When Tonality Is the Excursion

A live set by Eivind Aarset and his band

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Norwegian musician Eivind Aarset opens this piece for his quartet (featuring bassist Auden Erlien and two credited drummers, Wetle Holte and Erland Dahlen, though one of them, Holte, only spends some of the time drumming) with syrupy held notes, Aarset’s electric guitar’s tone extended beyond the instrument’s inherent, unmediated possibilities. Delays that slowly fade keep notes in play, clock-like pings becoming whisps, strums becoming halos. There seems to be a precognition of this early on: right at the start, it’s as if another performance is layered under this one, if you listen closely — perhaps bleed from a nearby room, perhaps an intended substrate, perhaps a bit of something caught in the digital buffer of one of those tools arrayed in front of Aarset. A drummer’s soft-ended sticks provide muted thumps amid brush strokes. The bassist plots the contours. Though credited in the video with drums, Holte is clearly up to something else, playing what appears to be a lap steel or pedal steel guitar. It’s a stately performance: jazz more concerned with tonality than with melodic excursion; pop more interested in sonic potential of phrases than in the rigor of repeated verse and chorus. Which is to say, it is Eivind Aarset through and through.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS7lRhegX4g).

Steve Swartz Inhabits the Landscape

On Desert Meditations

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s an evident buzz above the surface of “Department of the Interior,” the first track off Steve Swartz’s album, *Desert Meditations*, that sounds like a fly circling the ointment, like your stereo has a bum speaker cone, like there is dust on your needle — like a musician has had enough of digital production techniques that emphasize frictionless grace and, in turn, inadvertently sever listening from the physical experience of sound in everyday life.

The drone that arrives is not mere drone — not that any great drone is mere drone, or a casual one for that matter, but the drone here is more than just reverberating ambience, even more than reverberating ambience with a dollop of rasty sonic discomfort. There’s an abundant, if willfully slow-moving, generosity to the shifting layers. There’s a flute (or flute-like instrument) somewhere in the mix, and not so deep to be pure texture. It brings to mind the more sublime efforts of R. Carlos Nakai as much as it does the 1970s ambient of Brian Eno.

Swartz apparently recorded the album while in the southern Utah desert. The full album, like this track, certainly correlates with the arid, the remote, but it also doesn’t stick with easy illustrations of desolate natural landscapes. This is not just dust and decay. It very much down in the dirt. The music emanates the impact of heat and isolation. A lot of music that is conceptually tied to a territory is said to “map” the landscape. This doesn’t merely map the landscape; it inhabits the landscape. It’s heady and spacious and meditative, certainly, but also of the body, through and through.

*Desert Meditations* is due for release on April 8, 2022. It’s available at [swartz.bandcamp.com](https://swartz.bandcamp.com/album/desert-meditations). More from Swartz, who is based in Detroit, Michigan, at [swartzet.tumblr.com](https://swartzet.tumblr.com).

Disquiet Junto Project 0530: Minimally Viable Music

The Assignment: How much less is just shy of too little?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 28, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 24, 2022.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

**Disquiet Junto Project 0530: Minimally Viable Music**
The Assignment: How much less is just shy of too little?

Major thanks to Saga Söderback for having come up with this project. There is just one step:

Step 1: Make the thing you think is the minimum viable music.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0530” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0530” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0530-minimally-viable-music/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0530-minimally-viable-music/)

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 28, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 24, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Is longer more, or less?

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0530” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

Major thanks to Saga Söderback for having come up with this project.

More on this 530th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Minimally Viable Music (The Assignment: How much less is just shy of too little?
) — at: https://disquiet.com/0530/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0530-minimally-viable-music/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0530-minimally-viable-music/)

The Sonic Set Design of Kimi

Cliff Martinez's new score is killer.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Cliff Martinez, one of the essential soundtrack collaborators of movie director Steven Soderbergh (ever since *Sex, Lies, and Videotape* back in 1989), has scored *Kimi*, Soderbergh’s most recent film. In it, Zoë Kravitz plays a remote tech worker who stumbles on what appears to be a violent assault while doing her desk job, which involves listening to audio recorded by domestic digital assistants. Kimi is not the name of Kravitz’ character. She is Angela. Kimi is the feminized brand of devices — à la Alexa, Cortana, and, of course, Siri — that drives the film’s plot.

*Kimi* is very much inspired by classic Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, notably *Rear Window* (1954), though rather than a physical injury, it’s a kind of agoraphobia that keeps Angela stuck at home in Seattle. (The name Kimi seems like a nod to Kim Novak, the actress who appeared alongside *Rear Window* star Jimmy Stewart in 1958’s *Vertigo*.) Angela’s home is a brick-walled industrial loft from which she keeps a wary eye on the pandemic-era outside world. Soderbergh explores the physicality of the residential space throughout the movie, right up to almost the very last minute. Angela’s loft resembles the workshop of Harry Caul, the investigator played by Gene Hackman in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film *The Conversation*, which was also obsessed with technological eavesdropping. (It’s almost a joke that a building that felt low-rent in 1974 feels downright enviable today.) The camera guides us through the open plan while Martinez’s music alternates between narrative tool, window into the emotional state of Kravitz’s character, and pure sonic set design.

This is one of Martinez’s best scores. It beautifully merges a chamber orchestral palette (actively engaging with the legacy of Bernard Herrmann’s famed Hitchcock cues) with synthesized lines, making the most of the quietude allowed by modern digital production — the same digital realm that allows a device like Kimi to exist in the first place.

My favorite cue from *Kimi* is “Watch the Spray,” in which what at first seems to be a violin solo quickly reveals itself as a synthesized melody, one that remains expertly intertwined with the underlying symphonic bed. If there’s something eerie to that combination of strings and synthesizer, it’s arguably because the machine-made sounds of Martinez’s score serve as a parallel to how the Kimi devices are insinuated into people’s everyday lives.

Disquiet Junto Project 0529: Squared Off

The Assignment: Explore the number 23.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 21, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 17, 2022.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

**Disquiet Junto Project 0529: Squared Off**
The Assignment: Explore the number 23.

Major thanks to Eanna Butler for helping come up with this project:

Step 1: This is the 529th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project. The number 529 is what happens when you take the number 23 and multiply it by itself. Consider various interesting aspects of the number 23. For example: Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. It’s the number from the Birthday Paradox (read up!). Also, 529 is an “octagonal number” (read up some more!). The earth’s axis tilts at 23° (rounded down). Anyhow, have fun exploring.

Step 2: Make a piece of music that engages with the number 23.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0529” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0529” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0529-squared-off/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0529-squared-off/)

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 21, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 17, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Some variation on the number 23 might be in order.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0529” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

Major thanks to Eanna Butler for helping come up with this project:

More on this 529th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Squared Off (The Assignment: Explore the number 23) — at: https://disquiet.com/0529/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0529-squared-off/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0529-squared-off/)