Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Scratch Pad: (Sorta) Back

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

I took an extended social media (and adjacent) break, from mid-November through the start of January 2026. I’m now back.

Or perhaps back-ish. This past week felt a little off. I didn’t post much, not on social media, that is, and less so than usual in discussion groups I’m on. I posted a little bit more than elsewhere on Facebook, which is purposefully a bit of a wall of garden, but even then not much. I did, as was true to varying degrees through my hiatus, have the instinct to continue to “post” things in my scratch pad, things I hadn’t on social media. Which is good. It’s a way to still capture things and share them publicly on a weekly basis, just not in the social media mode, which is more in-the-moment. I won’t here dissect my thinking, but I am reflecting on it. And to be clear, I take heaps of notes over a given week on a variety of topics. This scratch pad mode is just its own loosely defined narrow subset.

▰ Siri is set on my iPhone to the female South African voice, which to my ear is the available female voice in the lowest register. At some point recently, this voice’s tone appears to have changed. It is less oddly playful, and the change is perfectly fine by me. The way it used to say “okay,” which it does frequently, used to be like it was saying “Okay, cheeky monkey.” Now it says “okay” more matter-of-factly, like “Okay, I’ll continue adding amino acids to this peptide.”

▰ When I speak to machines over the course of a given day:

  • MacWhisper on laptop to transcribe stray thoughts
  • MacWhisper on laptop to get rough transcripts of conversations
  • Whisper Notes on iPhone to transcribe stray thoughts
  • built-in Apple MacBook, iPhone, or CarPlay speech-to-text, the latter requiring Siri

▰ A particular highlight of the holiday break was playing a bunch of new-to-me games, notably the card game Compile, which I am just loving. Anyone else out there playing it? Metal is my go-to protocol, and Gravity and Death are great, too. Been exploring the two three-protocol expansions, as well.

▰ Apparently you can, in Buttondown, schedule way far in advance, because for a moment I had the next #DisquietJunto project set to go out on January 8, 22,026. Fortunately I caught the error.

▰ Is it too late to start this year over?

▰ Finished the first book I’ve read in full this year, Flesh by David Szalay. It’s a novel, a rags-to-riches story, in which the majority of people, when asked how they are or how something is, reply “Okay.” This word can be read as a signal both of how they’re not entirely sure, and of how they don’t really have much vocabulary, or much in the way of awareness, to form a response. Occasionally, if things are going well, they may say “Nice.” They may choose between things and state one is a favorite; in search of conversation, they may ask one another which is their favorite. Apparently this book was the favorite of the Booker Prize committee this past year. The novel is taut and, in terms of literary sensibility, often monotone, which makes sense in the context of the main character, who is quite damaged, but the tone remains pretty much the same even when the story oddly ditches him to portray moments between other characters that the (anti-hero-ish) protagonist doesn’t observe. He is almost absurdly magnetic to women, up there with James Bond and Neil Diamond, and if this book becomes a movie with, say, Michael Fassbender or Alexander Skarsgård as the lead, when he sleeps with the next-to-last person with whom he does in the book, the audience may, unless serious directorial precautions are taken, laugh out loud. In the New York Times, Dwight Garner says “It’s a very complicated plot.” I have no idea what he’s talking about. The best thing, and the closest thing to complication, about the storytelling is how Szalay introduces gaps: time jumps ahead, and you have to sort out how much time has passed, not that Szalay keeps any such period secret for long. So, how is the book? It’s okay.

Jamuary 2026 06–09

Four more

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Hey, I’ve made it nine days into Jamuary. (More on what Jamuary is here.) I’m not going to post all of these as individual posts, more likely as batches.

▰ 06\31 — “Traveller Feller”: This is a step forward from yesterday. Rather than two source field recordings, there are three. The beat, per se, is a pair of white noise equivalents (interior drone of a refrigerator and a fan in a bathroom) cut up and swapped back and forth. The third element is the same street musician as last time, pitched differently and brought more to the foreground. As the track proceeds, the speed at which the sampling of that third element occurs gets faster, which alters the way it sounds in playback (a little more cut-up, even jittery). And then, as with yesterday’s track, at the end it goes back to the original speed, which is a shortcut to a kind of closure. This was a lot of fun to put together, and especially interesting was trying to locate patterns that surfaced the most musically interesting elements of the source audio.

▰ 07\31 — “Monk Chip”: Continuing to push the same patch forward, the Patch of Theseus, switching one after another module as I move ahead. Tried to apply some automation to the pitch of all three samples. It’s rudimentary, but turned out kinda fun.

