Every year (pandemic excepted), San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is host to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, a three-day free (!) extravaganza of American roots and roots-derived music. I live close to the park, and marvel that many years — including this one — I get to walk on over and see Nick Lowe play outdoors. Today, the first day of the festival, I caught two acts: Margaret Glaspy and, shown above, the great Marc Ribot. The week’s fog and rain had disappeared overnight, and these sets made for a fantastic start to the weekend. Glaspy (in a trio) and Ribot (solo) were just two of numerous acts on two of the festival’s six stages, the others much larger than this one.
The Assignment: Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization.
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0718: Planet Jam It The Assignment: Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization.
The year is 2126, and your spaceship is on a routine science expedition of the outer reaches of previously unexplored parts of the universe. Your crew has encountered, for the first known time in human history, a planet that is home to sentient life that has developed an advanced civilization not unlike our own. After settling into geosynchronous orbit, you send down a stealth drone to explore. The drone captures audio and video. Please share the audio of your drone’s reconnaissance mission.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0718” (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.
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 718th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Planet Jam It — The Assignment: Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization — at https://disquiet.com/0718/.
I had a darn good time at the Stork Club in Oakland on Friday, September 26. Caught two performances:
Sachi’s Mirror, a local band, is either violinist/vocalist Shaina Pan’s project with supporting musicians, or the name of the trio, but in either case was thoroughly engaging. She routes her electric violin through a variety of guitar pedals, and the drummer did a great job of playing in a manner that sounded trip-hop-ish, the way it resembled precisely sampled beats, while the guitar player provided texture and patterning. Pan’s voice had a shoegaze-y quality to it, and the songs were well-constructed. You could really hear what they are working toward.
There were three other acts on the bill that night, one earlier and two later, and of them I only also saw Angoisse Magazine, a quartet (though often described as a trio, so perhaps they expanded for the tour). If you’re familiar with pop-psychedelic movies of the 1960s and early 1970s, then you have a sense of a certain type of louche score (essentially, stylish background music) and how those films might also feature a rock’n’roll band at some key point (like the Yardbirds pop up in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup). Angoisse Magazine is as if the score and such a band were one and the same, and they segued charmingly back and forth between the two modes.
In advance of the album’s release on October 17, the first track off North Woods from composer Scott Ordway and Lorelei Ensemble, conducted by Beth Willer, Lorelei’s artistic director, is up on Bandcamp. Lorelei is an adventurous group of vocalists who have recorded and performed music by such maverick composers as David Lang, Maggi Payne, Steve Reich, and Toru Takemitsu. Ordway’s North Woods has, apparently, been part of the group’s repertoire for more than a decade. The eight voices come across like sweeping winds, layers ever-shifting, as tones come in and out of sonic focus. Its lyric was sourced from Tacitus, Roman historian whose life bridged the first two centuries AD. More from Lorelei ensemble at loreleiensemble.com and Ordway at scottordway.com.
