This issue is just for paid subscribers of This Week in Sound. It’s an experiment, intended to supplement the usual Tuesday and Friday issues.
This past week I asked what readers, in a highly unscientific poll, what might encourage them to pay to support This Week in Sound, and the results strongly weighed in favor of ambient music recommendations and an extra email. This format accomplishes both those ideas. We’ll see how it goes. I’m enjoying it.
I wrote a bit more about Oval’s recent album, Romantiq, which I reviewed for Pitchfork on Monday, plus a pice of jagged ambient music by the Japanese producer Corruption, and a live (defined broadly) video by Ukrainian synthesizer musician Igor Yalivec.
Also, the image says 0002, but this is episode 0001.
Oh, and one additional quick note about last week’s issue: Those voices in the Karen Vogt remix by Yolanda Moletta were in fact Moletta’s own singing, not simply samples of Vogt’s original track — so, “echoes,” yes, but not literal echoes.
From Pennsylvania: handmade electroacoustic instrumentation; reducing complexity
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This Junto Profile is part of an ongoing series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.
What’s your name? My name is Kel Smith, although I’m better known among Disquiet Junto participants as Suss Müsik. The project started in 2016 as a vehicle to create what I then called “post-classical ambient minimalism for crepuscular airports.” I also record in a music project called Egret Zero, collaborating with the very talented guitarist Wm. Wolfgang Allen. As midlife crises go, making strange music is deeply satisfying and relatively benign.
Where are you located? I currently live with Mrs. Suss Müsik in Pennsylvania (USA), located between Philadelphia and New York City. I once lived in Baltimore, went to art school in Italy, got married in Greece, and from 2007 through 2018 traveled extensively for work. (This is how I gained my expertise in crepuscular airports).
What is your musical activity? In a recent piece on CKRL, roughly translated from French, I was described as a sound artist “with a mind haunted by the numbers.” That’s about as good a description of Suss Müsik as I’ve ever heard or read.
I’ve always been fascinated by the relationship between machines and human capability. In a way, Suss Müsik is the distant product of research I conducted for a book I wrote in 2013 called Digital Outcasts. My work at that time detailed the historical significance of disability on today’s design innovation. During the period of writing this book, I interviewed subjects with disabilities who achieved a high level of acclimation using tools they personally designed or retrofitted.
Looking back, I now recognize the inevitability that these influences would have in formulating my creative practice — especially a sonic discipline that blends science and art. Much of Suss Müsik’s output is generated by handmade electroacoustic instrumentation. Some devices are built from archaic consumer technologies (like 1990’s hard drive enclosures), while others are custom-designed and manufactured via 3D-printing or other methods.
Conceptually, I enjoy the ironic duality that results when limits are extended and redefined: the reclamation of outdated machines being repurposed for a new use, for example, or the digital replication of sonic behaviors native to acoustic instruments (such as when we hear breath through a flute or the abrasive scrape of a violin bow). A large component of Suss Müsik’s aesthetic lies in the existent tension between these formative states.
As my mechanical skills have grown, the devices have gradually become more consistently reliable in performance. Similarly, I’d like to think that my compositional techniques have grown sharper. The current version of Suss Müsik is less ambient and more minimal in parts, yet still crepuscular.
What is one good musical habit? Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson once said: “I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday, and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.”
I think it’s important to consciously expose ourselves to new ideas, new philosophies, new ways of working, and new forms of sonic expression. At the height of Suss Müsik’s ambient phase, I started taking djembe lessons. One wouldn’t necessarily imagine African drumming as being in the same family as ambient soundscapes, but both musical disciplines address the corporeal body as a conduit; a vehicle through which our understanding of time and space can be temporarily suspended. There’s always a richness to be uncovered whenever we explore new things, even if the benefit is revealed in the form of a happy surprise.
Participating in the Disquiet Junto has been a genuinely rewarding experience. I’m thankful to be a part of this network of talented individuals, many of whom have provided sincere encouragement that has elevated my practice. Somewhere along the path of my 160+ Junto projects, I feel I’ve learned a bit about making creative choices within a timestamp of four minutes.
More important, though, is the opportunity to return the favor with Junto participants via weekly projects or the Disquiet Slack channel. It takes zero effort to offer a bit of positive feedback, yet the impact can be transformative. It’s as if we have this safe, secret little snow-globe of creative energy that crosses geographic and demographic boundaries—a bit of stability, perhaps, in times of turbulence. As I’ve grown old(er), I’ve learned to appreciate that dynamic and avoid taking it for granted.
One technical item (and I’m sure everyone already knows this): it took me way too long to discover the importance of a good set of headphones. For too long, I could never figure out why my mixes sounded so tinny compared to everything else I heard. I recommend the Audio Technica brand.
