Getting to the Tracks

How one ends up listening to something

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I think sometimes about not just what I listen to but how I get to the music I listen to, how a recording ends up being a focus of my attention. For example:

▰ Taylor Deupree is often on my mind, in his capacity as a musician, and a record label owner, and the moderator of a great Discord, which is an offshoot of his record label. And he has an excellent newsletter on his process, which is how I ended up spending this afternoon listening to some forays into what he calls “digital degradation territory.” Beautiful stuff. Definitely give it a listen.

▰ It was then through another Subtack, dated earlier this month, from the musician Lia Kohl, that I came across the name Dorothy Carlos, whose Split EP, which came out in August, I’ve been listening to quite a bit:

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▰ And then there’s Julian Lage doing the bluesy “Nocturne” live in Manchester, thanks to the steady feed of his YouTube channel:

▰ And the instrumental of Casual’s “That’s Bullshit,” which I sought out after a friend informed me that the rapper Saafir (who appears on the track) had died. Choice taut sampling.

▰ And a couple tracks off the upcoming Oneiris from Chloe Lula. I learned about it from her Instagram. She’s melding her cello with her interest in electronic music. Dramatic stuff.

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Vibrating with Decisive Purpose

Lowercase glitch from Oleg Malov

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Fizzy, twitchy little sonic trinkets, the longest just a couple seconds over four minutes, the shortest a little over two and a half. Lulling bits of room tone split into fragments and scanned through as if with a radio dial. Beats made of considerably less than the sound of dust brushing against a vinyl player’s needle, other times — in classic glitch fashion, here rendered all in lowercase — like a questionable, all-plastic CD player well past its return date. Beats like windshield wipers made of eyelashes. Beats like stray thoughts caught in a spider web on a rickety wooden metronome. A hushed voice struggling to be heard, and yet cagey about what it might want to say. These are the components that comprise New Old Loops, a set as compact as it is delicate, at once intimate and private, and yet vibrating with decisive purpose. The musician is Oleg Malov of Tuapse, Russia. Malov, who goes by Okmiracle, knows exactly what he is doing, and it’s low-key glorious.

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On Repeat: Skupina, Jackal, Rohrer

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’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Really digging this mix of light synth tones, nature field recordings, and slow singing from Manja Ristić and Tomáš Šenkyřík, from the Czech record label Skupina. There are moments on Vstal when the artificial tones fit in more like background sound than prominent additions.

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▰ I don’t have an embed or a link for this, because the music isn’t available — yet? — as an album, but I’ve ben enjoying the scene-setting score that Volker Bertelmann (aka Hauschka; All Quiet on the Western Front, The Old Guard) composed for the new The Day of the Jackal, the one starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch. Spy thriller scores, especially those serving stories that don’t veer too much into science fiction, are a steady source of rhythmic and moody background listening, and this one doesn’t disappoint. (He’s been very busy. He also scored the new Dune TV series, Dune: Prophecy, and Conclave, both of which have album releases.)

▰ I’m still working my way through Samuel Rohrer’s new album, Music for Lovers, which I discovered due to a guest appearance by characteristically ethereal trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer on one dubby track, “The Gift.”

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Disquiet Junto Project 0672: Day Break

The Assignment: Make a handful of sonic alerts for various purposes.

/ 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 0672: Day Break
The Assignment: Make a handful of sonic alerts for various purposes.

Step 1: You’re going to make alarm sounds. Think about the alarms and alerts — phone, egg timer, microwave, neighborhood church bells, etc. — that currently go off regularly in your life.

Step 2: Make a list of a handful of instances you want to create an alert for, like something urgent and something that’s a gentle reminder, and so forth. Maybe you have a different tone for each morning of the week?

Step 3: Record roughly five (more or less) sonic alerts for the purposes you decided upon in Step 2.

Step 4: Make one track with each of the alerts separated briefly by some silence. When posting the track online, be sure to list the intention behind each alert.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0672” (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 https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0672-day-break/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long do you plan to snooze for?

Deadline: Monday, November 18, 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 672nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Day Break — The Assignment: Make a handful of sonic alerts for various purposes — at https://disquiet.com/0672/

Car Talk

Think of it as GTASMR, or in this case GTAVSMR

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’ve been doing a lot of research these past few years into field recordings, those of both the natural environment and the built environment. Bridging, in a manner of speaking, the gap between the two respective realms are the environmental sounds that fill video games, virtual reality, and the like. They are artificially created yet intended to give the impact of something real, something heightened or extrapolated, something — to use the ubiquitous term — immersive. Many of these high-definition sonic studio concoctions are derived from actual field recordings, while others are produced more synthetically. Such recordings are, of course, intended to be experienced in a given context.

However, as with the one heard (and seen) below, in which a driver navigates the nighttime streets of the 2013 game Grand Theft Auto V, there is a large and growing audience for prerecorded video game experiences, and though they are, inherently, audio-visual, many of these fan recordings are couched in sonic terms, like “ASMR” and as “sleep aids.” There is something lulling, indeed, to this city drive, which the title informs us has “NO LOOPS” — which is to say, it is a constant, non-repeating stream of different journeys around the open world of the video game, courtesy of the channel named Video Game Weather ASMR. It is also, per the functional title, eight hours long. The primary things I found myself listening to are the car engines and the rain, and I found myself listening for variations therein. Your mileage may vary. I recommend starting at the beginning and then checking out the different scenarios, each from the point of view of a different driver/character in the game. There is a clickable table of contents to the video, helping situate you should you want to know where you are — or more to the point, who you are — at a given moment.

This is excerpted from the Friday, November 8, Listening Post (0026) issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter.