Author: Marc Weidenbaum

More 30-Second Audio-Visual Field Recordings

Public and private

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’ve been enjoying using the Story mode on Instagram to post brief (30-second) audio-visual field recordings with light annotation. An Instagram Story is simple to produce, meaning (1) the dreaded modern sense of unpaid labor is minimal (as long as you don’t overdo it), and (2) they sync with my phone (without an Instagram logo), so they’re reusable elsewhere (though I tend to repost them without the tags and other text elements). Those are still frames from my most recent two above. The one on the left was recorded during Golden Hour in Berkeley, the first time I attended an event at the Alembic, and the one on the right was shot in the bathroom of a take-out joint in the North Bay: two very different drones, both abrasive, one outdoors, one indoors. They’re part of my “30s” (or “30 seconds”) Highlights series at instagram/dsqt, and the raw videos are on YouTube (golden hour and bathroom). (Collections of Instagram Stories are called Highlights.) Interestingly, if you upload short vertical videos to YouTube, they automatically get filed as Shorts, which is YouTube’s attempt at Instagram Stories.

On Repeat: KMRU, Tasselmyer, Demo, Incense

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

▰ More on this release shortly, likely in the coming week, but I am really enjoying Kenyan musician KMRU’s new album, Dissolution Grip, which somehow does away with his trademark field recordings without losing their influence. The key — or legend, in this case — is the notion of a graphic score. Check out the liner notes for an explaination.

https://kmru.bandcamp.com/album/dissolution-grip

▰ Andrew Tasselmyer (from Baltimore, based in Philadelphia) plays with time in delectable ways. Listen (and watch) as he samples, slices, fractures, and delicately reconfigures piano recordings.

▰ More music technology could use examples, like this one, that you go back to listen to simply because the sounds are so pleasing. This half-hour survey of slowly emerging melodic and rhythmic elements is a demo of a “conceptual sequencer” — called Seqsual — for the iPad. It’s from Helsinki, Finland.

▰ There is atmospheric music, and there is kosmiche (or space) music, and somewhere in between is music that seems to float in the realm of satellites, the ionosphere. This is the realm of Simon James French’s recent album, Meditations: ionospheric music, all euphoric-yet-sedate sonic explorations. Apparently there’s a line of Japanese incense created to complement it. French splits his time between Japan and the U.K.

https://sjfmusic.bandcamp.com/album/meditations

Scratch Pad: Weird Alarm, Audiobook Synchronicity

/ 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. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I take weekends off social media. 

▰ Numerous folks in the neighborhood peeking out their windows ’cause some car has the weirdest alarm going off, just plain peculiar — not just like they made it themselves, but like they didn’t even know what they were doing

▰ There are moments when an audiobook eerily aligns with with your current situation. As I walked home at dusk, I was informed by Alan Furst’s novel Dark Star of the Russian term “besprizorniye,” or “bands of children orphaned by the purge who attacked and robbed solitary walkers”

▰ I leave the amp on for a while after guitar class. My working theory is that the longer its hum lingers in the air, the longer before I forget half of what I’ve just learned.

▰ I certainly don’t want there to be a US government shutdown, but then again, if it meant we’d be spared the airborne noise of Fleet Week …

▰ Nice way to start the day: New York Times Wordle in 2 and Mini in :29. It’s kinda all downhill from here.

▰ Stop Making Sense is truly great. I saw the tour that became the movie (in Forest Hills) and I saw the film when it first came out and several times after, but in many ways that Rome concert on YouTube is the live Talking Heads I find myself going back to regularly and marveling at. And speaking of the Rome concert, we should all be fortunate enough to find someone in our lives who looks at us the way Tina Weymouth looks at Adrian Belew.

▰ Yow, it looks like the entirety of John Zorn’s Tzadik Records label is now on music streaming services. I’m listening to Quatrain, with guitarists Julian Lage and Gyan Riley, right now, after revisiting The Big Gundown. It’s Zorn’s 70th birthday, but listeners get the presents.

▰ Generally speaking Hardly Strictly festival traffic is chiller than Outside Lands festival traffic. It’s still traffic, and still noisy, but it’s a little more chill.

Music That Listens to Itself (Playlist)

An evening of Expanded Listening

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I just got back home from the “Music That Listens to Itself” event that I hosted in Berkeley at the Alembic. Here, quickly, is the evening’s 80-minute playlist (I trimmed one track to get the full set to fit). The first six tracks came from the recent Disquiet Junto project (0611) that engaged with the theme of the evening. More details soon. I had a blast. Major thanks to Erik Davis, Samuel Plattner, and everyone who came. Each of the Junto tracks in the list links to its SoundCloud page, and each of the other six links to the album, on Bandcamp, where it originated.

1: “Music Itself Listens To” — Leon Clowes
2: “Lake in the Sky” — Dan Simpson
3: “gwrandewch” — wasabicube
4: “Don’t Get Lost” — xhg
5: “riemann loops” — caustic_gates
6: “Lesser Facets” — he_nu_ri
7: “The one that went with the film of the trees” — Marcus Fischer
8: “Circle II” — Jeannine Schulz
9: “Your Blind Passenger” — Stijn Hüwels
10: “Thursday Afternoon” — Dedalus Ensemble
11: “Searching for Shoals” — Karen Vogt
12: “Scattered” — The OO-Ray

You can also get to this post at disquiet.com/alembic2023. For regular updates about Disquiet.com goings-on, subscribe at thisweekinsound.substack.com (free works fine, though there’s a paid option, too).

And if you were getting error message for the first six links, that’s been fixed.

The Bandcamp Conundrum

Strange times in retail

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“I’m all lost in the supermarket / I can no longer shop happily”

I’ve been working on an essay about how broken modern consumer technology (software and hardware) is when it comes to downloadable files, like MP3s and FLAC. And then Bandcamp.com, a leading retailer of DRM-free audio files and a cultural force in independent music, goes and gets re-sold by the company that bought it just last year. Bandcamp began as a self-owned entity, then it was bought by Epic, the video game company, and now it’s been sold to Songtradr, a music licensing firm. The word “precarious” has been floating around in my imagination all day.

Let’s be clear: companies get bought and sold every day. That is business. But for musicians and music fans alike, Bandcamp plays a special role. Its social tools are quite minimal; it makes no claims to be, say, the internet’s town square. But if there even is such a thing as the internet’s town square, then Bandcamp is the record store on the corner.