What are your online locations? To date, the Suss Müsik discography features eight proper “albums” and a handful of EP-length releases. Some of it makes me wince today, especially the way they were recorded, but I accept that as part of my learning journey. More than a few Junto projects have been reworked for release; in fact, one album titled Ex Post Facto is nearly all former Junto offerings. All Suss Müsik releases are available in the usual places: Bandcamp, Spotify, etc. The latest (and arguably best) is New Hopes, released in 2022.
There is a Suss Müsik website that I don’t update nearly as often as I should. People do find me via the contact form, so I suppose it must be doing its job. A number of Junto participants have indicated that they enjoy the written texts that accompany Suss Müsik contributions, so it’s nice to have them all in one place as a sort of archive.
Egret Zero releases are also available on Bandcamp. My favorite is Exploring Shackleton, mostly because it has a photo of my grandfather on the cover and got a nice review.
Soundcloud is sort of the Suss Müsik sandbox: Junto projects, failed experiments, etc. I’ve been considering some form of exit, but for now it’s still in the portfolio.
For those who enjoy seeing digital instruments pushed beyond the precipice of functionality, Suss Müsik offers a YouTube channel and an Instagram presence.
I’ve long since given up on Facebook and Twitter as vehicles for omphaloskepsis.
What was a particularly meaningful Junto Project? I love all my sonic children, but not equally. I have a soft spot for Junto 0247, because it was my first. I still fondly remember how surprised and delighted I was upon receiving a positive response. I also really like my contribution for Junto 0334, mostly because the text I wrote for it actually happened (more or less), and I recall Junto 0320 being a particularly fun assignment. But if I had to pick just one, it would be a sentimental favorite: Junto 0454, a numerically encoded tribute to my then-five-year-old niece.
Your mention of a good pair of headphones suggests a question, which is what advice do you have for people looking to listen back to their own music more critically? Listening back to some old Suss Müsik recordings, I’m often dismayed at how busy a lot of them sound. There were good ideas in there, but they were buried in excessive instrumentation (you know your mixes are too thick when you have a track for “tambourine #3”) and effects (reverb-erb-erb-erb). Sometimes we have to examine our work critically in order to fairly assess it, and for that it means removing the clutter. I’ve subsequently imposed limits on myself when reworking old material, allowing more dry space to let things breathe a bit. I believe this intention to reduce complexity has been a benefit to my overall creative practice. Whenever something doesn’t seem to be working, I always ask myself: “What doesn’t need to be here? What can be removed?”
People don’t act on the invitation to provide feedback as often as they might. Do you have any advice for people who are hesitant to do so? It’s a tricky dynamic I’ve observed in my non-Suss Müsik world as well: there are always one or two contributors who have no hesitation in providing feedback, and others who choose to be more passive. I believe these tendencies are the result of the confidence heuristic, a psychology term to describe how people are more willing to provide feedback when they feel their contributions are assertive or persuasive. I think the most important thing to remember is that it’s okay to be selective in how or when we offer feedback; sometimes people simply don’t feel up to it, and that’s fine. For those who have a tentative yearning to be part of the discussion, I’d say: use your reticence as a strength. Be sincere, be constructive, be open to dialogue. And for those who receive feedback, always remember this: even if you don’t agree, there may be a finer point in there worth investigating. It’s all subjective anyway, so be nice. As Pere Ubu’s David Thomas once wrote: “Artists can produce anything they want. And people can like whatever they want. That’s why there’s always disappointment on both sides.”
When I tell people I am incredibly sports illiterate and depend on the kindness of strangers and the patience of friends to help me navigate the peculiar subset of the multiverse where I ended up living — one where “A team beat another team” somehow qualifies as breaking news — I often have to clarify the depth of my lack of informedness. My statements to this effect can be taken to mean that I only follow one sport, or just watch occasional games and don’t subscribe to “packages,” or stopped after baseball and football and don’t pay attention to those other sports, whatever they may be. Proving one’s lack of knowledge is a version of proving a negative — which is to say, difficult at best. When I do find sports-things of sonic interest, like the noise at stadiums (remember the vuvuzela’s 15 minutes of fame?) or a purported lip-reading scandal in the NFL, I pay close attention.
There may not be a true vacuum in the universe, but the part of my brain where actual sports-stuff is supposed to be stored comes awfully close. And the virtuous circle of this newsletter is that people who know things about things about which I know nothing send me sound-related things from those realms (and then I share them more widely). Readers who are into sports or practice law or perform surgery or carry guns as part of their livelihood — or simply make their homes places where I do not — send me emails (and social media messages) with tasty factoids about how sound operates in those (alien-to-me to varying degrees) spheres. For which I am thankful. (So keep ’em coming.)
