Barbieri-ology

My latest review for Pitchfork

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I mentioned this in advance of its publication, but mistakenly not afterward. Last month I had the pleasure of reviewing the great new Caterina Barbieri album for Pitchfork. Titled Myuthafoo, it’s a follow-up to her 2019 album Ecstatic Computation, with the added benefit of muting her voice in favor of a sound-first exploration (per the review, nothing against her voice in general — the simplicity just works well here). Here’s my opening paragraph:

Nothing signals synthesizer psychedelia quite like the combination of an arpeggio and a delay. The arpeggio divides a chord into looping sequences of notes. The delay allows those sequences to overlap. Once set in motion, the pairing can sound like a hall of mirrors receding toward infinity. When employed by dilettantes, it’s a simple trick that gets tired fast, but in the right hands, it’s magic. Caterina Barbieri is a wizard—and she knows a lot of other spells, as well.

And you can read the full review at pitchfork.com.

Sound Ledger

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

40,000: Number of flights aimed to be reduced by a Dutch government plan (to 460,000 annually, from 500,000), now under appeal, to limit noise at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport 

40: Percent increase estimated of people utilizing voice technology in the next 12 months

3: Current size, in gigabytes, of the largest language model in the excellent speech-to-text app MacWhisper (which I learned about via Om Malik’s newsletter)

Illusion

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I love how the two dozen anonymous buttons are both suspended in midair and bonded to metal — afloat amid the simulation of airy space rendered by glass, and yet screwed tight into the metal casing. Evening light facilitates the manner by which the inside stairwell and balconies merge with the reflection of the park across the car-lined street. The vertical buttons suggest a towering structure, but there are just a few floors, each lined with residences. Like the reflection, the doorbells offer up an illusion.

On Repeat: Ambient, Aphex, Chaos

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.

▰ Another great performance by Andrew Tasselmyer, using an iPad. I picked up the app he employs here to glitchy effect (one with the great name LO-FI-AF). I love how the beat emerges from the opening ambient drone.

▰ Another solid Aphex Twin transcription from Simon Farintosh. This one is “Raglan Holon” off Drukqs, reworked for solo eight-string classical guitar.

▰ Lorenz Weber has a new album, Zeiten, due out in mid-August. Half of it is online for preview currently. It’s elegant, quiet music — one track, “return,” a held tone like an angelic chorus heard through a dense fog; another, “spring,” like an ever so slowly played piano while open windows let in birdsong.

https://lorenzweber.bandcamp.com/album/zeiten

▰ There’s utter chaos, and then there’s chaos that keeps stumbling but never quite collapses. C. Reider (aka Vuzhmusic) commits the latter expertly with “071923.”

https://soundcloud.com/vuzhmusic/071923a

Scratch Pad: Paper, Deadloch, YubiKey

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). 

▰ I looked at my little paper notebook and caught myself briefly thinking, “I should take a look at it. Maybe there are new notes in there.”

▰ Just when I was thinking that the role of sound is kinda ordinary (if fun!) in the video game Moving Out, I had the unique (virtual) pleasure of noisily pulling a piano across a suburban lawn.

▰ I was watching Deadloch, a fun Australian TV series, and at some point in the third episode the camera moves to a previously unseen indoor art installation. I said out loud, jokingly, “Now that’s my scene.” And a second later the screen caption read, “[ambient whale song plays].”

▰ Ooh, the YubiKey made a fantastic noise when I pulled it from my laptop’s USB-C port — a kind of frigid gasp. I’ve had the device for a year. I’m used to the glitchspeak string of random letters that sometimes happens when you brush it, but this phenomenon was totally new to me.

▰ Few things say “I actually give a crap” when it comes to music technology (hardware and soft) than a proper and regularly updated manual

▰ The post for the latest Disquiet Junto music community composition prompt goes out, I get some work done, I have a dim sum for lunch with a friend, I come back to my desk, and there are already four tracks — two each from Germany and Italy. Can’t wait to hear what’s next.