Author: Marc Weidenbaum

#30s Play Misty

The city wakes to rain

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It hasn’t rained in ages, and then overnight the modest tides of the colloquial atmospheric river shifted, and drops began to accumulate on the ground. Around 3:45am, I wasn’t sleeping well, which is unusual for me. In retrospect, the rain must have begun, the unfamiliar nocturnal noises registering louder than they actually were. Likewise, after I woke, I wasn’t yet aware rain had fallen or, for that matter, continued to fall. Strange little plinks and pops registered as background texture, disparate as stray thoughts, until I raised a window blind and saw the gentle precipitation. The street in particular sounds different during the rain. Cars creep along like footsteps on Saran wrap, and they are more likely than generally to obey the nearby four-way stop sign. Far less chatter passes by, as morning walkers stay home, perhaps hoping for a respite later in the day. This goes as well for rattling skateboards and chiming bicycles. There is a squish and crunch and a mushy whir to the city when it is waking to the rain. This is what it sounds like, through the living room window, which overlooks the street from the second floor.

Recorded in San Francisco’s Richmond District at 8:42am on Wednesday, December 17, 2025. Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro using the standard Voice Memos app. Posted to Freesound and SoundCloud. This post is part of a collection of field recordings that last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.

#30s Retail Phase

At night in the aisles

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I found myself in an office supply store after dark, dark coming early this time of year, mid-December. The plan was to purchase some take-out Chinese food around the corner for dinner, but first came this errand. I wandered the aisles, items large and small on shelves that occasionally flirted with the emptiness one might associate with bankruptcy. A palpable emptiness defined the place, a single floor taking up a substantial portion of a city block, yet nearly devoid of people. There were two other customers: one on his phone, the other standing in a corner saying “hello” repeatedly in hopes of earning the attention of the two present employees, one of whom was stationed at the register, the other also wandering the aisles. At times the five of us were spread out as if we had claimed some portion of the known territory as our own. The customer who wasn’t saying “hello” was on his phone narrating his day to someone else, what seemed to be a close friend. This customer apologized to the friend for having been “irrespective” of his interlocutor’s recent emails. I wandered over to what I came to understand was my corner of the store, from which I could barely hear the repeated hellos or the phone conversation, and in that emptiness a sound caught my ear — two sounds, in fact: a pair of repetitive clicks. I drew closer to several rows of hanging backpacks, all connected by lengthy cabling, and each affixed by a plastic alarm. I came to understand that this clicking was somehow the result of the shoplifting-prevention system. The clicks circumnavigated the modest gallery of backpacks, the pair of them running at ever so slightly different speeds, so they came in and out of phase with each other. In the background, amid the muffled sound of traffic and the rumble of the HVAC, you can just make out people talking, and as well as the sharp ping of a distant cash register.

Recorded at roughly 6:50pm in San Francisco’s Richmond District on Tuesday, December 16, 2025, on an iPhone 17 Pro using the standard Voice Memos app. Posted to Freesound and SoundCloud. This post is part of a collection of field recordings that last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.

In Sequence

It's about time

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I haven’t gotten a new (used) module in a while. I’ve wanted a sequencer for some time, and though I’ve had gate sequencers and trigger sequencers and sequencers that are a tiny part of a larger thing, and I’ve constructed the results of a sequencer from various modules, I’ve never before owned what you might call a proper sequencer, a dedicated sequencer — not until now. Looking forward to learning the ins and outs of this one. There are more advanced, or at least more fully featured, versions of the foundational elements found in this one, but the price was right, and I can always level up — and, of course, constraints are the name of the game.

A Melody as It Slowly Evaporates

A note from the Disquiet Junto

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Take a look at that waveform for a moment. Note the way it changes as it makes the steady transition from left to right. Understand that the waveform is a visual representation of sound. Hold off before proceeding to read the following explanation, and first just spent a little time looking at the image.

Now, what that image depicts is not just a melody, but a melody as it slowly evaporates. The piece itself is simple, the same melody over and over — well, almost. Each time the melody repeats, you see, a note is removed. This process of repetition and reduction continues until there is no melody left — except, that is, to the extent that melodies involve silence as much as they do notes. Which is to say, even the absence of notes is, in effect, a melody, all the more so since the ear hears the notes that go missing. Which, in turn, means that at the end of a piece such as this, perhaps we still “hear” the melody, just with our inner ear.

This is a track submitted by one of the participants, who goes simply by lp, in this week’s Disquiet Junto project. You can listen to it here, and read more about the project, and listen to a playlist of all the tracks people are contributing.

Scratch Pad: Lore, 1988, Obsidian

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, 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.

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 this Saturday habit 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:

▰ Back early on when I was teaching a course on sound at a local art college, maybe 2013 or 2014, a student asked me, during discussion toward the end of a semester, what I though the normalized state of everyday being would become, given how fast things seemed, at the time, to be changing — and this is a decade-plus ago — and my response, in the moment, was “flux.”

I though “flux” might become an everyday sensibility. We might be concerned about flux but we would also adjust to and even take pleasure in flux. Flux was sort of the opposite of the supposed “end of history,” or an aslant corollary. Flux was change as a manic constant.

What I didn’t foresee was “lore,” which has clearly prevailed. Lore is the glue — whether fictional, or as a matter of heightened narrative-providing, dot-connecting facets of everyday life — that keeps things together. Lore’s prevalence in particular in the consumption (and collective contribution to) popular fiction feels like an expression of a desire for such continuity outside of fiction: lore as an antidote to flux. Lore is the anti-flux.

I still take pleasure in flux. To me, flux is riding the everyday, a bit like standing while on a public bus, or dodging fellow pedestrians while keeping up a good pace on a city sidewalk. I’ve never had great balance physically, but I can handle the cultural and technological flux okay. Keeping track of lore is not as much of a strength for me, come to think of it.

▰ I’m always keeping an eye on the Obsidian roadmap, Obsidian being my note-taking and writing cross-platform app of choice. Excited for a lot of what’s ahead, especially multiplayer, mobile widgets, and Bases support for Publish.

▰ It’s kind of funny to attend a concert in a church with a massive pipe organ, and the pipe organ just serves as a visual backdrop. No one plays it.

▰ I had an iPod but the vibration of the pre-SSD ones weirded me out. I think I used mostly rando Sandisk-type ones until the Touch came out.

▰ I have, based on recent evidence, found myself deeply in a phase of my life where I find concerts of songs that are all verse chorus verse, and during which there’s no musical improvisation, to be fully claustrophobia-inducing.

▰ When I got out of college, in 1988, I lived, for a spell, walking distance from the old Knitting Factory, the one on Houston Street. This year, 2025, here in San Francisco, I managed to walk from my home to concerts featuring Marc Ribot (in Golden Gate Park) and Fred Frith (at the 4 Star), both of whom I saw at the Knitting Factory way back when. More of this in 2026, please.

▰ I didn’t finish reading anything this week, but considering what I finished reading last week, I think that’s OK. I’m very close on Jon Fosse’s Morning and Evening and Sarah Gailey’s Spread Me.