AI as reply guy: when you’re just searching for references to a given Oblique Strategies card.
Reply Guy, Eno Edition
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
Currie x Sweeney
Live on ConcertLab
The ConcertLab channel on YouTube has quickly become one of my favorites. It’s an expertly produced series of live performances, with a substantial subset of contemporary classical pieces from a wide range of musicians. These videos aren’t static cameras with cuts between angles, or high-concept productions aiming for the narrative veneer of a pop music video. They are considered presentations that highlight the musicians in an elegantly stark setting with excellent sound.
Among the recent entries is the Colin Currie Quartet, a fantastic percussion ensemble, here playing “Starburst” by Scottish composer Aileen Sweeney. It’s a lightly propulsive, occasionally dreamy piece that puts the spotlight on the mallet instruments.
I was going to say that part of the appeal of the videos is how they’re all filmed as if you’re in the front row of the venue, but this video is a little different. It’s one of a new ConcertLab series that aims for a more VR-like experience, one that places the listener within the ensemble. VR glasses aren’t required. You can navigate by swiping the video, and the camera itself moves continuously.
More from the quartet at colincurrie.com and from Sweeney at aileensweeney.com.
Ambient Nail Spa
Language in the wild
Okey dokey. There’s a hypothetical linguistic fork in which “ambient” becomes an even newer “aesthetic.”
Scratch Pad: Ballard, Oblique, IMAP
From the past week
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 find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media 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.
▰ “Rows and rows of disused milk floats / Stand dying in the dairy yard / And a hundred lonely housewives / Clutch empty milk bottles to their hearts”
The Jam’s “Town Called Malice” could be re-titled “Town Called Ballard,” as in JG, and you wouldn’t have to change another word.
▰ The excellent You Are Listening To website got a relaunch/reskin/reboot:
▰ An Oblique Strategies hack. Choose two, and contemplate how they play together and what tension surfaces between them:
phone: “Cut a vital connection”
laptop: “Destroy nothing; Destroy the most important thing”
▰ IMAP is still magic
▰ One of the best things comma I think comma about voice-to-text is overhearing people speaking punctuation out loud comma as if they’re standing at a blackboard in grade school period
Also comma you can easily weed out people who don’t use serial commas period
▰ When I’m back in New York, I always listen for whose music I’ll hear first: Billy Joel’s, Bruce Springsteen’s, or Bon Jovi’s. After a week and a half on Long Island free of all of them, I stepped off the LIRR and into Penn Station, only to be greeted by a subway busker playing “Uptown Girl” on a Melodica.
▰ Been in New York for two weeks now, read less than I have during any equivalent period of the year. Digging into a short novel to dig myself out of the whole. OK, a couple short novels.
More Solo (Roger) Eno
From his new album
Here’s another track in advance of the release of Roger Eno’s third album for the Deutsche Grammophon label, Without Wind / Without Air. As with the previous “Alembic Distillation,” this is a fairly brief solo piano piece. The focus is a pastoral melody, leaving equal parts for space and notes. Titled “Spell,” it hovers in an ambiguous zone. The somewhat elegiac quality registers as autumnal, but there’s a hint of spring green shoots in there, as well.