Current Listens: Halo Live + Aphex-ish Mansell

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)

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NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases

▰ Mike Weis translates grief into the beautiful, moving [*49 Days (Music for a Transition)*](https://grannyrecords.bandcamp.com/album/49-days-music-for-a-transition), two quarter-hour tracks of bell field recordings pushed nearly beyond recognition. This is a record I hope to get around to writing about more soon, but I wanted to get a mention in sooner still, because I’ve been returning to it daily.

▰ Lush and ambient all the way through, this [20-minute live](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swe_lXRZQXM) solo performance by Laurel Halo was recorded at the Monastery of São Martinho de Tibães near Braga, Portugal.

▰ Fahmi Mursyid, based in Bandung, Indonesia, ekes ripe atmospheres from a tape loop. The actual original tape is priced at $99. Four tracks derived from it comprise the album [*Satu*](https://ideologikal.bandcamp.com/album/satu), the digital version of which is set at whatever price the buyer wishes to pay.

▰ There’s a lot of beauty in Clint Mansell’s score to Ben Wheatley’s new film version of *Rebecca*, much of it devoted to expertly old-school thriller grandeur. One standout track, [“Côte d’Azur,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfzxc6wSiUU) is to Aphex Twin’s solo piano “Avril 14” what Wheatley might have hoped his film would be to Hitchcock’s *Rebecca*: alternately hinting at and veering from the original, and offering its own pleasures entirely.

▰ Also, covered with a bit more depth: Fadi Tabbal’s fifth solo album, [*Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions*](https://disquiet.com/2020/10/23/tabbal-subject-to-potential-errors/), + the Yumi Iwaki / Ryan J Raffa split [*Living Distances*](https://disquiet.com/2020/10/20/iwaki-raffa-split/).

Premiere: Lebanese Musician Fadi Tabbal’s 5th Solo Album

Co-released by Beacon Sound (Portland) and Ruptured Music (Beirut)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Today marks the release of Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions, the fifth solo album by Lebanese musician Fadi Tabbal. From the pointillist delays of “On the Escape Boat” to the lush, cavernous drone of “Triptych Photography,” it’s a beautiful collection of music that at once is emblematically peaceful and yet also vibrates with an undeniable substratal energy.

This post is a premiere, thanks to the invitation of the Portland-based label Beacon Sound, which has co-released the album with Ruptured Music, a label in Beirut, where Tabbal lives. Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions is structured around a trio of tracks, each titled “The New and Improved Guide to Birdwatching” (“Vol. 1,” “Vol. 2,” and “Vol. 3”). They take as their source material for transmuting not birdsong but a human voice. The voice belongs to Julia Sabra of the band Postcards. Instead of dreamy pop music, though, here her singing is pure dream: sweet, ethereal syllables that Tabbal each time through contorts with textural processing.

A deeper voiced, and more choral, approach energizes “Ceremony by the Sea,” which introduces a gorgeous melodic line: part French horn, part fog horn. If there is a palpable intensity to the music overall, that may be owed to a doubling of pressures. The record was created by Tabbal during the period of Covid-19 self-quarantine, and done so in a city that suffers from untold external and internal political and economic forces.

Album available at [beaconsound.bandcamp.com](https://beaconsound.bandcamp.com/album/subject-to-potential-errors-and-distortions). More from Tabbal at [faditabbal.com](http://www.faditabbal.com/).

Disquiet Junto Project 0460: Creative Destruction

The Assignment: Show how you got to a tortured sound.

/ 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, October 26, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 22, 2020.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0460: Creative Destruction

The Assignment: Show how you got to a tortured sound.

Step 1: Through some multi-step process, arrive at a complicated, tortured sound. Keep track of how you got there.

Step 2: Record a piece beginning with the end result: that complicated, tortured sound. Then transition to the start of the process and build back up to the end result, slowly repeating how you got you there.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0460” (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 “disquiet0460” (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-0460-creative-destruction/

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, October 26, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 22, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. The sound should be torturous, not necessarily the experience of revisiting it.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0460” 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 460th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Creative Destruction (The Assignment: Show how you got to a tortured sound), at:

https://disquiet.com/0460/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0460-creative-destruction/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Image associated with this project is by Chris Smart and used via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

https://flic.kr/p/jDndy

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Iwaki/Raffa Split

On the Muzan label

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a lot to recommend the new split release by Yumi Iwaki and Ryan J Raffa, Living Distances (on the Muzan Editions label, out of Nara, Japan). Start with Iwaki’s “April,” a thick bed of throbbing, pulsing tones plus Cheshire Cat choral vocal effects appearing here and there in the mix. Then go for “Correlation,” Raffa’s combination of rattling metallic effects and fragmented field recordings. There’s much much more to the album’s 10 tracks, some more challenging (Iwaki has a thing for fractured dream-state sound design, notably on “Spiral Flow”), others welcomingly lulling (Raffa closes things out with an artificial landscape the listener will be hard put to exit; fortunately it’s the longest track on Living Distances).

Album originally posted at [muzaneditions.bandcamp.com](https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/living-distances). More from Iwaki at [soundcloud.com/iwakiyumi](https://soundcloud.com/iwakiyumi) and from Raffa at [rjraffa.net](https://www.rjraffa.net/). Both are based in Tokyo, Japan.

Current Listens: New Autechre, Textile Music

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰

NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases

▰ The ensemble Third Coast Percussion teamed up with modular synthesizer musician Bana Haffar for a nearly 20-minute performance of “Shed,” inspired by the textile art of Anni Albers. And as a side note, how amazing is it that Haffar’s own website, [banahaffar.com](http://banahaffar.com), is simply a Google Sheet with bits of information and outbound links? More on the piece at [blackmountaincollege.org](https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/performance-bana-haffar-third-coast-percussion). (Thanks, Kim Rueger, for the recommendation.)

▰ Another fine, dramatic yet [gentle patch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY5AMfHoEzI) from Michigan-based Orbital Patterns.

▰ Grassy Knoll has a new EP due out at month’s end, and one of the preview tracks, an instrumental, is a strong crunch of noir-detective electronica. The track is “Into Your Mind,” and the EP is [*EP01*](https://thegrassyknoll.bandcamp.com/album/ep01). It’s due out October 29.

▰ Autechre is back with [*Sign*](https://autechre.bandcamp.com/album/sign), its first album in over two years, though that doesn’t count over two dozen live sets released in between, not to mention a lengthy NTS archival broadcast. It’s more sedate, less brutal, than much of their recent music.

▰ Noise album from the duo of Chinese musician Yan Jun (更多) and Bani Haykal, who I believe is based in Singapore. The record, [*Rats in the Bright Southern Sky*](https://yanjun.bandcamp.com/album/rats-in-the-bright-southern-sky), came out a year ago this month, but I’m just beginning to explore its spartan mix of rapid-fire loops, industrial drones, snatches of voices, and invigorating feedback. (Thanks, Grzegorz Bojanek, for the recommendation.)