This is the “tube layout” for an ancient stereo console that someone left out on the street. The sticker, undated, was on an inside wall of the piece of furniture. When I complain about how absurd dealing with metadata of audio files continues to be, I like to remind myself that the past had its own difficulties and complexities.
A friend some time back shared a photo of an object in the current installation by artist Samson Young, Intentness and song, that is on view at SFMOMA (December 21, 2024 – June 22, 2025). I first encountered Young’s work when I reviewed Seeing Sound, an exhibit curated by Barbara London at the Kadist gallery here in San Francisco back in mid-2021. This new Young exhibit is a sizable space filled with ephemera, notably small gadgets that emit little bits of light and sound, much of it on tight loops, all of which resists easy mental collation. I was touched to find old familiar gadgets, like an Apple Newton and a Sony MiniDisc player, in the mix, as well as this book by the late sound artist Steve Roden, i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces. Young seemed to have excavated his own memory palace and created a vaguely Lego-like zone of contemplation.
The Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA is a dozen shades of fantastic. I fear it’s becoming cliché to note it, but with the sculptures, the physical objects are only part of the story. The shadows carry a lot of the weight, so to speak. And it’s really the interplay where things happen. It’s like the sculptures are the guitar solo, and the shadows are the result of delay and reverb pedals.
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.
▰ Amy Cimini has been recording since the early 2000s, and yet See You When I Get There — its title suggesting a certain amount of belatedness — is her first solo album, and it’s a solo viola record, to boot, exploring a range of timbre, textures, and techniques, with an emphasis on noise and and electronic mediation. Cimini is also the author of Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life.
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▰ I don’t focus enough on iPad music-making here, though I listen to a bunch, and many musicians I pay attention to include it prominently in their set-ups. This is Andrew Tasselmyer at work sampling and looping, as he puts it, in real time. Watch as it proceeds.
▰ This is a new-to-me (and newly uploaded) streaming bootleg of Bill Frisell playing solo at the Jazz Standard in Manhattan on November 21, 2019, just pre-pandemic:
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.
▰ Kudos to whoever on the Poker Face team ran the episode 7, season 2, credits in the typeface from the movie Heat
▰ It appears a drummer now lives near the tiny office I rent. I think I can work with this, as traffic noise and distance muffle much of it. Headphones can manage the remainder. I mean, someone can’t practice drums all day. Right? Right??
▰ So much of my favorite music is glitch. Thelonious Monk is piano glitch. Kid Koala is turntable glitch. Gregorian chant and early polyphony are architectural glitch. Janis Joplin is vocal glitch. I love when the fragility of engineering is put to purposeful use.
▰ The recent documentary (really more like a commissioned group memoir) Becoming Led Zeppelin was very enjoyable, and it was fun to be reminded of Jimmy Page having, in his early work as a session musician, done work on Muzak. I’d love if some superfan had managed to track down the specific material he contributed to.
▰ Keeping an eye on my Mac Mini via Screen Sharing on an iPad connected to my MacBook via Sidecar is my mundane version of Inception
▰ My Shazam is 90% music I disliked so much I had to find out what it was (maybe call this habit “hate-Shazaming”), and 10% stuff I loved but couldn’t identify, half of that originating from the inside of taco trucks
▰ I am far more up for this Superman movie than I expected to be. The trailer roll-out is doing its job. I mean, the teeth making a sound when they hit the camera after being knocked out by a punch (at 1:15)? Bonus points for major Frank Quitely vibes. Sign me up.
▰ Update: the drummer who moved near (but not too near!) the little office I rent appears to have made a bassist friend. They dig Cream, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath.
▰ This hold music is like a weaponized lullaby
▰ Update: The drummer near my little rental office skipped a day of practice, but filling the void was someone a few buildings away screaming on a phone for so long and so intensely that someone in a neighboring office started laughing.
▰ Finished reading one book this week: The Mushroom at the End of the World by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Well into several others, including the second Bosch and Stephen King’s The Long Walk, and probably too many others to count.
▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Tom Gauld posted, on Instagram, a four-panel comic involving the sound of a fountain pen, and I won’t give away the ending. (Thanks, Mike Rhode!) ▰ Robin Fox, on Instagram, posted the internal organs of a 1939 instrument, the Hammond Novachord, that contains no fewer than 163 (!) vacuum tubes. ▰ The account that goes by c1t1zen had a funny response, on Threads, to my latest doorbell post.
