Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

On Repeat: Demo, Jazz, Sine

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.

▰ There’s upstream, and then there’s up upstream. As you find your curiosity pulling you deeper into the making of music, you take pleasures in demos of new functionality for pre-existing gear. A “no-talking” (YouTube category of demo) performance for a couple minutes on an instrument called the Tonverk is also a master class on ambient glitch, with a minor in dub influences. I played this on loop for an hour while reading at night. The performer is Keinseier, a film composer based in Hamburg:

▰ Nothing makes me happy as a listener quite the way jazz musicians teaming up with electronic musicians do, and a key example is the trio of Jason Moran (piano), BlankFor.ms (aka Tyler Gilmore, electonics), and Marcus Gilmore (drums), together for their second full-length outing, titled Shards — ambient and atmospheric, then gently abrasive, always considered and thoughtful:

▰ A relative oldie (five years) but a head-trip goodie, this is an hour-long live performance (click on the link, because the embed isn’t working) by Lesley Flanigan for voice and a couple of literally industrial-strength sine wave generators. This was taped very early in the pandemic when arts organizations (NYC’s Roulette here) were doing live streams to keep the culture moving and stay on mission. I was reminded of this when a friend sent me a link to a new article about people using archaic test equipment to make music.

Scratch Pad: Tuner, Neuromancer, Alerts

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts serves, I’ve found, as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. Some items show up on disquiet.com before this post, in which case I don’t repeat them. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ I was distracted during the movie Tuner when a piano tuner, in one of many such metaphoric excursions, said that a single key can seem in tune yet may not fit in with the other 87 — all while sitting at what we’ve been told is a Bösendorfer, which I associate with expanded keyboards (92 and 97). I then read up, and was reminded that Bösendorfer makes regular pianos, too, so no foul. Still, I wondered why mention that specific manufacturer, beyond a very pro-Yamaha production over all (note the t-shirt worn by the younger tuner, and the shade thrown on Steinway by the maestro — and Yamaha owns Bösendorfer).

▰ Has a composer been announced yet for the upcoming Neuromancer TV series? The cast and crew are listed in detail on IMDB (including a lot of puppetry — what’s going on there?), among them both sound and music supervision, but no composer is named.

▰ If you happen to go back in time and meet much-younger me, please mention that in the future I’ll live walking distance from at least five Burmese restaurants. And after an inevitable pregnant pause, mention how tasty Burmese food is. Thanks.

▰ It’s alarming how many fire engines, with alarms blaring, have gone by the living room window in the past half hour, all headed toward the ocean — and this all the more alarming because it is not noon on a sunny day.

▰ No music in the barbershop, just two scissors, not in anything approaching sync. … Eventually the semi-silence was broken by the Hollies’ “Jennifer Eccles.”

▰ I many years ago turned off all alerts on my phone except texts, which I mute after hours, and phone calls. At some point I turned on Slack weekdays during work. The only other app that snuck through and that I stuck with is YouTube Music, so on occasion I get these random alerts about a new release by Atarashi Gakko! or some string quartet or John Fogerty or Sarah Davachi, and those are all sort of a treat. In other words: thumbs up to treat alerts. Just, as with sweets, not too many of them.

▰ Finished reading some manga tankobon this week. There was the first volume of Ao Kojima’s Hon Nara Urdu Hodo, about a bookstore, its owner (and previous owner), and its customers, all of which sprawls into these lightly connected stories that have a bit of a Midnight Diner (by Yarō Abe) vibe in terms of structure. And then there were the first three volumes of Tomoko Yamashita’s Ikoku Nikki, which is about a 15-year-old girl whose parents die in an accident, and who is taken in by her mom’s sister, a fiction writer. The aunt is somewhat anti-social and the teenager is more outgoing, and while they truly don’t understand each other, they understand that they don’t understand each other, and that appears to be enough to provide a foundation for their relationship. Both series are quite good, and I’ll continue reading them for sure. Nikki ended after 11 volumes, after which Yamashita moved on to another series about a novelist, this one titled Tatsumaki, which I’ll check out as well.