This was at the corner. I resisted the urge to snag it.
Down on the Corner
Almost out in the street
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
Scratch Pad: Algorithm, Apps, Mycology
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.
▰ I sometimes wonder if the Algorithm processes that much of the music I Shazam is stuff I can’t stand, so I can avoid it in the future. The Algorithm can’t regularly distinguish curiosity from affection from dislike.
▰ Listened to some old Power Station albums for the umpteenth time and remain astonished by Tony Thompson’s drum production
▰ I love when it’s clear a website has tweaked its backend because suddenly the RSS reader is full of a dozen or so old posts
▰ I’ll take a small pleasure at the end of the week. I use an phone app a lot, and I so send a note to its developer with a small suggestion, and less than a day and a half later my suggestion is part of the app, and now I’m using the app even more regularly. Doesn’t matter, really, what app, or what feature. Just a kind of interaction and response and sense of connectedness I marvel at, and hope not to stop marveling at.
▰ End of week:
▰ A lot of foghorns and a lot of wind, that’s what’s going on here. Have a good weekend.
▰ I didn’t finish reading any books this week, but I’m about halfway through the first Bosch novel (by Michael Connelly), The Black Echo, and about a quarter of the way through The Mushroom at the End of the World (by Anna Lowenhurst Tsing). I love how seemingly unrelated books that one might read at the same time end up having connections. For example, without giving too much away about the Bosch book, both it and the mushroom book center around skills gained by people in Vietnam and around Southeast Asia, and how those skills then get transferred to the United States: in one case, of military veterans committing crimes based on skills learned in tunnel combat; and in the other, of mushroom hunters foraging in the forest.
More Live/Stream Venues
In both Boston and Brooklyn
The word “livestream” is for events that are streamed live. During the early pandemic, that was in lieu of an in-person audience, and these days it means simultaneous with the live performance. These latter events are something special, not “livestream” so much as “live/stream”: offering locals and the far-flung (and the infirm, or otherwise homebound) opportunities to attend. I made a list earlier this week of a bunch of venues that live/stream regularly, and here are two more, courtesy of folks on the very interesting izzzzi.net social network, where I hang out a bit:
▰ A member named brandon directed me to Boston-based Non-Event (nonevent.org), which is not livestreamed but has a heap of archived material from past events at various places, including a 45-minute Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe show at Boston City Hall, which as of this writing merely 214 people have streamed, Jessica Pavone at First Church a few months back, Raven Chacon, Neil Leonard performing Phill Niblock, and much more. These are egregiously under-viewed full-length concert recordings. I’m used to being one of 10 people seated on folding chairs at a concert, but a year and a half later, a Seth Cluett solo show should have more than 414 views. I’ve now subscribed to the Non-Event YouTube channel, and look forward to what’s next, and exploring its past. (And Non-Event is not a venue in the physical sense. It puts together shows at a wide range of places.)
▰ And courtesy of another izzzzi member, onewayness, I’ve been introduced to Wonderville in Brooklyn, which has a presence on Twitch and YouTube, a lot of live coding, modular, and other musical activities. I’ll be digging in.
I’ve added both these to my “Livestreams After Lockdown” post.
Disquiet Junto Project 0696: Chain of Layers
The Assignment: Make music change by altering its layers.
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 0696: Chain of Layers
The Assignment: Make music change by altering its layers.
This project is the first of three that are being done by the Disquiet Junto in collaboration with the 2025 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 3 through 7. The festival topic this year is « Kette » — which translates, as the organization explains, to “Chain”: “Chains connect but they also bind. They create relationships but also restrictions. As a gift they look nice, feared when used in vice, and yet they can span bridges across fire and ice.” All three Junto projects will engage with the work of Svetlana Maraš, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 festival.
We are working again at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the seventh year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.
Step 1: Record 10 to 15 layers of continuous sound.
Step 2: Create a piece of music in which you only change the relative presence of those individual layers from Step 1 over time. Some light effects and panning are certainly fine, but the majority of the impact should be how the prominence of the individual layers changes.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0696” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.
Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0696-chain-of-layers/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you.
Deadline: Monday, May 5, 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 696th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Layers — The Assignment: Make music change by altering its layers — at https://disquiet.com/0696/
Listening to Mushrooms
And the presence of John Cage
Yes, I’m enjoying Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s 2015 book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, which I’ve owned for almost as long and started twice and am finally getting into. It’s interesting how much John Cage is in it. Even before I got to the Cage mention at the start of the “interlude” between section I and II of the book, I’d noticed, amid all the mycology (of which Cage was a major enthusiast), much attention paid to “indeterminacy” (“the unplanned nature of time,” in the author’s words) and “happening” (as opposed by Tsing to “gathering”), both key Cageian concepts.