Listening while home and away in Lauren Wilkinson's novel American Spy
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
“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.
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.
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:
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/
Much urban doorbell activity speaks of the need for quick fixes — and the results of uninformed, poorly planned ones. The situation here could very well be evidence of casual vandalism. It could also be a quiet moment in the midst of just the sort of jury-rigged, duct-taped upgrades that pedestrians become either inured to or, in my case, fascinated by. Perhaps the tenant or owner is currently at the local hardware store, sorting out a selection. Given the haphazard angle of the board and the monochromatic palimpsest of prior attempts, it’s more likely this will look the same, if not worse, on my next stroll.
From the Netherlands: "Be open for anything that can happen."
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This Junto Profile is part of a new series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.
What’s your name? Michel Banabila.
Where are you located? Rotterdam, Netherlands. Born in Amsterdam, then I grew up in Hilversum, Bijlmermeer, Buitenveldert, Amsterdam. There were always instruments at home. My mother, who is Dutch, played piano, my half sister played harp, my Jewish grandfather played violin and mandolin. The abrupt change when I was 9 — from living in nature (bird sounds, lots of trees, owls) to a flat apartment in an Amsterdam suburb under construction (ongoing sounds of pile driver hammers) after my mother and stepfather separated — made quite an impact. I was raised by my mother, as I did not know my biological Yemeni father, who left us when I was two. I met him once, for the first time in my life, when I was in my late 30s. Because of stories about him, I started to listen to all sorts of Arabic music. (However, I do not speak Arabic, so I just follow the music, not the lyrics — but I guess I do that actually most of the time with songs in English as well. I never pay much attention to lyrics.) I left home when I was 15 and started to live on my own in Amsterdam when the rest of the family moved up north. Listened a lot of different music at that time. Around the time I was 20 I discovered an 8-track studio in Amsterdam. I quit school and have no formal musical education. I pretty much tried to discover a lot by myself. I would say that listening (to music but also to sounds around me) was my education. Hearing Music for Films by Brian Eno was one of the things that gave me the direct motivation and inspiration to record. In that 8-track studio I made my very first recordings. They have been lost.
What is your musical activity? For years I recorded on a very regular basis at home with a computer. It was a huge liberation when the first Macintosh HD recording became available and I realized that with that I could record whenever and as long as I want. I record music for myself (these days available in self-released limited editions) and music for assignments (dance, theater, film). Some of my music has been published by labels like Steamin’ Soundworks, Bureau B, JJ Tracks, Séance Centre, Eilean Rec, and Knekelhuis. I record a lot outside, as well, using a field recorder, or simply my phone. I do not really seriously control any instrument but I play some keyboard and use my voice and any possible found objects. I performed live in bands, as well, and I still often love to collaborate with other artists. I feel I am not active in one particular genre, but more exploring different ideas, and the sort of music of course also depends on who I work with or the project I am involved in.
What is one good musical habit? Be open for anything that can happen. You can plan or compose whatever you want, but many things can and will happen that are not foreseen, whether it is a mistake, or something unexpected, whatever, and this can be to your great advantage. So you need space in your mind to tune in — not always easy, but necessary. Holger Czukay, a great composer, used to say a lot about this in his interviews. So although I can be very persistent and eager to get something in a way I want, whatever effort or time it will take me, I still have to admit that I feel the nicest and best things that happened to me musically so far actually took very little or no effort at all. When your brain is set into “playfulness,” great things can come in and then I actually never feel like I “did something,” but more like that I tuned into some stream from where everything happens naturally.
What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? Although I have been a Junto member since 2012, I did not record that much (compared with others) but still have about 54 recordings so far (banabila.bandcamp.com/album/disquiet-junto) and I am listening to all that right now. It is so nice to listen back, and it all feels quite playful and experimental. And each track is so different! Very hard to chose one particular one really, but:
– For Disquiet 0207 I had the honor to have my first LP from 1983 being remixed by the Junto members (Remixing Marilli), which brought amazing results and it was great to hear all these different contributions.
– Last but not least, I still miss my dear cat Tapu, who unfortunately fell from our balcony and died — but I still have her lovely calming purr sounds in my very first Junto recording ever
Could you tell people what the music scene is like in Amsterdam? I don’t know that much of it, but I recorded several times with Gareth Davis (bass clarinet), who lives in Amsterdam (though he is mainly on the road performing abroad nowadays) and recently I recorded with a very old friend from Amsterdam, Olaf Keus (drums), who was also present on my very first live gig in Paradiso, in 1984. I love that beautiful old venue. You have a couple of interesting places / scenes, like Splendor, De Ruimte, and of course Bimhuis. A few weeks ago I went to a concert by Anton Goudsmit there, an Amsterdam based guitar player that I like a lot. He plays on some of my recordings. The Bimhuis is now in het Muziekgebouw, beautifully located at the water close to Central Station. I went to the Bimhuis in the ’80s already, when it was still situated at the Oudeschans in the centre, where me and my friends saw mind-blowing improvisations with people like Martin van Duijnhoven or Micha Mengelberg or Han Benninck. It made a huge impression on me. Those were the first times I saw concerts like that, and very exciting. There’s also OCCII, a great place where I performed at the Haperende Mens Festival in 2017. Musicians I follow now are like Oene van Geel and Albert Van Veenendaal, who I saw live with Bora Kim in Splendor. These days everything in the city gets more and more commercialized so musicians and venues in general are hugely dependent on subsidies. So far I’ve never been to De Ruimte, I really should go there. I can not always afford to go see concerts in Amsterdam. However, I do look forward to seeing two concerts soon, one by Die Wilde Jagd, and one by Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith.
