I was interviewed for WFMU's Radio Free Culture podcast.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Radio Free Culture WFMU exists to, per its credo, “examine issues at the intersection of digital media and the arts.” I was excited to be interviewed for the podcast by Erik Schoster, aka the musician He Can Jog. We talk about a wide range of subjects, including the role of netlabels in the age of streaming, listening strategies in our age of sonic abundance (forum digging as the new crate digging), the benefits and challenges of platform agnosticism (in light of the Disquiet Junto’s shifting dependence on SoundCloud), the imminent 250th weekly Disquiet Junto project, the imminent 20th anniversary of Disquiet.com (December 13, 2016), and the return to active duty of Aphex Twin.
As of August 30, 2016, I’ve updated this with the audio embedded. You can also listen at [prx.org](https://beta.prx.org/stories/185793).
Loops both digital and natural courtesy of Denmark-based Robert Rizzi
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
The piano is not entirely lost, though per the title of the track it is deconstructed, and muddied by the presence of a field recording. The full track title is “Deconstructed piano improvisation and Field recording etude No.5,” by Robert Rizzi of Kolding, Denmark. The field recording is largely bug noise, “this summer of cicadas on Mallorca, Spain,” according to Rizzi. Amid the high-pitching buzzing, the piano is heard cutting in and out, notes more like shards than notes. They break in the middle or start midway. They repeat like a stutter, like a memory caught on a loop, sometimes so swiftly that the digital processing is self-evident, but often with a whispery, casual quality — almost flute-like at times — that makes this half-real piano sound just as real, just as natural, as nature’s own looping white noise.
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/rizzi](https://soundcloud.com/rizzi/deconstructed-piano-improvisation-and-field-recording-etude-no5). More from Rizzi at [twitter.com/RobertColeRizzi](https://twitter.com/RobertColeRizzi).
Like [yesterday’s featured video](https://disquiet.com/2016/08/20/delay-in-multiple-directions/), this video pushes the legibility of live filmed performance. Yesterday’s technically involved multiple live takes overlaid, each obscuring the others, and the ambient quality of it having less to do with any individual performance in the first place and more with the chance correlations that occurred as a result of the post-production act of accrual. Today’s video, by Flohr, is too murky and unidentifiable to ever be mistaken as a tutorial. And, of course, any modular synthesizer piece, such as this, that employs self-generating patches thus involves little if any human interaction. The hand comes down from above, the scale and surprise a bit like a Monty Python animation, a couple times, but by and large, this is really a live performance as fixed document — a patch playing out in realtime as something set in stone nonetheless, or in this case set in plastic and metal. The piece, “Spring Reverb Feedback Paths” by Flohr, is a shiny, rapidly cycling shimmer worth putting on repeat.
Flohr is Eric Flohr Reynolds of Atlanta, Georgia. More from him at [soundcloud.com/flohr](http://soundcloud.com/flohr) and [ericflohrreynolds.bandcamp.com](https://ericflohrreynolds.bandcamp.com/).
It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing [YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-) of fine [“Ambient Performances.”](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/30/a-youtube-playlist-of-ambient-performances/)
Echo, reverb, delay — common elements in ambient music, as they take sound and expand the space in which the sound resounds, the space the sound suggests, the impression the effects in turn give of a large hall, a deep cistern, a lengthy corridor. By expanding that space, they make space the prevalent concept of the music, the organizing principle. Music that makes you think about its spaciousness makes you stop thinking about it merely as a forward progression. To think spatially is to think in multiple directions at once, and to think of them as having relatively equal value. Even if the spacious music isn’t expressly static, like a drone, it is still distinct from music that moves firmly from beginning to end.
All of this came to mind while listening to [an overlay video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4aN_PtW8mw) by Bassling, aka Jason Richardson of Australia. He posted a piece in which multiple test runs of a Junto project — the current one, which involves [providing a mini-tutorial for a favorite skill](https://disquiet.com/0242) — are played atop one another. The impression is of echo, of a single motif repeating off into the distance. But the effect, the reality, is quite different. Certainly for each note there are others than follow, but it isn’t consistent in which of the layers the note is first heard. Likewise, the notes fade in near unison, rather than in sequence. Thus the echo effect is complicated significantly — made both flatter and more chaotic. The layering itself was inspired by a previous Junto project, one proposed by Brian Crabtree (a developer of the Monome grid instrument), called [“layered sameness.”](https://disquiet.com/0223)
More from Richardson on the piece at [bassling.blogspot.com](http://bassling.blogspot.com/2016/08/disquiet-junto-0242-share-yer-knowledge.html). Video originally posted at [YouTube.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4aN_PtW8mw).
It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing [YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-) of fine [“Ambient Performances.”](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/30/a-youtube-playlist-of-ambient-performances/)
The Anti- label has posted another track from Daniel Lanois’ forthcoming *Goodbye to Language* album. It’s even more tripwire and slipstream than the previously shared [“Heavy Sun.”](https://disquiet.com/2016/07/08/daniel-lanois-goodbye-to-language/) The new piece, “Deconstruction,” is even more likely to turn on a moment’s notice, and to shift subtly from one transient listening zone to the next. It plays almost like a trailer of the album, composed as it is of myriad small segments, muffled blasts of warped pedal steel, gaseous cloud effects in full force. It features Rocco DeLuca on guitar, though his performance, like Lanois’, is so deeply consumed by processing that the presence of the instrument is artfully muddied, to the extreme. The album will be released on September 9.
There’s also a video that, like the music, emphasizes atmosphere. It’s packed with images of Lanois at work, but they’re all through fish-eye lenses, or are filmed close up, or appear in quick, fractured moments:
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/antirecords](https://soundcloud.com/antirecords/daniel-lanois-deconstruction-feat-rocco-deluca). More on the album at [anti.com](http://www.anti.com/artists/daniel-lanois/).
