New Susie Ibarra Book

My review in The Wire

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

My review of percussionist Susie Ibarra’s new book, Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm (Habitat Sounds, 158 pages), is in the current issue of The Wire, the one with Tomeka Reid on its cover. Here’s the first paragraph:

The great drummer and composer Susie Ibarra — born in Anaheim, California, home to Disneyland, among the most artificial environments on Earth — has long embraced the natural world as intrinsic to her music. In 2002, her Songbird Suite, released by John Zorn’s Tzadik label, teamed her with a supergroup (the label’s term) of Jennifer Choi, Ikue Mori and Craig Taborn. Uncredited were additional participants: the birds whose music could be heard on the title track, not merely sampled, but having provided evident inspiration for her antic percussion and for Taborn’s impressionistic piano playing. Two decades on, Ibarra’s Walking on Water (Innova, 2021) melded a larger ensemble with more birds and, trenchantly, the sounds of glaciers in decline. At times during Walking on Water, a listener might think Ibarra’s music had lost a battle with the field recordings, before coming to recognise the water is, in fact, the music.

Scratch Pad: Chimes, RSS, Books

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ Multiple devices in the house ring out, slightly out of sync, all pinged semi-but-not-quite-simultaneously by an ongoing sequence of text messages — the same alerts on multiple accounts associated with multiple gadgets. It’s a wind chime for which the breeze is conversation.

▰ Me in guitar class: I’m pretty solid on the chords and the voicings until the start of the [whatever section of the sheet music] and then I look ahead and it’s like reality splinters entirely

▰ A blog without an RSS feed is like a … ?

▰ I took me a few months, a year or so ago, to train myself to write in ALL CAPS (for clarity). It has taken less time to train myself to hold the guitar pick with two fingers instead of three (for utility of my pinky, ring, and middle — an arpeggio’s version of clarity), but I’m not quite there yet.

▰ When I first started doing interviews as a music critic, I found the best examples of how to express conversation with just text involved simply studying how playwrights did it. I mostly read David Mamet and Dennis Potter at the time.

▰ I’ve had odd browser issues. This one is new. I turned on my MacBook. Safari had lots of tabs open in two different windows. I thought I’d gone overboard with tabs yesterday, then realized the windows were duplicates. I shut a set down, shut Safari down, reloaded — and now all the tabs are gone. :(

▰ I had to look up “rip-rap.”

▰ I finished reading three books this week: a novel and two graphic novels. The novel (my 14th this year) was Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod (after Warren Ellis recently noted the third in the series of which this is the first). I enjoyed it a lot and will be moving on pretty soon to its sequel, though right now I’m deep into Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which I haven’t read since college (and I’m not sure I paid a lot of attention to it then). The graphic novels were: The Gull Yettin by Joe Kessler, who as always manages to be abstract and sentimental, messy and elegant, at the same time (also, it reminds me of Frank Santoro’s work, which I mean as a compliment), and Nejishiki, one of five volumes (thus far?) of Yoshiharu Tsuge’s manga published by Drawn & Quarterly. I’d only previously read The Swamp, from which this is a long, dark stretch away.