Organ Failure
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
On Repeat: Synth, Oliveros, Khosla
Home/office playlist
Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ Beautiful ambient track from the England-based musician Oscillator Sink, a solo piece on the Lyra-8 synthesizer: droning, slow-motion, grainy atmospherics.
▰ The ensemble Apartment House, founded by the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, has recorded a full album of works by Pauline Oliveros, Sound Pieces, for the Another Timbre record label. Four of its 13 tracks are available to preview on its Bandcamp page. Deeply felt performances, played with admirable patience with patient listeners in mind.
https://anothertimbre.bandcamp.com/album/sound-pieces
▰ Tightrope is a characteristically beautiful and intriguing, in equal parts, album from Michel Banabila, the Rotterdam-based musician. The “rope” in question might be the strings of a violin, given the textured ambient orchestral quality of the music. It begins with tension somewhere between the work of film composers Carter Burwell and Bernard Herrmann, and then unfurls into something graceful and glorious.
https://banabila.bandcamp.com/track/tightrope
▰ Also, Siddhartha Khosla’s music for the new TV show Rabbit Hole (a conspiracy-fueled thriller starring Kiefer Sutherland) is fantastic. It has some of the most unusual instrumentation, glitchiness, and sampling I’ve heard in a major TV production in a long time. I don’t think the score itself has been released yet. I’ve heard and enjoyed his music in Only Murders in the Building and The Mysterious Benedict Society, but this is next level.
Scratch Pad: Jordan, Molvær, Fiction
From the past week
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means @[email protected] (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.
▰ You almost have to admire how when DuckDuckGo doesn’t have a useful response it just shoves a bunch of unrelated stuff at you at random.
▰ The laptop keeps changing “mapo tofu” to “mayo tofu” and, well, ick
▰ RIP, saxophonist Kidd Jordan (1935-2023), one of the greats. I think the first time I saw his name may have been as part of the title of the last track (“Kidd Jordan’s Second Line”) on a Dirty Dozen Brass Band record, The New Orleans Album (1990), but I soon grew to learn about how much further out his music went, thanks to his work with Hamiet Bluiett, William Parker, and many others. Here he is live with drummer Andrew Cyrille just four years ago at the Vision Festival in Brooklyn, in June of 2019. Aim to be this vibrant at 84 — or, heck, at any age:
▰ It’s called The New York Times Spelling Bee but it should be called The New York Times Teaches You Random Words for Fish and Plants.
▰ Watching a new Nils Petter Molvær performance means keeping the video open in one tab while tracking down details in another on whoever else is in the band, because the trumpeter has always got great colleagues, here percussionist Erland Dahlen and bassist Berger Myhre.
▰ I read a bunch in March. I finished three novels and a long book of short stories in the process. The novels were Chemistry by Weike Wang, The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz, and Box 88 by Charles Cumming. (I reviewed the short story collection for a magazine, so I’ll wait until it’s out before mentioning the book here.)
Homeland Intelligence
Listening while home and away in Lauren Wilkinson's novel American Spy
“It is humbling to have your social fluency, your sense of yourself as a competent, independent person, upended by a foreign city.”
That is the narrator of American Spy, a 2019 novel by Lauren Wilkinson, talking not to the reader so much as to her children. The framing device of the book is that it is a tale told by her (a Black American FBI agent who may or may not have once moonlighted for the CIA) to them while she is evading an unseen enemy — as well as interrogating, through flashbacks, what got her family into this troubling situation in the first place. While the stakes in the book are highly personal, much of it hinging on the circumstances surrounding the death, years earlier, of the narrator’s older sister, the scope of the story is international, its second half occurring largely in West Africa.
Her observation about “social fluency” occurs as a response to an earlier situation, back in Manhattan, when the narrator, named Marie Mitchell, was guiding a head of state around the city (that character, Thomas Sankara, is an actual former president of Burkina Faso). The dignitary was flummoxed at the time by the enormity of the city’s noise.
Now the tables have been turned, and Marie is in his country’s capital city, Ouagadougou, finding herself dependent on the kindness of strangers to navigate a place where no sensory input is familiar. “I thought of the afternoon in New York I’d spent with Thomas, the way he’d been surprised when we were in the park and those kids on bikes had whizzed around us,” she reminisces. “He’d sounded embarrassed when he’d said he’d been unable to pick out the bikes from the ambient city noise, and now with a teenager practically leading me through Ouaga by the hand, I thought I understood why.”
As always, writers of fiction about spies need to be good listeners in order for their characters to be. You can fake an NGO. You can fake a counterintelligence operation. You can’t fake paying attention.
Disquiet Junto Project 0588: Swell Time
The Assignment: Make some surf music
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, April 10, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 6, 2023.
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 out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).
Disquiet Junto Project 0588: Swell Time
The Assignment: Make some surf music
Step 1: We’re going to make some surf music. Think about the word “surf” separate from the word “music.”
Step 2: Make some surf music inspired by the thoughts that arose in Step 1.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0588” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0588” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0588-swell-time/
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.
Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. How long until the tide changes?
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, April 10, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 6, 2023.
Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.
Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).
For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 588th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Swell Time (The Assignment: Make some surf music), at: https://disquiet.com/0588/
About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0588-swell-time/