Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Recent Posts of Note

A quick list of some recent posts here at Disquiet.com

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From the past couple months:

▰ A trip down the rabbit hole that is the archive of Tape Recording magazine, following an obituary about its publisher, who loaned a video camera to Andy Warhol in the mid-1960s

▰ A personal memory of seeing free jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle perform live, on the occasion of his death at age 84

▰ An interview with me, talking about the Disquiet Junto music community’s participation, for the fifth year in a row, at Musikfestival Bern in Switzerland, thanks to Tobias Reber’s support.

▰ A work-in-progress, as I track my listening to the massive recent set of Autechre live concerts from 2022

▰ An appreciation of Dedalus Ensemble’s album of Brian Eno covers

▰ An essential sonic moment from Kwon Yeo-sun’s novel, Lemon

▰ My review for Pitchfork of Caterina Barbieri’s new album, Myuthafoo

▰ A quick little meme about Steven Soderbergh

Work Tools (Apps)

All mod cons — as far as writing-oriented software goes

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I write a lot, all the time, and I do so in a lot of different apps. I work on a MacBook laptop, an iPhone, and an iPad of late. Not so many years ago, I was evenly split between a Windows laptop, an Android phone, and an Apple iPad. Back then I used to joke that Dropbox was my operating system. I was on Nokia phones before the Android G1, and then on various other Android phones until the iPhone 13 came out. Due to a confluence of reasons, after that I ended up, for the first time, with all my major devices in the same single corporate realm (née “ecosystem,” which is a snazzy word for variably regulated shopping mall). I also have a cheap, used Samsung tablet as a second screen (or third, given the iPad). Below are the main pieces of software I use. I use a bunch of others, too, and I may add some to this list as time goes on.

Notes / Writing

▰ I primarily use Obsidian (obsidian.md) for the majority of my organized notes, which are broken down by date and project. Obsidian is a recent move for me, from IA Writer, and before that a variety of other Markdown tools, including Atom and Sublime. I sync Obsidian with my iPhone and iPad thanks to iCloud, which works fine. I use the tabbed and multi-window options in Obsidian a lot.

▰ I take quick notes in Apple Notes, which syncs fairly well, though there are odd hiccups.

▰ I do most of my longer-form writing (anything over 1,000 words) in Scrivener (literatureandlatte.com) for a simple reason: a specific feature that, to my knowledge, only Scrivener and another writing tool, called Ulysses, provide. This is the ability to split a single document into multiple sections, and to be able to view and edit any consecutive subset of them. It’s fantastic.

▰ Anything simple that requires collaborative editing I do in Google Drive.

To Do

▰ I have several sheets in Google Sheets that are formatted as virtual whiteboards, one of which is always displayed on my side screen (a cheap, used Samsung tablet). This has two benefits: (1) I can turn off my whiteboard at the end of the day; (2) I can see my whiteboard even when I’m not home.

▰ Apple Reminders — I’ve tried ’em all (Any.do, Trello, etc.), and none of them have really worked for me, but to the extent I use any to-do app, it’s currently Reminders. Before this, Todoist was the one that worked best for me.

Other

▰ Pinboard.in for bookmarks, with an app that syncs on my phone. It’s incredibly bare bones, which is to say: it does what it’s supposed to. I tag everything by project, and I have a few lists of things (like newspapers and other resources) that I check every morning over coffee.

▰ Duet (duetdisplay.com) lets me use my Samsung tablet as a second screen from my laptop.

▰ Horo (matthewpalmer.net) is a laptop timer. It’s somewhat finicky, but it’s simple and sits in the menu bar.

▰ Blurred (via github.com) is set up in the laptop menu bar. Whichever window is currently “active” appears slightly brighter than all the others, of which there are generally many.

▰ Chill (see the dev’s website) is a white-noise app that sits in the laptop menu bar. I like the Airplane mode.

▰ MacWhisper (goodsnooze.gumroad.com) is a fantastic laptop speech-to-text tool. I use it a lot.

▰ Keysmith (keysmith.app) is an easy way on your laptop to save text phrases to be called up with keyboard commands. I pretty much use it for just one thing consistently, which is the day’s date, which I format as “YEAR.MM.DD / Weekday” (e.g., 2023.09.12 / Tuesday).

