The waiting iS
The hardest part,
sO the song goes.
The weatheR has its own plans,
its own Music.
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
Sound Ledger¹: Mumbai Edition
Audio culture by the numbers
100: Distance (in meters) from “schools, hospitals, courts and places of worship” within which loudspeakers are banned in Mumbai
16: Number of decibels reduced by the installation of a two-mile long fence along a highway
$12: Fee for drivers making too much noise on “No-Honking” day (1,000 rupees)
________
¹Footnotes
[bloomberg.com](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-03/mumbai-s-plan-to-curb-noise-pollution-no-honking-days-sound-barriers)
Novels Read, 2022
And looking ahead
I managed to finish reading 26 novels in 2022. Here they are in the order I read them. The ones with a + are particularly recommended.
1: +Fonda Lee: Jade Legacy
2: Olen Steinhauer: The Last Tourist
3: Geling Yan: The Secret Talker
4: Caleb Azumah Nelson: Open Water
5: +Sayaka Murata: Convenience Store Woman
6: Becky Chambers: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
7: +Maggie O’Farrell: Hamnet
8: Becky Chambers: A Closed and Common Orbit
9: Julian Barnes: Flaubert’s Parrot
10: Sayaka Murata: Earthlings
11: Shion Miura: The Great Passage
12: John Scalzi: The Kaiju Preservation Society
13: Victor LaValle: The Ballad of Black Tom
14: Hervé Le Tellier: The Anomaly
15: Elvia Wilk: Oval
16: James S.A. Corey: Leviathan Falls
17: +Jennifer Egan: A Visit from the Goon Squad
18: Neal Stephenson: Quicksilver
19: +Peter Watts: Blindsight
20: Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending
21: +Hannu Rajaniemi: Summerland
22: Annalee Newitz: The Future of Another Timeline
23: Ed James: The Hope That Kills
24: Ed James: Worth Killing For
25: +Francis Spufford: Red Plenty
26: +Hernan Diaz: Trust
Looking ahead to 2023, currently I’m in the midst of:
1: Amor Towles: A Gentleman in Moscow
2: Carole Stivers: The Mother Code
3: Lauren Belfer: And After the Fire
On Repeat: Guðnadóttir, Frisell, Rathrobin, Rplktr, Colombo
Recent favorites
It’s the start of a new year, and I want to try to get back in the habit of posting quick mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ Hildur Guðnadóttir already had committed some of the most remarkable film music of the year for *Tár*, Todd Field’s feature starring Cate Blanchett, and she’s followed it up with *Women Talking* (Deutsche Grammophon) Both scores veer dramatically from her often drone-based prior work (*Chernobyl*, *Joker*, *Sicario: Day of the Soldado*). *Women Talking*, in contrast, features a lot of staccato string work.
▰ If I had done a top favorites of 2022, guitarist Bill Frisell’s *Four*, his third album for the jazz label Blue Note, would have been on the list for sure. It teams him with Johnathan Blake on drums, Gerald Clayton on piano, and Greg Tardy on horns (saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet). The key word is “team,” as this is a jazz album with essentially no solos; it’s all about constant interplay.
▰ Beth Chesser and Pier Giorgio Storti collaborate as Rathrobin. Their album *Ear to the Ground* combines strings, voice, and unidentifiable textures, including field recordings, into a sometimes aggressive but often ruminative sonic spaces. It came out almost a year ago, at the end of January 2022, but I’ve only recently started listening to it.
▰ Rplktr (aka Łukasz Langa) recorded half an hour using the Awake script, which comes as part of the Monome Norns musical instrument. It’s sparkling and lightly percussive. Just listen as the patterning unfolds.
▰ Embedding here won’t do it justice, so if you do use Instagram, check out Jorge Colombo’s ([instagram.com/jorgecolombo](https://www.instagram.com/jorgecolombo/)) — specifically the short films he posts. The “[NYC2](https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17936737063578204/)” batch, for example, are black and white snippets, shot in cinematic horizontal mode — field recordings that evidence the keen eye and ear I’ve admired for decades.
Scratch Pad: Brazil, ASMR, Guðnadóttir
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](https://post.lurk.org/web/@disquiet).
▰ I watched Terry Gilliam’s *Brazil* for the first time in forever and it is more than ever one of my favorite movies. Bonus points for using the same song over and over in different arrangements.
▰ Morning sounds: house creaking gently now that the heat is turned on, distant vehicles droning by blocks away, cars right outside rushing atop streets newly slick with rain, the pneumatic releases of a city bus as it comes to a stop and then starts off again
▰ I’d like an ASMR recording of the fake typing sound that is employed by phone menu voice user interfaces when the institutional narrative needs to signal that data is being processed and it may take a moment
▰ I have a feeling I’ll be listening to the new Hildur Guðnadóttir score, *Women Talking*, for the rest of the year — which, yeah, is only a day and a half, but still.