Marc Weidenbaum – Page 49

Disquiet Junto Project 0724: Work It

The Assignment: The year's almost over. Do that thing you've been meaning to do.

November 13, 2025November 15, 2025 / 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 0724: Work It
The Assignment: The year’s almost over. Do that thing you’ve been meaning to do.

This week’s project is timely and open-ended. The year’s almost over. Do that thing you’ve been meaning to do.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0724” (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-0724-work-it/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, November 17, 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 724th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Work It — The Assignment: The year’s almost over. Do that thing you’ve been meaning to do — at https://disquiet.com/0724/.

Julian Lage in Repose

Two versions of a peek at the forthcoming album

November 12, 2025November 12, 2025 / By Marc Weidenbaum

As a longtime admirer of the guitarist Julian Lage, I’ve only wanted more from him in one area: more of him doing less. His is such a prodigious talent that, even with the casualness he emanates, even given his ease with his fellow players, his performances can sound not so much ornate or busy as, at some point, what might be described as additive, like an extra layer (or two) of complexity is eventually introduced where space might have provided another way to explore the given material.

Now comes “Opal,” the first track off a forthcoming full-length album, Scenes from Above, delivering exactly this sort of purposeful spareness — and wow does it deliver. The album, due out from Blue Note in late January 2026, features Lage’s new group: a quartet with keyboardist John Medeski, bassist Jorge Roeder, and drummer Kenny Wollesen. The plainly stated melody at the heart of “Opal” never goes into overdrive. Where Lage might earlier have expanded on themes at length, here he strips them back and lets them enter a state of repose. He takes pauses, and not for another member to solo, but for the substrate of the piece to be given room and time. There are eloquent pauses and muted refrains.

The first single from Scenes from Above, “Opal” is up on streaming services, and better yet there is live video version, which is even less embellished than the album take, lacking the bits of fractured piano, and lingering instead on Medeski’s near-subliminal organ. Up above is the live video take, and here is the album version:

Light Brown Noise (Zimoun Edition)

From France's Musée d'Arts de Nantes

November 11, 2025November 12, 2025 / By Marc Weidenbaum

A new video of a new Zimoun installation is always a treat, and this large scale one from the Musée d’Arts de Nantes in France does not disappoint. At this phase in Zimoun’s expansive career, video documentation is as much a part of his work as are the installations themselves. This brief new footage, just over a minute long, is edited to display his characteristic array of inexpensive materials put to pattern-generating use, the result a gentle rainstorm rendered as a product of geometric beauty. Each of its 528 boxes contains a single cotton ball on a loose metal cable connected at the box’s base to a rudimentary motor that is held in place by a wooden plank. The cables are just long enough that the balls seem to hover over the grid, bouncing along the edges of the cardboard enclosures. Based on the close-ups in the video, this was shot early in the exhibit’s run (it has just started this past week), because the cardboard shows little to no wear from the constant motion. Presumably there will be more cumulative texture by the end of the run, on March 1, 2026 (nantesmetropole.fr).

A few months in advance of the Musée d’Arts de Nantes exhibit, Zimoun posted a video of a single one of these boxes, back when it was, presumably, still in prototype mode. The box’s closing flaps were yet to be removed. In the above video, from :39 to :41, you can see a strand of the cardboard coming loose from where the flaps were trimmed.

At first the structure of the museum installation confused me. The brief description at the start of the video lists, characteristically, its components: “528 prepared do-motors, cotton balls, cardboard boxes 40x40x60 cm, 2025.” The video’s opening wide view suggests it as a square, but there is no simple square root of 528. If the number of boxes was 529, this would be assumed to be a grid of 23 x 23 boxes. Then I noticed that from :54 to :56 in the video you can see it is laid out, in fact, as a triangle. A still image on the museum’s website shows this as well.