downstream – Page 118

David Wingo’s New Mayans M.C. Theme

New season, new era, new drone rock

March 31, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

I’ve been enjoying the new season of *Mayans M.C.*, the first following the exit of co-creator Kurt Sutter. The fourth episode aired last night. The show continues under the stewardship of Elgin James, its other co-creator. Part of the new tone is due to the arrival of composer David Wingo, replacing Bob Thiele Jr. That new tone is set from the start by the new opening credits, which have [gotten attention](https://popculture.com/tv-shows/news/mayans-mc-season-3-new-title-sequence-revealed/) for their political imagery, not just the real-world source material, but the historic scope.

Wingo’s theme music is just as big a shift from the earlier seasons. Gone is the song co-written by Thiele and Sutter, sung initially by Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo, and then the second season by Diana Gameros. In its place, Wingo has crafted a compact, moody instrumental track that lingers just below 70BPM. It’s all atmosphere, built from layered guitar parts, moaning group background vocals, and plenty of percussive elements, all rendered as slow-burn drone rock. While not quite as diffuse as, say, the ambient folk and country of groups like [Boxhead Ensemble](https://boxheadensemble.bandcamp.com/) or [SUSS](https://www.sussband.com/) (the latter of whose Gary Leib [died last week](http://www.tcj.com/gary-leib-1955-2021/)), it sits well alongside them.

Wingo’s name wasn’t immediately familiar to me, but as it turns out, I’ve heard a lot of his music in the past. He composed material for *Soundtracker*, the excellent documentary on field recording artist and acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, co-author of the book *One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Quest to Preserve Quiet*. We discuss material from *Soundtracker* most semesters I teach my “Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds” course. He also wrote music for *Manic*, the (pre-*500 Days of Summer*) pairing of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel that made excellent use of some Aphex Twin music, as I wrote about in my book on *Selected Ambient Works Volume 2*, for which I interviewed its director, Jordan Melamed. Wingo has worked on the scores for *Heaven’s Gate: The Cult of Cults*, *Barry*, *Mud*, *The Report*, and numerous other productions, dating back to David Gordon Green’s 2000 debut feature film, *George Washington*. He also led the Austin, Texas, band Ola Podrida.

More from Wingo at [david-wingo.com](https://www.david-wingo.com/blog/031621).

Corruption Is Back

With a SoundCloud stream

March 30, 2021April 1, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

After a bit of a SoundCloud dry spell, when Japanese musician Corruption seemed to spend much of the time posting collections of older tracks [at Bandcamp](https://corruption-music-drugstore.bandcamp.com/), the steady stream is back, from ragged video game exotica ([“Amuse Myself”](https://soundcloud.com/corrption/amuse-myself)), to elastic drones ([“Worm Fat”](https://soundcloud.com/corrption/worm-fat)), to jagged metallic noise ([“Outdoor Indoor Edit”](https://soundcloud.com/corrption/useless-echoless-helpless)). Corruption is incredibly prolific, with well over 1,100 tracks to date on the account. Tune in at [soundcloud.com/corrption](https://soundcloud.com/corrption/tracks). A particular recent favorite is “Khakkhara,” named for the noise-making zen Buddhist staff, yet here sounding like a empty train barelling through a science fiction movie.

Algorave Review in The Wire

Livecoding by Chiho Oka, Kindohm, and AFALFL

March 29, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Yeah, that typeface means something. I’ve got a new piece in the Wire magazine, the issue with (musician) Warren Ellis on the cover. It’s a review of a livecoding livestream from February 13, 2021, of Chiho Oka (Tokyo), Kindohm (Minneapolis), and AFALFL (Paris), hosted by Alex McLean as part of the No Bounds Festival. There’s something quite digitally native about a livecoding livestream. Had algorave not already existed, Covid-19 certainly would have engendered this cultural variant.

McLean posted the full review at [slab.org](https://slab.org/tmp/page_84.pdf). The concert is archived on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/SwptAJS51hk):

Disquietude Podcast Episode 0005

Ambient music by Lesley Flanigan, Dave Seidel, KMRU, Celia Hollander, and John Hooper plus an interview with Flanigan, commentary, and a short essay about reading waveforms

March 28, 2021March 28, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the fifth episode of the Disquietude podcast of ambient electronic music.

The goal of the Disquietude podcast is to collect adventurous work in the field of ambient electronic music. What follows is all music that captured my imagination, and I hope that it appeals to your imagination as well.

All five tracks of music are featured with the permission of the individual artists or record labels. Below is the structure of the episode with time codes for the tracks, the spoken annotation of the tracks, an interviews with one of the musicians (Lesley Flanigan), and a brief essay about reading waveforms.

02:15 Lesley Flanigan’s “Headphone Space”

08:09 Dave Seidel’s “For LMY and MZ”

15:51 KMRU’s “Figures Emerge”

23:34 Celia Hollander’s “5:59 PM”

26:55 John Hooper’s “Underwater Stream”

29:20 Annotation Begins

32:39 Lesley Flanigan Interview

39:53 “Reading Waveforms”

42:00 Credits

42:59 Closing Music

43:26 End

Thanks for listening.

Produced and hosted by Marc Weidenbaum. Disquietude theme music by Jimmy Kipple, with vocal by Paula Daunt. Logo by Boon Design.

Disquiet Junto Project 0482: Exactly That Gap

The Assignment: Make a musical haiku following instructions from Marcus Fischer.

March 25, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 29, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 25, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0482: Exactly That Gap

The Assignment: Make a musical haiku following instructions from Marcus Fischer.

The following is lightly adapted from instructions by Marcus Fischer titled “Sound Haiku and Constraints in Composition.”

Background: Sound can be descriptive, emotional, and transportive or it can also be abstract when edited to be disconnected from a recognizable source and recontextualized in a composition. Michael Welch, an Adjunct Poetry Professor at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, states that the haiku “gains its energy by the intuitive or emotional leap that occurs in the space between the poem’s parts, in the gap of what’s deliberately left out. …The art of haiku lies in creating exactly that gap, in leaving something out, and in dwelling in the cut that divides the haiku into its parts.”

Instructions: Construct a Sound Haiku from a series of two-second “syllables” made from recordings you have captured. A traditional haiku is a poem written in three sections of ﬁve syllables, seven syllables, and then ﬁve syllables. Only seventeen syllables in all. Your audio recordings should be arranged into three sections of ten seconds, fourteen seconds, and then ten seconds, with each section separated by a pause of four seconds of silence.

Once you decide on a theme, try to focus each section of your haiku around aspects of that theme with noticeable contrasts in between each each two-second syllables. Keep in mind that gap between the parts and the power of that pause.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0482” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0482” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0482-exactly-that-gap/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0482-exactly-that-gap/)

Step 5: Annotate your tracks with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 29, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 25, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track will be, per the instructions, roughly 42 seconds.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0482” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 482nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Exactly That Gap (The Assignment: Make a musical haiku following instructions from Marcus Fischer) — at:

https://disquiet.com/0482/