Author: Marc Weidenbaum

On Repeat: Dessner Score, Autechre Covers

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ I can’t remember the last time I’d been alerted to an album’s release by as many old friends and internet friends as I have been thanks to Shane Parish’s set of guitar covers of music by Autechre. The full album, titled Autechre Guitar in a way that gives no due to the effort entailed, isn’t due out until February 27, 2026, but the first two tracks are out on Bandcamp. Give a listen to the first track, “Maetl,” off the great Incunabula, from way back in 1993:

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=940875574 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

and then listen to the original. I’ll almost certain detail additional impressions in advance as the album’s release approaches.

▰ I haven’t seen the movie Train Dreams, but I’ve been listening to Bryce Dessner’s score on repeat. The mix of Americana and post-classical will earn it comparisons at brief moments to Aaron Copland, but there’s much more than that, including a hint of Gavin Bryars in the messy layers of “Home I.” There is a lot going on, and it all holds together.

▰ Major thanks to this YouTube channel for posting a full set of ambient jazz from guitarist Jakob Bro (its his name atop the trio), electronically mediated trumpeter Arve Henriksen, and drummer Jorge Rossy. Recorded May 18, 2024, and uploaded around then, but I only recently became aware of it.

▰ Absolutely transportative set by Hania Raini recorded at at Cercle Odyssey in Mexico City, Mexico. Like Nils Frahm, she essentially places an entire studio’s worth of equipment around her on stage and performs solo. I believe it was recorded April 26, 2025. Given the emphasis on surround visuals, I think of it as “IMAX techno.”

▰ The trio of Ståle Storløkken (“keys and organ”), Eivind Aarset (guitar), and Audun Kleive (drums) has something rhythmically fantastic going on, downright funky, in a tight, minimal, off-kilter way. I believe this was recorded May 24, 2025.

Scratch Pad: Break Mode

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 — and I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts serves, I’ve found, 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.

Right now, though, I’m on a more extended social media (and adjacent) break, through the start of January 2026. Which raises the question: when I’m on such a hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since it is by definition a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week? Apparently it’s random notes I make to myself that I would have posted online, plus bits I’ve sent to friends via email and other means. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts. Anyhow, here’s this past week’s roundup:

▰ There’s something orderly about a month that begins on a Monday, almost as if all months should.

▰ In just over a year, come 2027, it’ll be the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s original Junto, and the occasion will be noted and celebrated.

▰ Barbershop scene report: seven men in a small storefront room with the Kinks’ “Come On Now” playing. And yes it’s been a while since I got my hair cut.

▰ The song I listened to most this year on YouTube Music, per the “recap,” was a song I’d written an article about, naturally: Dandy Livingstone’s “Rudy, a Message to You,” for 72 minutes total. Rounding out the top five: some Hildegard von Bingen, by the Sixteen, the opening tracks on their album Angel of Peace; the seventh track on Nils Frahm’s Music for Animals, “Right Right Right”; the third track on Barker’s Stochastic Drift, “Difference and Repetition”; and the Specials’ cover of that Dandy Livingstone song. Also according to the YouTube end-of-year wrap-up, I am in the top 3% of listeners to the music of Trent Reznor.

▰ I keep an eye on Metallica’s ever-expanding public archive of live shows. I enjoyed this detail from the most recent one:

And for bonus “charm,” the tape flip (IYKYK) lands right in the middle of “Fade to Black.”

Oddly the annotation doesn’t appear on the tape’s webpage, just in the solicitation email.

▰ I was just looking at the Wikipedia page for the Oblique Strategies card deck, the famed collaboration between Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, and I noticed that the main photo (upper right corner of the page) of the deck is by none other than Cory Doctorow, who uploaded it to his Flickr account with a Creative Commons license in 2013 — Flickr (launched 2004), Creative Commons (2001), and Wikipedia (also 2001) being part of the older web, if not the old web.

