When the record store’s name is Noise, it leads to some excellent sentences. If you’re in the San Francisco area, you can check ’em out at sanfrancisconoise.com.
Noise Weather
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
Ersatz Neubauten
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
I always feel, as I approach this telephone pole, like I’m about to see some guerrilla Einstürzende Neubauten graffiti.
On Repeat: Schulz, Zorn, Seidel, Quayle
Recent favorites
The new year is still new, and I’m getting back in the habit of posting brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ The prolific Jeannine Schulz closed out last year with three tracks of lightly abrasive ambient mist. Interestingly, the accompanying image shows a cassette, though the release is digital-only, so presumably some of this texture has to do with cassettes being employed as part of the recording process.
▰ John Zorn and Bill Laswell improvise in the richly reverberant space of the Gagosian gallery in Manhattan, responding to the array of paintings by artist Sterling Ruby. And it’s worth mentioning how well the filming and editing, by Lea Khayata’s Pushpin Films, function.
▰ Not only has Dave Seidel released a beautiful experiment in slow chord progressions, but he’s posted the performance — in this case using the free VCV Rack software synthesizer — with step-by-step annotation:
▰ I’ve never seen the 2022 TV series Gaslit, but I’ve listened repeatedly to its music, which was composed by Mac Quayle. Quayle worked on some of my favorite Cliff Martinez scores, including Arbitrage and The Company You Keep, as well as Drive, Contagion, Spring Breakers, The Lincoln Lawyer, and Only God Forgives. The track “Trash Can S’mores,” with its noir-ish use of horns, acoustic bass, percussion, and other jazz elements, is a standout.
Scratch Pad: 2023, Menus, SuperCollider
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, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means post.lurk.org.
▰ Happy new year. Let’s leave 2022 in the dust.
▰ Listening to Alexandre Desplat’s score for the film Tirailleurs sure makes my sitting here typing all day feel more adventurous than it actually is. Walter Mitty would have loved a good pair of headphones, not to mention access to streaming audio.
▰ I thought it had become impossible to turn off autoplay on SoundCloud, but it turns out the little button is hidden, placed in the poppup from the “Up Next” menu in the lower right corner.
▰ Font love:
▰ Very excited to start off a new year of Disquiet Junto projects with the very same project that kicked things off 11 years ago this week
▰ They were impressive:
▰ Best part of the new Peter Gabriel song:
▰ Brown noise, but slower
▰ A great thing about social media is you post a stray thought, such as the one directly above, and a friend replies with a sonic experiment along those lines, and another shares code, in SuperCollider, as to how to accomplish it:
(
{
Pulse.ar(
BrownNoise.ar(1!2).range(50,2000).lag(
LFTri.kr(1/30,1).exprange(20,1/400)))
}.play
)Widescreen Synthesis
Another generous slate from Glasgow-based Instruō
The maximum display width of an image on Disquiet.com increased significantly with this site’s recent redesign. I figured I’d employ the capacity for the first time by taking a screenshot of the six modules that the Scottish company Instruō (instruomodular.com) made available for free last month on the free software synth platform VCV Rack (vcvrack.com) — along with, for good measure, a seventh module, the earlier Cš-L oscillator, just to max out the width. Each of these modules was ported to software from existing commercial hardware that Instruō designs and builds in Glasgow.
It’s also a good opportunity to highlight the interview I did back in January 2021 with Instruō founder Jason Lim about the process and decision-making that went into the company’s initial slate of hardware ports: “How Instruō Went Virtual.”