Hence this photo, sent by a friend in England, properly warning me in advance of my next visit. I feel vaguely relieved that (1) I wouldn’t be playing cricket in the first place (my hand-eye coordination is virtually non-existent) and (2) I am fully self-trained in acting accordingly when someone happens to scream “HEADS!” What fascinates me in particular about this sound-focused warning sign is the evident decision-making about emphasis. Someone put “STOP PLAYING IMMEDIATELY” in all-caps, whereas the actual safety measures (“cover your head and duck”) aren’t, and are left until the very end of the sentence. Fortunately, the signage is largely rhetorical. Its real purpose is likely the tiny print, the part that excuses the location from legal liability. Chances are most people will hear “HEADS!” and duck and cover (or as I think of it, cover and cower) before even identifying what the word means. Hearing is a key feature of humans’ built-in alarm system. It’s kept us safe for eons, even after we started throwing things at each other for sport. (Thanks, Susan Blue!)
Adventures in multilingualism and the adventure's interfaces
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
With one stark exception, I did well in school, both in terms of grades and a sense of engagement. The exception: languages other than English. In high school I did poorly in Spanish, French, and Latin, in that order. In college I was required to extend my disappointing entanglement with French. My sophomore year I ran into one of my French instructors outside the classroom — during class we only spoke French — and after some staring and nodding we came to an agreement that it was OK to speak in English if the sun was overhead and no other students were around. Also, were we to have spoken French I wouldn’t really have been able to say much of anything. After dual sighs of relief, we chatted a bit, and I witnessed an expression form on my teacher’s face: “Hey, this kid actually isn’t an idiot.”
Fresh out of college, I enrolled in night classes in Japanese, and proceeded to do just as poorly. Much later in life, I worked in manga for five years and ended up vice president of multiple departments with dozens of employees, and I still couldn’t manage to pick up any of the language (scanlators, I salute you). The office language instructor had a familiar expression on his face when we ran into each other at a bar one night.
I exist as, if nothing else, an exception to the idea that someone with a deep interest in music might have a natural inclination toward languages. (More to the point, I think the situation reflects how much writing — in English — I have running through my head at all times.) A big turning point for me in my writing about everyday sound was a trip I took to Tokyo in the mid-2000s, during which I maintained a detailed sound diary. It was all transportation, pachinko, ventilation, birds, device UX, entertainment, etc. Essentially none of it, when I look back, was about language.
And now as part of my low-grade midlife crisis, I’ve decided to be perhaps the last person on the planet to install Duolingo on one’s phone. I still long for the idea of being able to have some facility with another language, and so I’ve been pondering which language to pursue. Returning to Japanese seems like a natural option. Given my eating habits and my neighborhood in San Francisco, Chinese is also a good idea, though I’m fairly confident more Chinese science fiction will be translated into English than I’ll ever have the time to read. Korean has, hands down, my favorite alphabet on the planet. However, the U.S. State Department tells me those are among the most difficult languages for a native English-speaker to learn, and I don’t think the government had even taken into consideration my well-documented deficiencies. Top of the list (inverse proportion to difficulty) are Romance languages, and a few others. Right below that set is a shorter set, which includes German, which is what I’m currently experimenting with on Duolingo. Germany has more than its share of electronic music, music-instrument makers, music in general, and contemporary art. If nothing else, I’d eventually gain access to the blogs of plenty of musicians and coders. And I’ve always coveted those tiny paperbacks with the yellow spines.
One of the reasons I did poorly with languages is because I do well with patterns. I’d find a pattern in a textbook, and make my way through the lesson quickly. For a while I’d earn solid As, until suddenly I didn’t. It was initially a struggle in Duolingo for me to actually pay attention to the words and to not memorize letter combinations (devoid of pronunciation or meaning) and collate them with their English equivalents. Fortunately, Duolingo reinforces reading with listening and — quite amazingly to me, when trying it for the first time — with speaking. You aren’t just queried to read or to type words or to click on buttons with words, but to identify them by ear and to say them aloud and have your words parsed by a machine and then rated as passing or failing.
Which brings me to the above interface. (This has gone long, so you may need to scroll up before proceeding.) When I first saw this list of options on my cellphone (the answers, by the way, are “Bruder,” “ich,” “mit,” and either “mein” or “meine,” I’m happy to say I actually know), I felt my old pattern habit kick in. The top waveform seemed to suggest two syllables, and the second and third suggested one syllable each. The fourth was ambiguous. This was all a distraction, for two reasons. The first reason is those waveforms are simply there for you to click on: You listen to the words, and then match them with their written English equivalents. Second, those waveforms don’t actually coordinate at all with what is spoken. They’re just different as a subtle means of distinction. It’s almost entirely decorative. I’m not sure anything would be lost if the waveforms all looked exactly the same, and in fact, if you’re prone to pattern-finding, then you might actually find a uniform interface more welcoming.
There’s plenty to be said about the use of sound in the Duolingo app — the gamification-addled pings, the forgiving nature of the speech grading, the option to register when you’re not in a situation where you can speak, the humorous character voices — and presuming my interest remains as engaged as it has been, and I avoid the sad language-averse path I’ve repeated in the past, then I’ll have more notes to share in the future. Or I should say, die Zukunft.