▰ I was using Safari as my main browser, but it lagged and hung too often, so I moved to Zen, which was excellent but also eventually did the same. This is on an M1 MacBook Pro 14”. So at some friends’ recommendation, I moved to Vivaldi, which is sort of a sequel to the browser Opera. I found Opera, back in the day, a bit baroque, so to speak, but Vivaldi is streamlined and full of little touches I appreciate — including the ability, with the click of a button, to enter “break mode,” which mutes and blanks out every single tab, a welcome respite-by-command.

▰ I definitely fell back into the habit of reading too many books at the same time this year. Doing so didn’t impact my comprehension or the number of books I read, but it did, I think, decrease some of the enjoyment. I’m going to try to reverse course this coming year. In any case, it was due to such parallel processing that in one single week, this past one, I finished reading not only Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, but also Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (which is set at roughly the same time as Moby Dick, but takes place on land), and Laurie Colwin’s Goodbye Without Leaving, as well as most of Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know, which I imagine I’ll finish in the coming week, work allowing.

Inside the Drone

A drone that drones, that is

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’ve taken two rides in driverless cars so far, both times alone, both times to dental appointments to which I was in a rush, and after which I wasn’t sure I’d be in a condition to drive, though both times I felt fine afterward and took the public bus home — once on a rapid bus, which is rapid indeed.

There are several competing models of self-driving cars that circle San Francisco like mundane sentries. One thing they have in common is their whir, which is similar to that of other electric vehicles. However, combined with the steadiness of their pace and their strict adherence to stop signs and stop lights, that whir has a far less revved-up vibe. It’s really more drone than whir. These driverless cars are drones that drone.

Once you’re inside such a vehicle, the touchscreen interface — as well as your phone — provides various options for music and sound environments, but during both my rides I almost immediately turned off the piped-in sound entirely, and just settled into that placid hum, experiencing the drone from the inside.

I still don’t know what to think about the impact — economic and otherwise — of driverless vehicles. I’m just reflecting, at the moment, on routine experience as a pedestrian and occasional driver, and now a two-time rider.

Disquiet Junto Project 0727: Polar Strategies

The Assignment: Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Oblique Strategies card deck

/ 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 lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0727: Polar Strategies
The Assignment: Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Oblique Strategies card deck.

Step 1: Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt published the first edition of their Oblique Strategies card deck in 1975, which makes 2025 the deck’s 50th anniversary. Note the milestone — and if you’re not familiar with the deck, read up a bit.

Step 2: Select at random two cards from the deck. If you don’t have a deck, there are various free web and mobile apps that reproduce it.

Step 3: Record a piece of music that somehow combines or reconciles the two directions that resulted from Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0727” (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-0727-polar-strategies/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. (What to increase? What to reduce? Are there sections? Consider transitions.)

Deadline: Monday, December 8, 2025, 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 727th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Polar Strategies — The Assignment: Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Oblique Strategies card deck — at https://disquiet.com/0727/.

Favorite 2025 Albums

Originally compiled for Pitchfork and The Wire

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

As I mentioned recently, list-making is not, generally, my idea of a good time. But at the invitation of Pitchfork and The Wire, which tally up the lists of critics at the end of each year, I did get together a set of 25 albums I loved in 2025. I break down my vague color-coding below.

The top 10 of these I feel particularly strongly about. The next second set of 9, from 11 to 19, are in their own zone, in terms of my frequency of listening. Then come two albums by artists I follow quite closely, closely enough that I may veer toward uncritical.

And the list closes with a set of four mainstream hip-hop albums that helped me, this year, find a way back into the rap fold. (Doechii is another favorite.) I’ve always been listening to hip-hop instrumentals — far less so, however, the full tracks. Something shifted this year. For one of my final social media solicitations of 2025, before I entered into a year-end hiatus, I asked folks for recommendations of albums based on my affection for these recent four, and I’m still working through the excellent titles that resulted.