Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Junto Profile: Ian Joyce

From the North Wales coast: soporific synths, having fun, the cat's meow

/ 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? It’s Ian Joyce. I generally release music as ikjoyce, but annoyingly my Twitter handle is iankjoyce, because there was someone else using ikjoyce already.

Where Are You Located? Currently based on the North Wales coast. I grew up here, then moved away when I was 17 to go to university in Bristol. Spent a year living in Richmond, Virginia, as part of that degree, which was an amazing experience. That’s where I bought my first “synth” and sequencer (an XP10 and MC50) from Boykins on Broad Street, and shipped them back when I came home. Still have them, still working! I then lived just outside London for a few years (*cough* decades *cough*), where my little studio gradually grew. Moved back here three years ago just pre-pandemic. Never thought I’d be back, but very much glad I am. It’s a beautiful area; a lovely sandy beach at the end of my road, lush green countryside just inland, and the mountains of Eryri (Snowdonia) just a short drive away.

What Is Your Musical Activity? My main activity stems directly from Disquiet Junto prompts and Naviar Haiku challenges — although I don’t always get the time to do them. I also play a lot, just making noises, improvising, jamming.

I’ve been making music since I was 14, when my mum started teaching me to read music on the electronic organ. I then went on to teach myself piano, harmony, sequencing, synthesis, and so on, reading whatever I could get my hands on. I’ve got pretty broad tastes and will listen to pretty much anything (wasn’t always that way — in my teens it was basically Jarre and Beethoven and not a lot else, but thankfully that changed in my early 20s!)

My own music is mainly ambient, sometimes verging on new age, sometimes more towards drone / dark, and occasionally my synthpop childhood shows up with a snappy noise based electronic snare drum. I keep meaning to do more musique concrete / cut-up stuff as I quite enjoy the results.

My stuff is usually pretty soporific — I like the weird states between sleep and waking, so I tend to make things that put me there. If you fall asleep listening to my stuff, it’s a compliment.

Ian Joyce and (some of) his synths

What Is One Good Musical Habit? Play. By which I mean, have fun. If it starts to get dry, do something else for a bit. Let loose with your instruments. Jam, improvise, make noise. Make that cheesy cover version for yourself. Enjoy it! But keep in mind that this is different to “practice,” which should be focussed and structured — *looks sternly over the top of his glasses and wags finger, in a teacherly manner*.

What Are Your Online Locations? Facebook is generally more for family and people I have met or interact with a lot. Twitter (iankjoyce) is where I mainly hang out, and follow musicians and artists and any other creatives. I’m on Lines and the Disquiet Slack (ikjoyce), but I’m more of a lurker on both. I do try to be more sociable, honestly. I use Soundcloud (ikjoyce) for posting my Junto and Naviar Haiku pieces, and Bandcamp (ikjoyce) for album releases.

What Was a Particularly Meaningful Junto Project? This is a hard question. I’ve been taking part since project 0222 (Bounded Foundation — 31st March 2016) so there are a lot to choose from. The most memorable ones have been the ones that pushed me way out of my usual working practices, but the most meaningful one for me personally is 0238 from 21st July 2016.

It has developed a deeper meaning for me since it was made. It’s not my best work by a long shot, but the recording has the sound of my old cat Gus, who came in while I was recording it. If you listen, you can hear the catflap going near the beginning, and then him chirping a hello to me just before I finish playing. He died the following year, aged 16. He had been my companion since he was an hour old, and was a really gentle and characterful cat. Many of my earlier Junto pieces were made while he was draped over my shoulders like a scarf, which he was always wanting to do. I still really miss him — that little recording of his friendly chirping, in a house we no longer live in, is strangely even more evocative than any of the photos I have of him.

Looking back, I did actually do the Junto prompt the week after he died (0303), which was to make music on a 303 or similar. It was quite therapeutic, and I am still quite happy with the resulting track. In a weird coincidence, I just bought a TD-3 that arrived yesterday.

Has moving back to a place you lived in a long time ago had any impact on your music — whether through memories, or local culture, or just reorganizing your home? The local soundscape is very different here. We used to live near Heathrow, so planes were constantly overhead, whereas now we have the sea at the end of the road, so the predominant sound sources now have much smaller wings — and very loud voices, especially when they are nesting on our roof! I will definitely be keeping an ear on differences in my music-making, because the whole vibe here is much more relaxed, and the landscape itself much more dramatic with the sea and mountains nearby. I am certain that it will have an impact.

On Repeat: Field Recordings, Roger Eno, Ambient Murk

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:

▰ Nathan Wolek’s bench 6, every morning edits a year’s worth of just pre-pandemic field recordings made at DeLeon Springs State Park in Florida. The cuts jump around in time: near silence, then water, then chatter, then an announcement, a car, bugs, all at various volume levels. Moments of extended natural silence glitch into stutters of quite different experiences of the exact same spot. Wolek’s approach both enlivens and gives lie to the concept of a soundscape, emphasizing inherent change over idealized stasis.

https://nathanwolek.bandcamp.com/album/bench-6-every-morning

▰ A live performances by a string ensemble of a beautiful work by Roger Eno from a series of EPs. This is “Venerable Dilemma.”

▰ Eliza Brown has been posting weekly selections of field recordings since September of last year. The one from two weeks back, “TLY Week 31 – February 3, 2023” (“TLY” is for “the listening year”), is seven-plus minutes of an icy creek — the highlight being that Brown breaks the near silence by narrating what it is she’s witnessing.

