On Repeat: In the Wild

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

This week, all field recordings:

▰ George Vlad reports from a spot in Surrey, England, where he managed to record nature sounds without intrusion of passing cars and planes. He writes: “I recently discovered one such pocket of quiet while hiking in my local patch in Surrey. It’s a wooded valley nestled between two hills with a small brook at the bottom. There’s some farmland nearby but this time of the year there isn’t much activity, and the only road in the area isn’t too busy. It took me a couple of drop rig attempts before I could get the balanced perspective I had in mind. I wanted the natural geography to act as a kind of parabola, focusing the bird calls towards where my mic was. I also wanted to capture the subtle babbling of the water.” More detail at the link and from Vlad at wildaesthesia.bandcamp.com.

▰ The great Bandcamp account of freetousesound posted a collection of 28 short snippets of birdsong from Sri Lanka, plus two five-minute-long opening tracks.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=494575537 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

▰ Seán Ronayne, late last year, posted a set that combines Irish and Catalan field recordings. The notes state “[E]very effort has been made to produce tracks free from anthropogenic (human-made) noise. However, traces may appear. I have chosen to let these rare instances through, rather than lose a track because of their minimal intrusion.” This strikes me as a wise, in the Solomonic sense.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=1380737637 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

▰ And for something far more urban, Jan Sampermans recorded, from a hotel rooftop, the honking and general bustle of Bangalore:

In Bloom with Brian Eno & Peter Chilvers

One of the best apps ever

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Bloom app developed by Peter Chilvers and Brian Eno hasn’t been updated since 2024 but there’s a new half-hour-long video of it playing on YouTube. Maybe something new is coming? (Update: per David Mead below and Deb Chachra on Mastodon, it’s related to the Eno documentary, and on Facebook I benefited from the indefatigable Bruce Levenstein drew my attention to an even longer version of this audio that is available through music streaming services, more on which below.) The video is titled “Brian Eno x Bloom – Bloom: Living World (Video Edit),” and it is one of several such recordings than Eno has posted over the past year or so. The Bloom app is available for iOS and Android, and it also runs on macOS. I often have Bloom going in the background as I work, set in “Listen” mode rather than “Create,” so it can do its chill thing automatically. The app is a generative marvel, the circles appearing and disappearing in sync with the soft beads of sound that slowly come and go in relative prominence.

Here is descriptive text about Bloom: Living World from Eno’s Instagram:

Brian Eno has reimagined Bloom as a studio work, applying treatments to an hour long recording and adding subtle sonic touches. It is accompanied by Bloom: Small World, which encapsulates the whole experience into a concise 5 minutes and thirty four seconds. Accompanying the music is an original video edit, also generated from the app.

In Eno, the new film about his creative life, Brian explains that his approach to making each piece of music is to think of it as creating a new world. In Bloom: Living World this is illustrated with elegance and simplicity.

Disquiet Junto Project 0683: Space Shot

The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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 0683: Space Shot
The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant.

There is just one step to this project. Record a piece of music in which half of the material is recorded in a highly reverberant space (or has spaciousness applied to it through effects) and half of the material is just sound in isolation, devoid of any sense of space or place.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0683” (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-0683-space-shot/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, February 3, 2024, 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 683rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Space Shot — The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant — at https://disquiet.com/0683/

On Repeat: Dub, Buchla, Jamuary

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

This week, all live performances:

▰ Andrew Tasselmyer (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) gets quietly catastrophic with this dubby seven-minute live piece:

▰ A full hour-long set from synth legend Suzanne Ciani (Bolinas, California), just uploaded, but recorded last April in Milan. It goes everywhere — wispy space music, Tron-style pulse-raising beats, utter chaos. It’s something else.

▰ Jamuary — that’s not a spelling error — is the gift that keeps on giving, as electronic musicians upload work throughout the first month of the year, like this percolating set of looped elements from lap steel guitar, by Magnetic Loops of Bristol, UK:

Disquiet Junto Project 0682: Unring a Bell

What if you could?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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 0682: Unring a Bell
The Assignment: What if you could?

There is just one step to this project. The idea that one cannot “unring a bell” is a fairly common saying, at least in English. But what if you could? What might it sound like? And what use might the unrung bell serve in the making of music. Please record a track in which you try to unring a bell.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0682” (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-0682-unring-a-bell/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, January 27, 2024, 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 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/