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 first track off the forthcoming duo album from pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson, Bone Bells. Bluesy, funky, gently atonal, sweet, rough. This may be my single favorite thing Halvorson has recorded to date:
▰ I love how a “single” nowadays is so universal: any standalone track that’s put out in advance of a full album release. No matter the coinage, chill out to the Sixteen performing some seriously ethereal Hildegard of Bingen (I couldn’t get the embed code to work) from their forthcoming Angel of Peace:
▰ An incredible concert recording (audio only) of Power Tools (guitarist Bill Frisell, bass player Melvin Gibbs, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson) at the Bottom Line in Manhattan on September 10, 1988, which is to say the first September of my life when I wasn’t in school since I’d entered preschool. This band meant so much at the time to me, just outta college, and it still does.
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.
▰ Looks like The Agency has been renewed, so there will be a second season — so maybe we’ll see a release of Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s score to the first season?
▰ The wind is intense. Fortunately some of it sounds worse than it is, exacerbated by planes flying by, but the power of 50-mph gusts is something to behold. The occasional beep on my phone alerts me to my concern about another tornado warning. Really don’t want to go through that again anytime soon.
▰ Current vibe
▰ Been thinking about what are probably the four most important concert venues of my life, and how only one of them is still around
Knitting Factory (Houston Street, Manhattan), RIP
Old Ironsides (Sacramento)
Mermaid Lounge (New Orleans), RIP
Luggage Store Gallery (Market St, San Francisco), RIP
▰ Just sitting here listening to the wind, the washer, the dryer, and Palestrina
▰ I feel like I’d read that the bridge* song had been tamed, but judging by today’s storm that clearly isn’t the case
*Golden Gate Bridge
▰ I don’t think I understood until now that Obsidian could have not just multiple tabs and multiple panes open, but also multiple windows. On a Mac, a two-finger click on a given tab allows you to “Move” or “Open” the tab “to a new window.” It’s fantastic, as is Obsidian in general.
▰ The link for the website exposure.band is going in and out, but the news is that on the heels of the awesome Beat tour currently underway, there’s another a Crimson-adjacent reenactment/cover band in the works, doing Robert Fripp’s solo Exposure album, with Terre Roche, Pat Mastelotto, and others. Expooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-sure!
▰ Have a great weekend, or best you can. Open a window and listen. Play one of your least favorite LPs, CDs, or tapes and decide if it’s worth keeping. Pick up a favorite book and read a section at random out loud.
▰ And I read a lot this week, but I only finished reading a few graphic novels, four of ’em: writer Ed Brubaker and illustrator Sean Phillips’ Houses of the Unholy, writer James Tynion IV and illustrator Fernando Blanco’s w0rldtr33 (volume 1), writer Ryan North and illustrator Iban Coello’s Fantastic Four: Whatever Happened to the Fantastic Four? (the first volume of their collaboration), and writer-illustrator Quentin Zuttion’s All Princesses Die Before Dawn. Making my way, meanwhile, through the massive Cryptonomicon and Middlemarch, and a thriller I picked up.
Minimal instrumentation (piano, bass) combine with rhythmic bits of everyday sound. The result, both fragile and engaging, melds post-classical, ambient jazz, and lowercase. This is the first track, “i,” off the forthcoming duo album, A Four Part Cure, from Jason Calhoun and Foresteppe (the latter aka Egor Klochikhin), on Ned Milligan’s Florabelle label. Can’t wait to hear the rest.
The Assignment: Record not so much an alarm as a guided wakening.
/ 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 0684: Early Bird The Assignment: Record not so much an alarm as a guided wakening.
Step 1: You are going to record a piece of music intended for someone to listen to almost immediately upon waking up. Think about your mornings, and what a more optimal morning might entail.
Step 2: Consider a scenario in which someone wakes up and, rather than look at their work or check the news, they take a period of time to just get centered. Think about how long you might want this to take, say three minutes, or five minutes, or twenty minutes.
Step 3: Consider the stages of awakening, from quiet to loud, from slow to fast (or a middling pace), from simple to complex. Perhaps the sounds go full circle, returning to where they started.
Step 4: Consider what sound at the end — a gong, a bell, a bird call, etc. — might signal that the waking process has concluded.
Step 5: Having reflected on the topics brought up in the instructions thus far, record a track that might guide someone slowly into consciousness upon waking each morning.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0684” (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 684th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Early Bird — The Assignment: Record not so much an alarm as a guided wakening — at https://disquiet.com/0684/
There is now a proper index — at at disquiet.com/fxf — for the ongoing Frame by Frame comics series I’m doing with illustrator Hannes Pasqualini. The next standalone episode is due out on February 17th.
