The Dark Side of Ekin Fil

At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Back in mid-April, perhaps when it felt more like an end might be in sight, when the new abnormal was more new and more abnormal, a group of musicians under the umbrella of Katuktu Collective individually recorded nine tracks with a shared theme. The album is titled *Isolate With I.* It’s described as follows:

>A compilation of music recorded entirely during the coronavirus pandemic in two parts, a dark and a half-light, messages in a bottle from our island to yours. Both parts are free downloads; if you hear something that resonates with you, please visit the individual tracks for more information and to support the artists directly.

This album is the first half, the dark half. (If you didn’t know the title of the second half, you might read the “I” as first person. It’s a Roman numeral one, in fact; the second album is *Isolate With II*.) The participants include C. Brickell, German Army, Fading Tapes, Danni Rowan, the Corrupting Sea, Aidan Baker, Anders Brørby, Brian Case, and Ekin Fil. Fil’s track, “Detour,” is a highlight, the underlying rumble like a train running fast, the intermittent patches of noise like echoes in a series of tunnels. It’s so stark, so precise, one could easily imagine that the piece isn’t electronic, and that she had scored it for strings and timpani.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/ekin-fil](https://soundcloud.com/ekin-fil/ekin-fil-detour). The full album is available for free download at [katuktucollective.bandcamp.com](https://katuktucollective.bandcamp.com/album/isolate-with-i). More from Ekin Fil at [ekinfil.com](http://www.ekinfil.com/).

Five Nights

An online collaboration from Cody Ellingham and SJF

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

New Tapei: construction in the distance, a mid-rise building illuminated with color bands, the music an orchestral drone with a sublimated pulse. Hong Kong: viewed from above, a forest of lit skyscrapers, the music lending the drama of a thriller. Tokyo: a dark street corner, much of the light coming from a set of vending machines, the music introducing a glitchy twitch.

Those are three of the five cities that set the scene for Wander the Night, a collaborative online project from photographer Cody Ellingham, who has a way with images that seem intended to benefit from the projection of screens, and musician SJF (Simon James French), who has a way with held tones and underlying drama.

The website contains five pages, each pairing one of Ellingham’s striking photos along with a roughly 10-minute recording by SJF. The images are still, but a gentle current pushes clouds across the screen, from left to right. (Pictured up top is Bangkok.) For added emotional undercurrent, there’s an option to add some rain. It’s a beautiful collection, and a moody accompaniment if you have a spare screen at your disposal.

The score is also available for streaming and purchase:

Visit at [wanderthenight.com](https://wanderthenight.com/), and don’t expect to leave anytime soon. The photos are available as prints and in book form: [store.derive.tokyo](https://store.derive.tokyo/).

Listen Out a Window

Thanks to WindowSwap (dot com)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The great thing about [window-swap.com](https://window-swap.com) isn’t necessarily the view. WindowSwap is a site where people can experience browser-spanning views out other people’s windows, and the folks sharing their view generally seem to leave the microphones on. So you don’t just see. You hear. You listen. When you have a glimpse out a window in Wangerooge, Germany, for example, you can hear water gurgling, as well as what seems to be office noise. When the feed switches to Haridwar, India, there’s birdsong. A siren passes, the source unseen, by someone’s pad in Mexico City, Mexico. There’s pots and pans rattling from a home in the Indonesian city of Tangerang. It goes on and on, around the globe and back again. It isn’t an endless itinerary, though. I’ve only used it a few times, and already come to notice repeat windows.

If WindowSwap brings the world close, details from the individual settings make the notion of distance (that is, of difference) more amorphous. The Tangerang kitchen has a radio playing, of all things, Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual.” The shot of Bangkok, Thailand, is as generic as might be: open laptop inside, dangling power cables outside; nearby are sounds of construction work. And then there’s the houseplants, which are universal, with an emphasis on pint-sized succulents. As it turns out, nothing is unusual.

Nothing is unusual in part because a shared aesthetic has kicked in. No human is in view, at least not on the inside of the buildings. The window in each is likely centered and fairly horizontal, or outside the frame of your browser. No brands are to be seen. And what we hear is quiet precisely because the people doing the filming are themselves, for the most part, keeping quiet. We’re hearing their world in a unique circumstance where they are doing their best not to be heard. It isn’t everyday life; it’s life minus us (with some exceptions made for actual activity, generally at least a room away).

It’s also not everyone’s life. It’s a self-selecting cohort who have the interest and time to participate, and whose domestic life allows for such a thing. The supposed quiet of right now, amid the pandemic, can be overstated. There is violence, and protest, and anxiety, and noise. To a degree, the windows viewed through on WindowSwap comprise the opposite of disaster tourism. It’s a depiction of placidity in a world that is, in point of fact, anything but. That siren in Mexico City is the rare discordant sound in all the videos I witnessed. WindowSwap is, in a manner of speaking, another form of peer-to-peer sharing.

