Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

On Repeat: Parker, SML, James

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.

▰ The Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, a jazz foursome, posted a full video recording of a live set, doing their new album, Happy Today, co-released May 15 by the International Anthem and Nonesuch labels — heavy on atmosphere and exemplifying a rich sense of ensemble:

▰ SML, a jazz quintet, revs percolating minimalism into virtual Afrobeat in this first available track from their forthcoming live album, Spontaneous Music Live, due out June 26, also on International Anthem:

▰ Glitch/IDM producer Loraine James works with vocalists a lot lately — introspective rap, sultry soul, stream-of-consciousness spoken word — and her excellent recent album, Detached from the Rest of You, released May 8 on Hyperdub, exudes artful anxiousness:

Scratch Pad: Sichuan, Bern, Bay

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, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online 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.

Another light week. Guess I’ve been busy. (I have.)

▰ You know it was a good Sichuan meal when afterwards, as you walk down the street, even the air you inhale is tasty.

▰ The Disquiet Junto music community is collaborating for the eighth year in a row with Musikfestival Bern, in Bern, Switzerland, and they posted this about the first of four projected projects we’ll be doing together this year, in the lead up to the September events:

▰ Not bad, SF:

Rudy Rucker’s Software Embodiment

OMAC Your Enthusiasm

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The sheer messiness of flesh and blood (and data and robotics) is essential to Software’s role in the birth of cyberpunk as a genre. The first of the Ware books, Software arrived in 1982, two years before William Gibson’s Neuromancer, four years before Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology of cyberpunk short stories, and a full decade before Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Now, there is plenty of software in Software, but ultimately the operative term is the first half of the title, not the second. What’s really at work in this first book isn’t a tale of mere technological singularity — in which data rules supreme, outpacing human cognition, blah blah blah — but quite the contrary, one in which embodiment is explored as the essence of life. How punk is that?

That’s from my new essay about Rudy Rucker’s classic early cyberpunk novel Software, which turned out to be the first of four books in a tetralogy (or quartet) that ran for nearly 20 years, from 1982 to 2000. The essay is part of a series on hilowbrow.com, “OMAC Your Enthusiasm,” in which the contributors write about “a favorite sf novel or comic from the Seventies (1974–1983).” Below is the full list. The ones in blue have already been published. Check them out at hilobrow.com, starting with editor Josh Glenn’s introduction. The “OMAC” set of essays is a kind of sequel to 2024’s “Vurt Your Enthusiasm,” in which contributors wrote about “science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema).” For Vurt I wrote about writer-illustrator Howard Chaykin’s comics classic American Flagg! (the exclamation point being part of the title). Eagle-eyed readers of disquiet.com (or my Instagram account around the same time) might have noticed I was (re)reading a paperback of Software back in November.