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.
▰ The ever prolific Jeannine Schulz just released NØinmi TwØ, which, based on its typographic and cover treatment, seems to be (maybe?) part of an ongoing series of hers. As is often the case, there is a strong presence of processed field recordings. One track, “twØ,” stands out with its brittle, infinitesimal beat.
▰ The score to The Veil, the new spy thriller TV series, features original music by Jon Opstad (Bodies, We Hunt Together) working from themes by Max Richter (The Leftovers, Arrival, Ad Astra). It’s a post-classical effort, with the presence of some choral vocal parts, as in “Exploring the Camp,” that distinguish it from a lot of TV scores.
▰ Now / Never / Whenever, Vol. 7 is the latest in Oval’s occasional series of short, pay-as-you-like releases (you can get them free, but paying a small amount keeps them in your Bandcamp library, which is useful in the mobile app). The second track, “September Scab,” is particularly lovely. Apparently it’s a “quasi-cover,” as Oval puts it, of the A.R. Kane song “Scab.” Oval refers to this version as “faux jazz,” and I don’t myself really hear the jazz in it, but it’s a nice combination of disintegrating keyboards at atmospheric whirring.
The Assignment: Record music for a party of your choosing.
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0644: Event Horizon The Assignment: Record music for a party of your choosing.
Step 1: Imagine a party you want to attend.
Step 2: Write some music that would be appropriate as background music for that event.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0644” (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.
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 644th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Event Horizon — The Assignment: Record music for a party of your choosing — at https://disquiet.com/0644/
Another gorgeous live performance by Andrew Tasselmyer, who here runs four often though not entirely unidentifiable piano samples through various processes, yielding a piece at once cinematic and immediate, at once widescreen and obscure. Watch his hands as he manipulates the source material. Track motions to alterations, finger gestures to sonic morphing. And if you’re familiar with the central instrument, the Octatrack, then you’re no doubt thankful we don’t hear the familiar clack of those plastic buttons, which would be entirely out of place here. I especially appreciate how his index finger ends the performance with a single tap on the laptop’s touchpad. We’re long past the time of rampant doubt about what it is exactly a “laptop musician” is up to (and the associated “are they really performing?”). Here what we see is the same intimacy inherent in expertise that one might expect of a “traditional” (read: “acoustic”) instrument. Manual skills are manual skills, no matter the tools.
I love record albums, certainly, but in 2024, as for many years now, there’s nothing for me quite like fragments posted by musicians online as they work toward a finished work. The word “work” appears twice in that previous sentence, eventually as a synonym for a fixed document, but first as the effort it took to get there. You can hear that sort of effort in an untitled track that Taylor Deupree just posted in his newsletter, which is titled The Imperfect. The recording is just under three minutes of looping drones. Per the brief description, there are two loops: “loop a / Arp2600, pitch pipe, wooden abacus → strymon volante → meris mercury x / loop b / kaleidoloop.” If the words aren’t familiar, a quick search online will reveal the instruments being described. What matters is the result, a kind of lush, syrupy stasis, the sonic equivalent of a nearly blank mind that is stuck on something ponderous, but not uncomfortable with the mental obstacle. It’s a beautiful little treat. The audio is only in Deupree’s newsletter, so you’ll need to click through to listen.
I really enjoy writing liner notes. I only write them for albums I like enormously, the most recent of which came out today: Lieder Ohne Worte by Marco Lucchi and Henrik Meierkord. It was released by Chitra Records, which is based in Oxford, Mississippi. The title means “songs without words” in German.
Marco Lucchi, based in Modena, Italy, and Henrik Meierkord, based in Stockholm, Sweden, have a lengthy collaboration to their reciprocal credit, and they accomplish it far and near alike. A testament to the interplay of their work together is that a listener might be hard-pressed to discern which of their recordings are the result of long-distance file-trading, and which occurred when the two managed to be in the same place at the same time.
Several aspects of their respective music-making serve them well as creative partners. First of all, both tend toward the ambient, given as they are generally to a slow pace and to a sensibility that manages to be at once radiant and intimate. Secondly, while both are multi-instrumentalists, there is a complementary nature to their specialties, Lucchi being more of a keyboardist, Meierkord more of a string player. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, they are both immersed in techniques drawn from electronic music.
In particular, both men are experienced with live multitrack recording, in which they process and layer their own performances in real time. Meierkord is fond of layering sinuous tones to create scenarios of unique dimensions. It becomes uncertain — even unimportant — to the listener what preceded what, so intricate is his deployment of interplay. Lucchi likewise finds parallels between classical orchestration and the opportunity for drones lent by modern synthesizers; in a small room he can create a vast space. There is often an oceanic depth to such efforts, part composed and part improvisatory, in which playing is a tool toward composition, rather than the other way around.
Throughout their new record, there is an underlying melancholy, a nostalgic beauty, and a reflective consideration — a virtue that is foundational to their ongoing collaboration. The result is particularly rich in plaintive scene setting, as on the glacially paced “La bestia umana,” which emerges from a neighborly field recording of a dog barking, and “Kosmisk Strålning II,” which maintains a dream-like quietude, more shadow than light. On “Like tears in rain,” what sounds like a synthesizer is, in fact, a piano, a recording of which has been stretched beyond the point of it being readily identifiable.
On first listen, their leaning toward unimpeachable steadiness can seem uniform, but listen more closely and you’ll recognize how explicitly they emote on a track like “The Third Stage,” due not just to the reaching melodic surges (which, in turn, match the sampled recordings of bird calls) but to the slight discordances that suggest trouble and tension. In a different manner, there is “A warm and golden October,” which balances breaking-dawn hush with piercing overtones. That track features a motif at the end, played on a celesta; those bell-like tones edge the piece out of dreaminess without entirely breaking the spell.
The greatest outlier — dog barking notwithstanding — may be on “Oändlig,” not just for its fierce pulse, but because of its more immediately electronic vibe. “Oändlig” is an exceptional piece, bringing to mind the minimalism of Terry Riley and the rave classics of Underworld.