▰ TextSniper (textsniper.app) is an incredible tool to copy any text from your laptop screen. If I’m watching a movie and the end credits roll and I want to simply copy the names of everyone involved in sound, I select that portion of the screen, and TextSniper turns that into actual words I can then paste into a document.

▰ AirBuddy (airbuddy.app), which hangs out in the laptop menu bar, for whatever reason connects my AirPods to my laptop better than the default Apple settings.

▰ MonitorControl (via github.com) lets you control the brightness of external monitors the way you do your laptop monitor.

▰ Goodnotes (goodnotes.com) is the primary tool I use for (1) reading and making notes on PDFs, and (2) taking handwritten notes on specialized “virtual” paper (e.g., sheet music). I’m hopeful that the eventual reMarkable 3 tablet will be backlit. If that happens, I’ll give it a try.

▰ Kindle: I have a Kindle (the current one, the first with USB-C) and it’s the main thing I read books on (other than comic books), though I sometimes read on my laptop and iPad, too.

Acoustic Drone Music from Sweden

The group Trio Ramberget is poised to release new commissions

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The title track on Drone Positions by the Gothenburg, Sweden, group Trio Ramberget is a promising taste of the full set, which is due out on September 29. The ensemble consists of three horn players: Gustav Davidsson, trombone; Johanna Ekholm, double bass; and Pelle Westlin, bass clarinet. They are joined on the album by a half dozen guests playing, among other things, piano, guitar, vibraphone, and a tape deck, as well as singing. “Drone Positions” is a luxurious descent into deep deep timbre. The sounds are dense and glottal, rich and vibrant. There is an earthy sibilance throughout, and a steady — if glacial — sense of melodic development. It’s wondrous.

https://trioramberget.bandcamp.com/album/drone-positions

Rewinding Tape Recording

Getting enjoyably lost in the magazine's online archive

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In 1965, a magazine publisher named Richard Ekstract — a Brooklyn-born army veteran — loaned a piece of recording equipment to the artist Andy Warhol. The device, a prototype of a Norelco video camera, appealed to Warhol’s ongoing interest in working with moving pictures as a tool of artistic expression. (The Norelco wasn’t Warhol’s only recording device, not by a long shot. He famously was known to frequently carry a tape recorder with him.) The mention of Ekstract’s history (in an obituary by Penelope Green in the New York Times, following his death on August 7) led me to far less productive ends, unless spending a lot of time down a rabbit hole counts as productive. 

I went searching — online — for reproductions of some of Ekstract’s magazines, which included a weekly trade journal titled Audio Times and another print publication, Tape Recording. The internet is good at many things and one of them is making ephemera from the past readily available with the click of a button. It’s no surprise that what appears to be roughly half of the run of Tape Recording, from its first issue, in December 1953, through Volume 17. No. 6 in 1970, is available at an old-school website called worldradiohistory.com.

To flip — figuratively — through the PDFs of Tape Recording on the World Radio History website is to watch home audio become part of everyday life as time passes. The first issue promises, on its cover, to help the reader “Add Sound to Your Christmas Movies.” Gear fetishism took a while to come to the fore, as the image on that issue is simply of a smiling young woman. By June 1954, however, we see a different woman on the cover, dressed formally, holding a wired microphone up to the face of her puppy, as if to record its bark. 

That 1954 issue, like all of them, is filled with advertisements that promise fidelity in the audio sense, and also to modernize and enrich your home and cultural life:

The product taglines vary in their ad copy premises. The “Podium Presence” tone of Ampro Corporation technology lets you “Hear music as the maestro hears it.” Other items are more prosaic in their self-description: the Tandberg, we’re told, “Combines HiFi Quality with Long-Play Advantage of Slow Speeds.”

And each issue has plenty of editorial coverage, from tips on starting a tape collection, to reviews of recent recordings, to an explanation of what “decibels” are. One article recommends that students record themselves performing the dialog from comic books: “each can take one or a handful of parts in domestic dramas from the Dagwood family circle to Terry and the Pirates and Orphan Annie.” The cover to the October 1956 issue shows stuffed animals — one a donkey, the other an elephant — to promote a lead article on how tape recorders are used by news media to cover political conventions. It opens:

The two hottest spots in the world for tape recording last month were Chicago, Illinois, and San Francisco, California, where the nation’s two great political parties convened to name their choices for president and vice president of these United States.