▰ Roily, haunted sounds — muddy with a glistening surface — comprise the track “Language” by Christopher Hanlon. Set this ambient treat on loop.

Scratch Pad: Soderbergh, Pushead, Painlevé

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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 post.lurk.org (especially because the Algorithm keeps kicking me off Facebook even though I’ve down nothing even remotely inappropriate). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.

▰ The phrase “unforeseen consequences” is generally employed by someone who has never read a science fiction novel in their life

▰ After guitar class I sometimes shoot a quick video of myself playing what my instructor had just gone over, especially chord voicings that are entirely new to (and currently befuddling) me, and my face in them always look like someone shared some sort of really shocking state secret — eyes wide, brow furrowed, mouth shut

▰ Donald Fagen needs to get Pushead to draw his next album cover just to see if the haters can resist the lure of purchasing it

▰ The best thing about a new Soderbergh movie is new Soderbergh interviews

▰ Sometimes elegant solutions are more elegant than they are solutions

▰ That explosion at 9:20am (San Francisco) on Thursday, February 9, 2023, was something else. Whew. Incredibly loud. Set the hair on my arms up and frazzled my nerves. I saw reports of sirens across the park, so I got the sense it was in the Sunset, not the Richmond District (where I live), because I wasn’t hearing the sirens here. Looks like it was on 22nd Avenue, maybe near Moraga?

▰ That thing where after playing a video game for a while you stand up and are all too aware that moving and looking around are entirely separate actions

▰ PCB designs are my visual cotton candy. (This is the 4Swing module from Gieskes.)

▰ Ooh, Jean Painlevé’s The Sounds of Science, with the Yo La Tengo score, has been added to the Criterion streaming service this month

▰ 1993: “I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry.”

2023: “I didn’t know if I should use the laugh emoji or the cry emoji.”

Schrödinger’s Misophonia

Via Schopenhauer via Labatut

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
The image is a quote from the novel in question. It reads: "If he closed his eyes, he could hear the clicking of the spoons in the canteen, the movement of the chess pieces in the recreation room, the shriek of the steam in the laundry. Rather than ignore them, he concentrated on them, trying to drown out the sound of Miss Herwig's breath, that thin thread of air that could barely enter through her swollen throat and was incapable of filling her lungs."

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously saw a commonality¹ between intelligence and a sensitivity to noise, which may have been on the mind of author Benjamín Labatut when, in the novel When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), he put² physicist Erwin Schrödinger through the misophonia wringer.

¹“On Noise” from Studies in Pessimism

²Adrian Nathan West, translator 

Two Graphic Novels from Tom King

Supergirl and a troubled man

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I dug the Supergirl collection, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2022), written by Tom King and drawn by the Brazilian illustrator Bilquis Evely (suggesting a combination of P. Craig Russell, Kevin O’Neill, and Richard Sala). As a longtime reader of King’s, I was relieved it managed to not fall back on a combination of PTSD and faulty memory. It also had some welcome humor. It pairs Krypton’s most famous daughter with a young girl fueled by revenge for her father’s death. They travel the universe together for different reasons: similar goal, different aims.

We learn a bit about Supergirl along the way, in particular about her power of hearing. I’m always up for someone who’s willing to rewrite the overstated idea that there’s no sound in space. King does it well.

As to why there’s a schooner in space — just read the book.

. . .

I continued my Tom King–athon during my unfortunate if brief (27-hour) Facebook limbo. Facebook had, in its all-thumbs manner, temporarily (and in error) deemed me a troublemaker, so I read a graphic novel about one of comics’ most troubled troublemakers: Rorschach (2021). It’s pretty darn good. 

Having not read any of the other post-Moore Watchmen stuff (I’ve been fairly wary), I don’t know how much of the rest of that material aligns with the TV show, but I dug the touches, like the race history material about the untended graveyard. I was surprised by the role a certain Batman storyteller plays in it, that’s for sure (The Dark Fife Returns, indeed). I took the main bad guy to be a kind of Steve Ditko figure, though perhaps someone else was the intended model. Fascinating how inside-baseball comics have gotten — this book is so knee-deep in self-referentiality, it feels like it limited its audience to a degree, but maybe those characters are fine even without the background knowledge. I loved how pirates are the big-screen superheroes in that world, which is especially funny since Marvel’s having a lot more success than DC is in that regard. The pirate stuff also feels like it changes the context of the meta-comic in the original Watchmen, because it makes pirates feel more mainstream, less retro, but maybe I’m just misremembering the original (and maybe this is a theme in some of the other “expanded Watchmen” material). 

King does what he does well. He mixes up past and present so you don’t often know where you are until you’ve been there a while. The color-coding of time periods drifts into confusion, first on the audience’s part, then on that of the characters themselves. King also works so well with parallel structure, in particular when the three visitors to the ranch are telling their individual stories simultaneously yet separately. That was super duper. (His artist collaborator, Jorge Fornés, is totally up to the task.)

For better or worse, I saw the ending coming from quite a distance. Maybe that just makes this a tragedy. It’s not giving anything away to note that one character’s “hm” was paired with another’s telltale “hurm” several times too often for any actual surprise to have been intended. As a result, the end felt oddly certain whereas the rest of the book was enjoyably unfixed. And of course I greatly appreciated all the stuff about voices secreted in the silences of audio tape.