One nice thing about having moved to Buttondown for these Disquiet Junto project emails (from TinyLetter, which was shut down just over a month ago by its parent company, Mailchimp) is that I can send more emails than I used to be able to.
Previously, sending one email each week kept the list just under the maximum that the account was capable of. I promise to not start sending out emails willy-nilly. It’s just nice to have the freedom to communicate a bit off-cycle, solely to the extent that it serves the projects and the Junto community.
All of which is a lead up to a simple request: please make sure, if you did tracks for project 0638, that they are downloadable (whether you posted to SoundCloud or to YouTube). This was stated in the 0638 instructions. I mention this here because project 0639 will build on project 0638. This recent sequence was initially planned to be a three-part project, but with the option to extend it further if it went well. Suffice to say, the past three projects went very well, indeed.
The official project instructions for 0639 will go out in about 11.5 hours, shortly after midnight California time tomorrow.
I’m excited to have a short piece on Groundhog Day, one of my favorite movies (and, perhaps just as key, one of my favorite stories), in this series alongside some friends and writers I admire. It’ll be rolling out on hilobrow.com over the next few months.
An advance listen to the pianist's upcoming album, Moves in the Field
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This first appeared in the March 21, 2024, issue of the This Week in Sound email newsletter, also the newsletter’s 22nd Listening Post.
Just over a year into the pandemic, Kelly Moran marked most electronic music fans’ favorite annual holiday, April 14, in honor of the Aphex Twin song “Avril 14th,” with the requisite solo piano cover. She recorded her video with a camera that she set to look directly down on her keyboard, and at first all we see is the piano — even after the music starts playing. Magically, the keys move without anyone touching them, and then her hands — slender, sensual, nails gleaming colorfully — appear alongside the ghost accompaniment and flesh out her own version of the song.
It turns out that she was performing on a Disklavier, on loan from Yamaha, the same instrument on which Aphex Twin reportedly recorded the original version. “Avril 14th” appeared on his 2001 album, Drukqs; Moran’s cover marked the 20th anniversary.
More time has passed. In the years since that simple (if deceptively so) Aphex Twin experiment of hers, Moran has come to wield the Disklavier not just expertly but ferociously. She has pushed its feature set further. The instrument allows her to record parts and play along with them, and record that and play along with that. Her deep pandemic studies have yielded impossible, post-human music that is truly hyperactive, with chords that no human could accomplish on their lonesome in cadences no human could play for a prolonged period. The works are crystalline paradoxes at warp speed. It’s absolutely perfect that “Butterfly Phase,” the lead video for her forthcoming record, Moves in the Field (due out March 29), involves figure skating, because aesthetically that’s what Moran’s current music is: calisthenic, showy, muscular, and deeply competitive. (Regarding that last point, the title comes from the term in skating for the tests of a competitor’s abilities.)
Both “Butterfly Phase” and another track, “Sodalis (II),” are available as previews in advance of the full album’s release:
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.
▰ Having a newsletter about a specific topic is a virtuous circle. I process material that interests me in a way I wouldn’t otherwise. In turn the audience drawn to that material sends me additional items I might not have otherwise known about. Then I share some of those as well. Round and round.
Several times this week people sent me:
sentences from novels I’ve never read
references to scientific journals I didn’t know existed
summaries of podcasts I’ve not listened to
anecdotes from their own lives
Now I have another issue of the newsletter to prepare.
▰ When you share an album for review consideration, here is a mind-blowing and underutilized concept: put your bio and liner notes inside the ZIP archive along with the music and the album cover.
▰ Acting on my urge to say: social media is fine but if you’ve got a focus for your interests, do yourself a favor and start a blog, even if all you do is collect your social media posts there and sometimes expand on one or another of ’em. Blogs are like ecological sentinels, the bees of the internet.
▰ “If you would like to hold without music, please press star.”
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▰ This is pretty great. Nonesuch has nicked the Criterion Closet idea, and on top of showing the musicians pull their favorites, it also has playlists with examples of the audio. Nicely done. Four so far: pianist Tigran Hamasyan, multi-instrumentalist/singer Vagabon, pianist Timo Andres, and guitarist Mary Halvorson.
▰ Folks popping up in the Google Drive spreadsheet for the current, three-part sequence of Disquiet Junto projects, looking for tracks to turn from solos into duets, which may later become trios
▰ I love New Scientist’s take on the advice column
▰ For the moment I’m going to assume that the seeming increase in quantity of music releases (gauged by my overstuffed email inbox) and the rise of generative AI tools is a coincidence (or even me seeing patterns that aren’t there), but the parallel is striking
▰ Happy to report I was considerably less brain-dead when it came to 7th chords in guitar class this week. Bonus for the moment when my teacher played a sequence of notes and I, instinctively, played it back — Close Encounters of the Third Kind style — as a form of communicating my semi-sentience.
▰ Finding myself following the twisting paths of cables in modular synth videos to confirm they’re real and not, like the gloopy fingers common to AI-generated imagery, a tell of hallucinogenic forgery
▰ No Metadata, No Music — take it from this former Tower Records employee
