Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Irish Pumps Are Droning

Natalia Beylis explores her organ's unique qualities

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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It’s hard to define in specific terms what distinguishes generic drones from interesting ones, as sometimes the difference can be a matter of context, but generally it’s because something is happening in the drone, perhaps a richness to the overtones, perhaps additional sonic elements. The quality can be fairly subtle and, yet, substantively transformative. Both those latter points — the overtones and the extraneous sounds — are central to The Roots of the Mountain Ash Embrace The Stone II by composer Natalia Beylis.

The sounds — thick as a chocolate shake — are made from a pump organ. Beylis’ interest is the way the simple act of the air making its way through the device creates microtonal variations. In addition, there is something almost alive in the creaking of the instrument. As she puts it in the accompanying liner note: “The clatters and groans heard within this recording are the sounds of my old pump organ leaning into its idiosyncratic self.”

This isn’t meditative music, per se, because at times the dense sine waves of the organ speed up, and then they quickly, even suddenly, subside. Such is not the stuff of a peaceful listen. However, it is fascinating as music to make peace with, to enter into a contract with to just listen for the half hour or so straight, and follow where the sounds take you. More from Beylis, who is based in Ireland, at nataliabeylis.com.

On Repeat: Patagonia, Houston, Macedonia

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’m still in the process of wrapping my head around the highly imaginative Estuario by Juliana Kaiser, who mixes tonal synthesizers, environmental field recordings, rickety percussive ticks, and slightly muffled voice recordings, among other elements. Intoxicating and transporting. It’s almost like a drama-less radio drama. Kaiser is from Patagonia, Argentina, and lives in Buenos Aires.

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▰ I’m a sucker for that realm where the orchestral, the glacial, and the granular become virtually indistinguishable, and such is the case with Drift by LA EL, who is based in Houston, Texas:

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▰ After the Wildfire is a fantastic album of Fourth World music from Jan Bang (“live sampling, electronics”) and Arve Henriksen (“trumpet, voice”), though despite the title credits, it’s actually a quartet, rounded out by Eivind Aarset (“guitar, electronics”) and Ingar Zach (“percussion”), and in fact more than that, as it also involves them playing “set within the orchestral textures shaped by” the FAMES Institute Orchestra and Macedonian voices, arranged and conducted by Džijan Emin. The quartet are all from Norway. The other musicians are based in the Republic of North Macedonia, where the sponsoring body for this work, the Skopje Jazz Festival, is based.

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I tracked down some footage on YouTube (see below). I recommend starting the album with “Halfway Between Noon & Sunset.”

Scratch Pad: Sirens, Scores, Hex

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. 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.

▰ When you live near the ocean, sunny day = lots of sirens

▰ Always interested when a director scores their own film. This is from Jim Jarmusch’s upcoming Father Mother Sister Brother.

▰ The day after 909 Day is:

▰ I got a pickup that separates a guitar into six (fairly) distinct outputs. It’s neat seeing, thanks to an oscilloscope, how the notes ring out in a chord. This is three pairs of strings, from lowest (left) to highest (right).

▰ Reading: Busy week, during which I managed to finish one novel I’m reading — and to not start too many others. I’m working my way through Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) and I recently read True Grit by Charles Portis (1968), and in that context I came to wonder if these might be somewhat rarefied, where westerns (or novels of the the west) are concerned. I set out to read a “proper” western, by which I mean one that maybe spent substantial time as a trade paperback? I was recommended a handful, and I selected — essentially because the library had it — The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971) by Texan author Elmer Kelton (1926-2009), and boy did I enjoy the heck out of it. It’s a tight, quite intense story that goes through several distinct phases, with a bunch of well-sketched characters, and it’s also a lesson in how a certain amount of detailed description of specialized activities (here those of ranch hands, at work and at home) can ground a story. There is a climax during a major court scene that brings to mind the famous one from Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, though it plays out differently.

Test Post with Image

Hey, it worked

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the current status of my small Intellijel case for Eurorack synthesizer modules. That spot on the bottom will soon be filled with a joystick. I have wanted a joystick module for a long time. As a friend joked yesterday, I’ve had joysticks in the past, but they’ve just been for video games. He was right. I just haven’t had one that works with my synthesizer.

It took me a long time to decide what joystick module I even wanted, a key decision being whether it would be one where the stick immediately returns to the center, or one where it stays where it has been positioned. I opted for the latter. We’ll see how it goes.

Racks like this, I’ve long since learned, are often in flux, so I’m under no impression that it’s gonna last forever but it feels pretty good and I’ve been having fun with it.

That spot at the top is TBD. I think I wanna put some sort of input in, but I’m having trouble locating a small module that would work well with guitar with sufficient gain, but I may be reading the specs of the various options incorrectly, so maybe there are some obvious ones I’m mistaken about. Also, my definition of “small” may be too narrow, so to speak.

Anyhow, the point of this post is primarily to see if I can actually publish a post to my site with an image from my phone, now that I’ve got the WordPress app working properly.