence of occasional muffled thuds, something like footsteps, or a cane on a carpeted floor, or even distant bombs going off. These are almost — almost, but not quite — far enough apart to not count as rhythmic, but there is a pace to them, and that’s the point: just enough time for each pair of thuds to frame what comes between, and to make you wait for the next. The element is a welcome addition. Hanlon is based in Belfast, Ireland.

Heavy Metal

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

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A glimpse of the rear of a synth PCB before the module goes back into the slightly rearranged case. This one looks like the map of a city metro line. Oddly, the name of the module, the Bizmuth, was a word in the New York Times Strands puzzle today, May 7, 2024.