▰ 08\31 — “Trumpet Tantrum”: This might be a good mode: Making a patch at the start of a week, and nudging it a bit forward each day, and then starting over for the next week. In any case, the differences between today and yesterday are two. First, this is now a public domain field recording of a street musician, a trumpeter, in the “lead” spot. Second, that same “lead” recording appears twice: once using the same treatment as earlier, and the other using a granular module.

▰ 09\31 — “Quad Rat”: Probably the final, at least for now, variant of this seed. I may go back and label them as such. This version has four sample sources, drawn from the previous rounds, all but one now through a granular module, the other “merely” chaotically pitched. All in VCV Rack. At first it’s just three samples, and the additional one is introduced about halfway through.

Disquiet Junto Project 0732: Color Drenching

The Assignment: What does it sound like?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0732: Color Drenching
The Assignment: What does it sound like?

Step 1: Consider the design concept of “color drenching.”

Step 2: Record a piece of music that you think sounds like color drenching.

Note: The New York Times has described “color drenching” in interior design as “meaning the walls, ceiling and even trim are painted using the same [color].”

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0732” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0732-color-drenching/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, January 12, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 732nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Color Drenching — The Assignment: What does it sound like? — at https://disquiet.com/0732/

Jamuary 2026 03–05

Three more, so five days so far

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Hey, I’ve made it five days into Jamuary, so not so bad. (More on what Jamuary is here.) I’m not going to post all of these as individual posts, but since I was pretty happy with the fifth one, I figured I’d tie the most recent three into one post.

▰ 05\31 — “Ives Talkin'”: I’ve lately been making a lot of field recordings, mostly of what people might think of as noise: urban and rural, interior and exterior, and various realms in between. Among those recordings are occasional snippets of other people: speaking, singing, making music, doing things. Recording people feels, to me, a bit like taking photos of people, which is to say I’m not entirely comfortable with it. In particular, I’m not sure I’d share field recordings of musicians overheard on the street. What I’ve done here, in contrast, is to take two field recordings and combine them, the source material pushed past the point of recognizability. In VCV Rack I then placed those two quite different recordings into a pair of sample modules, and then set four markers in each, the positions determined by sample and hold of a noise source. I then put those through respective switches so they rotated through, and those outputs through switches that went back and forth between the two different sources. Then I slowly ratcheted up the speed at which that back and forth occurred, faster and faster, manually, until I finally jumped back to a slower pace, which brought it all to a conclusion.

▰ 04\31 — “Chatter Boxing”: Three sounds in one, all excerpted from field recordings. The underlying structure that sets the pace is a small snippet of an industrial drone, courtesy of the regional power company’s backup generators, put on repeat. The two other elements are both chatter, one from birds and the other from humans, repeating in differing patterns. What might be discerned as a melodic bass element is some background music playing during the recording of human chatter. All done in VCV Rack.

▰ 03\31 — “Re: Generators”: Third day of Jamuary, working just in VCV Rack. I had this field recording of the noise from massive generators temporarily installed in the neighborhood during a recent citywide power outage. The volume was just shy of 100 decibels. I slowed the track down, which significantly lowered the pitch, and then ran two slightly out of sync treatments. One of them turned on and off a high-pass filter, while the other glitched out the sounds. Think of it as processing infrastructure-induced trauma.

#30s Two Block Drone

Distance is a filter

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

My favorite — or at least my most utilized — synthesizer module is probably the low-pass filter. I like trimming the upper end off a signal. I like how doing so can make a sound feel distant, not just physically but emotionally. There is no active filtering on this recording, however. This is simply a very loud noise, continuously registering at nearly 100 decibels, as heard from roughly two blocks away. Distance, in other words, provides the filter. Massive portable electric generators, running on diesel and each the size of a dry freight trailer, had been placed outside a local substation when power outages hit much of the city. Up close, the sound was painful. Blocks away, it could still disturb your sleep. Out on the street, the drone — present but, of course, invisible — felt alien: unwanted, unexpected, and, foremost, uncanny. As the days went on, the sound became more familiar, but never any more welcome. After power was restored and the machines were turned off, however, I could appreciate the tonality by listening back to a short clip. I could luxuriate in the slow waveforms, and enjoy the way the drone collaborated with the sound of passing vehicles. Recording is a form of capture. I had captured the alien presence with my recording device, and now it was under my control, rather than the other way around.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on December 24, 2025. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of an ongoing series of field recordings that generally last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.