That said, though, the service is beautiful, and serene at a time when serenity is in short supply. In my office-chair travel, I didn’t just tour the quiet world; I also came across some familiar views, one from far across San Francisco, where I live, and another from a window on a rainy evening in Manhattan. The latter was especially familiar, and then I noticed the name Nomadic Ambience in its corner. That’s a [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqRTj-Nu_8to3jIBlXptOtA) I subscribe to, one of several that post lengthy, uncut footage of stationary and ambulatory periods. It was a uniquely internet experience to run into not someone but someplace, someplace that was familiar, a place I’ve never been and yet where I have spent considerable time. I often have such videos running in slow motion on a secondary screen at my desk.

According to a [Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jul/15/covid-19-travel-windowswap-photos) story by Poppy Noor, WindowSwap’s developers, Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam, are based in Singapore, and initially created it for friends during our extended pandemic, and later opened it up to submissions. The videos aren’t live, which explains why so many tend to be shot during daylight hours. The submission guidelines request the recordings be 10 minutes in length, long enough to immerse oneself in. And there’s a caveat, listed as an “update” on the submissions page, that brings up privacy concerns: “All videos have sound. So please make sure not to say anything private or sensitive. If you want your sound to be removed please let us know. Or record a video without sound. To safeguard your privacy, we will only display your first name in the credits. If you want your full name to be added, let us know.” Sound may have been a secondary consideration upon launch of WindowSwap, but it’s at least 50 percent of the experience.

Check it out at [window-swap.com](https://window-swap.com/). The above images are, from top to bottom, of Shanghai, Copenhagen, and Singapore.

Current Listens: Noctural Tokyo, Philly Beats

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is my 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

▰ Deborah Walker’s *Starflux*, on the Elli Records label, ends with a spectral reworking of the prior tracks, committed by Emanuele Battisti, who also mastered the record and, thus, knew Walker’s work intimately. The metronomic rhythms of the source audio are re-rendered with a halo effect, the earthy original material turned into something intergalactic.

▰ This isn’t music, per se. It’s an hour-long video someone took while walking around a neighborhood in Yokohama, Japan, at night. There is sound, however, the associated field recording of overheard chatter, and footsteps, and crosswalk signals. I usually have something like this running at half speed on a second screen when I work. Even better in black and white.

An added treat: the recorder of these videos, who goes by Rambalac, posts a map of the route. Here’s the one for this footage:

▰ A couple months ago I highlighted a set of Small Professor’s instrumental hip-hop, and then missed the arrival of a subsequent downtempo hip-hop collection, *A Jawn Supreme (Vol. 1)*. As the title might suggest, Small Pro, who traffics in expertly reworked samples, is based in Philadelphia. One highlight is the fractured piano lead on “Reflection,” in which the producer’s hand is just as light yet present as that of the original pianist.

4’33” on Ukulele

A sonic postcard from New Orleans

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s World Listening Day tomorrow, July 18, coincident with the birthday of the important composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer, who will turn 87 years of age. It was Schafer who helped us understand the world of sound around us as a consensual composition. Like John Cage, who was two decades his senior, Schafer helped us strive to hear through our cultural experience so we could gain perspective on it. It is to him we own the modern sense of the word “soundscape.” In this video, uploaded this evening, the night before World Listening Day, Todd Elliott performs John Cage’s 4’33”, and true to the original, he notes the change in the movements: he fingers new chords, but the music remains silent. Or does it? A point of Cage’s 4’33” (I hesitate to say “the” point, as doing so would be helplessly reductive) is to both recognize the contours of the performance, the cultural signifiers, and to hear through them, to hear the world framed by them (in his writings, Cage brings up the wire scupltures of Richard Lippold as a useful comparison). The beauty of this video is that the quietness tempts you to just leave it as is, and imagine it to be silent. But it isn’t silent, not in the sense of a digital void. Turn up the volume and hear the fan, a sliver of which is in view, haloing Elliott’s head. Gain a sense of the room tone. Note variations, like the uptick in the room’s hum that happens around the 2:30 mark. Part of the composition-ness of Cage’s 4’33” is the extent to which it is truly perform-able. There are rules to it, and the thoughtful performance considers them. It isn’t merely sitting still for the prescribed length of time. Elliott’s rendition is solid, including the brief bit of heard uke and the broad smile at the end.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsfoSjTo784). Todd is a friend who recently relocated to New Orleans, where this was shot. It serves as a parallel listening experience to [the recent home-office field recording](https://disquiet.com/2020/07/06/rob-walker-shares-a-sound-shot/) of another NOLA-based friend, Rob Walker.