Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

Scratch Pad: Sirens, Scores, Hex

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 find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. 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.

▰ When you live near the ocean, sunny day = lots of sirens

▰ Always interested when a director scores their own film. This is from Jim Jarmusch’s upcoming Father Mother Sister Brother.

▰ The day after 909 Day is:

▰ I got a pickup that separates a guitar into six (fairly) distinct outputs. It’s neat seeing, thanks to an oscilloscope, how the notes ring out in a chord. This is three pairs of strings, from lowest (left) to highest (right).

▰ Reading: Busy week, during which I managed to finish one novel I’m reading — and to not start too many others. I’m working my way through Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) and I recently read True Grit by Charles Portis (1968), and in that context I came to wonder if these might be somewhat rarefied, where westerns (or novels of the the west) are concerned. I set out to read a “proper” western, by which I mean one that maybe spent substantial time as a trade paperback? I was recommended a handful, and I selected — essentially because the library had it — The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971) by Texan author Elmer Kelton (1926-2009), and boy did I enjoy the heck out of it. It’s a tight, quite intense story that goes through several distinct phases, with a bunch of well-sketched characters, and it’s also a lesson in how a certain amount of detailed description of specialized activities (here those of ranch hands, at work and at home) can ground a story. There is a climax during a major court scene that brings to mind the famous one from Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, though it plays out differently.

Scratch Pad: Ribot, E, Snowball

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 find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. 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.

▰ This year’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival lineup is getting insane. They just added Marc Ribot. (More artists are yet to be announced. Someone even bigger than Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash, and Lucinda Williams? Crazy.)

▰ Occasional reminder:

video games, E = everyone

music, E = explicit

▰ The ambient/techno Turing Test: I’ll know my computer is sentient when it mocks me for playing Nils Frahm’s Music for Animals and Monolake’s Cinemascope on repeat all day.

▰ Switching from iCloud to Obsidian Sync — for syncing Obsidian vaults — was a tad more complicated than I’d imagined, but it is now working for me on multiple devices. #whew

▰ Snowball playlist: heard a band, led by Roger Glenn, cover Oris Mays’ “Don’t Let the Devil Ride” live; listened to Mays’ original; listened to a version by Leo “Bud” Welch, who was on the label Fat Possum; listened to heap of songs by an old Possum favorite, Junior Kimbrough, and on and on

▰ An excellent simple (and affordable, and portable) second screen for a laptop (mine: MacBook) is an older-generation Android tablet (mine: Samsung) with both running Duet — especially stable using USB, rather than wifi

▰ Happiness is the developer of an app you use a lot adding a button/function you’d requested

▰ As posted at the end of the week: And on that note, have a good weekend. See you Monday, or maybe Tuesday.

▰ Reading: I am certainly reading far too many books at the same time at the moment, but so be it. I finished reading one novel this week, my 17th this year, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, and two graphic novels, Alien: Thaw (which I picked up because I like writer/illustrator Declan Shalvey’s comics, though this one he didn’t draw; Andrea Broccardo did) and Con Artists (by Luke Healy, who wrote and drew it, and who has a great line).

Disquiet Junto Project 0714: Remix Yourself

The Assignment: Rework your own music as if someone else had.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
An old sepia tone photo of a woman and her reflection in a standing mirror, plus the name and number of the project

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 0714: Remix Yourself
The Assignment: Rework your own music as if someone else had.

Step 1: Think of a musician whose remix work you appreciate.

Step 2: Select a track of your own.

Step 3: Remix the track in Step 2 as if you were the musician in Step 1.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0714” (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-0714-remix-yourself/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Is it an extended remix, or a radio edit?

Deadline: Monday, September 8, 2025, 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 714th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Remix Yourself — The Assignment: Rework your own music as if someone else had — at https://disquiet.com/0714/.

Amstel x Kronos

And x Philip Glass

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I previously mentioned the Amstel Quartet, all saxophones, doing “Grandmother and Kimitake” (actually “1934: Grandmother and Kimitake”), a piece from composer Philip Glass’ score to the 1985 Paul Schrader film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, originally recorded by Kronos Quartet, all strings. This is Amstel doing another piece from the same score, though I’m not entirely clear on the track. On the video channel, it’s listed as “1962: Blood Oath” but there is no such track on the movie soundtrack release. The album does have a “1957: Award Montage,” which is roughly the same length as this, and a “1962: Body Building,” which is not, and two other tracks that actually include the word “blood” in the title: “Kyoko’s House (Stage Blood Is Not Enough)” and “Runaway Horses (Poetry Written with a Splash Of Blood).” Making the situation all the more complicated — though also pretty much confirming my sense that it’s the “1957: Award Montage” piece — is that on the album titled Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass (Brooklyn Rider is a string quartet), there’s a track titled “1957: Blood Oath,” also roughly the same length. Such discographical issues aside, Amstel’s is a great performance, just rich with subtle interplay, and it’s another fine video from ConcertLab, which is staking out an interesting realm of video-specific audio recordings of new music.