Awaiting Music for Black Pigeons

A jazz documentary

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’m very much looking forward to this documentary, Music for Black Pigeons, in which filmmakers Jørgen Leth and Andreas Koefoed interview a slew of great contemporary jazz musicians. Apparently the footage is from nearly a decade and a half of sessions. Featured musicians include Jakob Bro (who also provides the film’s score), Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz, Joe Lovano, Paul Motian, Mark Turner, Joey Baron, Andrew Cyrille, Craig Taborn, Thomas Morgan, and Palle Mikkelborg.

Some key moments in the trailer:

0:28 — A car horn aligns harmonically with the already playing saxophone.

1:15 — There’s a measurable pause before Manfred Eicher, the ECM Records founder and producer, not yet identified, says “A pause tells very much where you want to go, and, very much, where you come from.”

1:45 — Midori Takada, composer and percussionist, states: “For me, music is not entertainment. It’s life.”

Radio Art Zone Review

In The Wire

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you read The Wire, then you know that font. My review of the book Radio Art Zone, an anthology collection, is in the new issue (the one with Don Cherry on the cover). Once it’s fish wrap (not that I recommend disposing of your copies), I’ll post the full review here. Meanwhile, the opening sentences:

With “Radio, Radio,” Elvis Costello forcefully bit the hand that fed him. Singing that very phrase on his 1978 second album This Year’s Model three years before the launch of MTV, he condemned how radio can “anaesthetise” an audience through homogenisation.

Over time, the song bit Costello back. Its rousing chorus, much like those of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” and Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” made the track feel like a singalong celebration of its subject, rather than the intended critique.

Such is the power of radio. Or was. FM and AM have long since given way to streaming and downloads. Video didn’t kill the radio star, TCP/IP did. Which is to say, the internet. Far into the wake of internet ubiquity and radio’s commensurate decline, the book Radio Art Zone appears.

On Repeat: Ambient, Organ, Techno

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Gorgeous mix of microlooped and warped guitar figures from T1D3S, aka Samuel Death.

▰ “This album focusses on the quirks of the old organ,” writes Élan Vital of his forthcoming release, “its mechanical noises, the breathing of the pump and the sighing of the pipes rather than on actual tonal playing.” There’s one track from Travelling Waves II online so far, dense chords that give way over a long time with occasional sudden shifts in register and tonality.

https://elanvital.bandcamp.com/album/travelling-waves-ii

▰ It feels beneficial to note when I post something here that is the opposite of music that could double as a sedative. I’ve been really digging Synergy, a split EP between Chloe Lula and Ireen Amnes: vital techno that feels sparse and monochromatic while also commanding and filled with rich sound design.

https://tresorberlin.bandcamp.com/album/synergy

Scratch Pad: Timing, AudioMoth, Foghorns

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I used to do this on Saturday mornings over coffee, but it recently became clear to me that that timing is counterproductive, since I aim to take weekends off social media — thus, doing this chore on Saturday morning meant pulling up social media on Saturday morning, which is not what I want to be doing. So, now I’m collating late Friday afternoon, and then posting on Saturday morning. As for social media, these days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. 

▰ A privacy filibuster: Based on the appearance of “<crosstalk>” in automated transcriptions of human speech, the best current way to keep AI/ML from comprehending a conversation is for an additional person to speak continuously at the same time in a way the others can just ignore.

▰ My phone is set to a voice (South African, according to fruit company linguists). When I decline to reply to a text message, it says “OK,” which always sounds like it’s in on some unspoken meaning I’ve thus telegraphed. It sounds like what it means is “OK, you cheeky monkey.”

Also, I realize that the word “telegraph” has itself long since transformed from an actual form of direct communication to a synonym for suggesting something indirectly.

▰ This is aimed an no one in particular: there’s rarely reason to follow-up about an album you’ve asked me to write about, and much as I try for it not to affect me, after three or four emails, the correspondence does begin to negatively impact the likelihood of what you’re asking.

▰ Between June 23 and August 4 I used the AudioMoth for 14 overnight recordings of five to six hours each night (half indoors, half out), yielding over 26 gigabytes of sound, on just three AA batteries. And far as I can tell, the batteries still have about half a charge. Amazing.

▰ This is incredibly obvious, but only today during guitar class did it occur to me that when I move chords in a major scale up and down the fretboard, each string is in its own mode. (I can be a slow learner.)

▰ Moved to Obsidian.md from IA Writer for markdown and general note-taking. So far it’s nice: elegant, solid, customizable. (Side note: I love that a 1994 decision to use .md as Moldova’s top-level domain led to it being a favorite of medical professionals and coders.)

▰ Summer in San Francisco is foghorn mating season