On the Line: Transcription, Clocks, Birding

Some favorite recent sentences

/ By Marc Weidenbaum 

“When the recording diverges from score, I follow the recording.”

That is Brooklyn, New York–based Ethan Hein on the process of transcribing some classic jazz.

. . .

“I’m still a slave to the clock despite all my attempts to break free from it.”

That is a Melbourne, Australia–based musician, who goes by the name branch, on the topic of the absence of clock syncing in a piece of music-making software.

. . .

“Then, like scanning through the quiet static of a radio band, I began to notice the birdsong.”

That is Tristan Louth-Robins recounting a field recording visit to Australia’s Kangaroo Island.

Thief

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Fish and Shrimp Thief totally sounds like the name of an early-’90s Ninja Tune electronica act I forgot about in the intervening decades. However, the name is not taken, so go at it.

Side Trip

Live at the Chase Center, San Francisco

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Got to see Joan Jett. So much fun. Been reading up on Kenny Laguna, her Blackhearts cofounder, who had two moments in the spotlight at his keyboards during the show to talk a bit about this rock and roll legend. He’s something of a legend himself. And she exudes ease, power, and joy. (For context: the vast majority of the show didn’t have her face projected in the background. This was during the song that was the theme song the guitarist wrote for the Bad Reputation documentary.)

On Repeat: Rain, Sinéad O’Connor, More

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.

▰ “There are cars, pigeons and aircraft!” warns Mark David Hadley in a brief liner note for his collection Recordings of the Rain, which contains exactly that. Also: church bells. “Metal Garden Chair 3” is a banger.

https://soundbymark.bandcamp.com/album/recordings-of-the-rain

▰ I mentioned recently the phenomenon of doing some research while writing a review of a concert and stumbling on a video of that very same concert. This is one of the four sets from a great recent show I saw here in San Francisco. The quartet, playing a kind of ambient chamber jazz, is Ross Hoyt, keyboards, electronics; Ryan Honaker, violin, electronics; Leila Abdul-Rauf, trumpet, voice, electronics; and Ed Lloyd, contra bass. Pay attention particularly to Abdul-Rauf, who runs her voice thorugh the same technology that transforms her trumpet. The music is apparently all drawn from Hoyt’s upcoming album, Peregrinari.

▰ And let’s be honest, I spent much of the week listening to the late Sinéad O’Connor. Her debut record, The Lion and the Cobra, came out at the start of my senior year of college. She was barely four months younger than I am. To suggest she had an impact on my Gen X cohort would be an understatement. More specifically in the context of the sort of music I focus on at Disquiet.com, her version of the 17th-century Irish poem “I Am Stretched on Your Grave,” with an underlying Amen break augmented by bass line and fiddle, off I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, her sophomore album, came out in 1990. That’s the same year as Enigma’s “chant and beat” MCMXC a.D (brainchild of Michael Cretu, a decade older). This left a mark, and we’re all the richer for it. Fold in Dead Can Dance’s own cover of “I Am Stretched on Your Grave,” a few years later on Toward the Within (1994), and these seeds — among many others — of cultural impact are pretty clear.

Scratch Pad: Forums, TTY, Airplane Mode

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others, including Bluesky (disquiet.bsky.social), which remains behind a beta firewall at the moment, and Threads (threads.net/@dsqt). 

▰ A friend mentioned in passing that he was waiting for a video to “caption.” I knew what this meant but still asked, in order to confirm that, yes, “captioning” serves as a verb describing the process of software turning a video into a transcript that’s then applied to the video.

▰ I joined an online professional discussion group about sound design, and when you first log in there’s a warning to only talk about sound design — not about “music production.” It felt both like an interesting and useful distinction, and like a glimpse at a longstanding holy war.

▰ There’s a simple noise app on my laptop I turn on sometimes when I want to concentrate (I play “airplane” noise). One little thing about it that I appreciate is it doesn’t start or stop cold. It fades in or out, respectively. No sudden transition. A simple but essential detail.

▰ The San Francisco 311 number for reporting downed electrical cables and emerging potholes leads to quite the menu. Once past the language options you’re told “the following tones” are for TTY*, and you’re to wait. Except it seems you can’t hear the tones TTY devices are designed to recognize. Now, that may be an aging-ears thing, but it seems like the TTY tones you’re supposed to wait to end are more like an extended silence you’re supposed to wait through — which maybe is what the instructions should say?

*TTY = “teletypewriter” for the deaf and hard-of-hearing

▰ Honk if half your iPad storage is PDF manuals of music hardware and software.

Then play a loop of the honk using some of that gear as an effect.

▰ I’ve been on Threads since day one and I think I only just now made my first actual, you know, thread — and it was just two posts, and the second was just a definition of a term in the first post.

▰ One good thing about July coming to an end is being officially past the point when I’m regularly typing June instead of July, after having gotten past the earlier annual May/March boondoggle.

▰ This phenomenon isn’t new but if you’ve written about music long enough it can feel new: while reviewing a concert you check some facts and stumble on the entire show online. At least in my current case it doesn’t diverge from how I recall or, more importantly, describe the show.