More than a quarter of a million feet of tape — nearly 500 miles of it — rolled through hundreds of recorders, day and night, to bring to the American people a more detailed, dramatic and documented account of democracy in action.

Fast forward to 1970, and the magazine has expanded its scope: The cover is about slideshows, and the first story is about video cameras. Nor is the coverage purely practical. That same issue has a lengthy photo essay about composer John Cage using 52 tape recorders (“concealed backstage and operate by Cage and an associate, Lejaren Hiller”) for HPSCHD, a work for harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer: “Cage recorded Miss Vischer at the keyboard. Then by dubbing from one recorder to another, the composer was able to build up tonal patterns unlike anything live musicians could possibly imitate.” And yet, this being Tape Recording magazine, there’s still the benefit of a technical angle: “By using Scotch 201 low-noise tape, the composer kept tape hiss to a minimum during the repeated dubbings.”

RIP, Charles Gayle (1939-2023)

NYC 1988

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s good to get these memories down, better at the time, but time has its own way of filtering information, so perhaps collecting and collating long after the fact has a unique value, too. Retrospect. Rashomon. Revisiting. Revising. Something. 

In any case, the great jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle died this week, age 84. He was a powerful player, born in upstate New York in 1939. When I moved to Manhattan in 1988, a couple weeks after graduating from college with an English degree and a desire to write about music professionally, I was already used to visiting the Knitting Factory. Soon enough, by the end that year, I’d live a couple blocks away from the Knitting Factory’s Houston Street location, thanks to my then boss at a graphic design firm on Broadway, a few blocks north of Houston, having an empty bed in an alcove in his under-heated Crosby Street loft apartment, a couple blocks south (a stretch you’ve seen if you’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s film After Hours, released three years prior). That was in the autumn, when most of the New York sublets had dried up because their inhabitants had returned from summer in Europe, or at the east end of Long Island, or some other locale. 

I’d heard word of this fantastic player, Gayle, who was reportedly homeless. Folks like the late Irving Stone (for whom John Zorn’s eventual club, the Stone, would be named) and his cheerful wife, Stephanie, who always had candy in her purse, would talk about Gayle at Knitting Factory concerts before and between sets. (Since I’m down Memory Lane, I might as well add that there was a guy we’d sometimes sit with who sold tape cassettes in Washington Square Park of Jack Kerouac readings and bootlegged jazz concerts. Maybe he’s still out there. If so, hello.)

One day I saw a little photocopied flyer affixed to a telephone pole. I can’t recall exactly where the show it advertised was, but it was on the east side of town, below 14th and above Houston. When I got to the address, the sun had long since set, and far as I could tell this was an abandoned building, undergoing on-and-off re-construction toward some indecipherable new purpose. Maybe I had the address wrong. Maybe the flyer did. Maybe the concert was canceled. Or had already ended. 

The entrance was boarded up, but there was, somehow, a way in — light, sound, promise; dim, muffled, ambiguous. The interior was at first narrow, and everything was covered with dusty drywall. I handed a little cash to someone near the door (or “the door”), and made my way back. If memory serves — a big if — the only illumination was from bright bulbs connected to long, tangled extension cords. Gayle was already playing when I got there. What I had mistaken for normal boisterous New York City street noise was, in fact, his band — a trio, unless I’m mistaken, which is clearly quite possible — bleeding onto the street from the deep, windowless, interior space. 

I no doubt later saw Gayle again at the Knitting Factory proper, but that show, at what I took to be a squat, was the first — and clearly most memorable — time I had the pleasure. He was in full force, playing free, with a ferocity that suggested John Coltrane channeling a hurricane, or Eric Dolphy at his least congenial. In many ways, I feel like I’ve been trying, ever since, to recreate — to relive, or in the context of the Disquiet Junto music community, to encourage — that specific concert-going experience the remainder of my life. It’s part of the reason that the graffiti-strewn steps at the Luggage Store Gallery performance space in San Francisco feel so welcoming. It’s part of why when I discovered a (now defunct) club in the Sendagaya neighborhood of Tokyo that was behind a building (and down some stairs) I felt so at home. And it’s part of why whenever I travel I seek out small spots and keep my eyes out for little flyers.