Lia Kohl, Site Specific

Live at (and for) Chicago's Union Station

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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The Union Station on Lia Kohl’s album Music for Union Station, released earlier this month, is the one in Chicago, Illinois. The “for” in its title means that the music was designed to make use of the place’s richly reverberant qualities, as well as to enter into a conversation with the sounds inherent in that space. The single piece, three quarters of an hour in length, features 10 acoustic instruments, among them Kohl’s cello. Also in the mix: Dorothy Carlos, a second cello; Zachary Good and Jason Stein, bass clarinets; Gerrit Hatcher, tenor saxophone; Riley Leitch and Nick Meryhew, trombones; Beth McDonald, tuba; Zach Moore, bass; and Macie Stewart, violin. Also also in the mix: those site-specific noises, notably the voices of passing travelers (and at least once persistent cough). There is an oceanic drone to Music for Union Station that, along with a nostalgic tinge to the strings, brings to mind the music of Gavin Bryars, and occasionally there’s a quiet pulse that suggesting the minimalism of Philip Glass and Terry Riley. In combination, it’s all pure Kohl: considered, reflective, and deeply resonant.

On Repeat: Earth, Samplr, Duet

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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

▰ The EP Extra Capsular Extraction was the first recorded music from Earth, the trenchant doom/drone/sludge metal band led by Dylan Carlson. It dates back to 1991. Geometry of Murder: Extra Capsular Extraction Inversions is a reworking of that source material by Black Noi$e (aka Robert Mansel), who’s worked largely in hip-hop with the likes of Earl Sweatshirt and Armand Hammer, among others. If you’re looking for an artistic green shoot at the start of 2026, a hint of the universe bending toward fruitful cross-cultural collaborations, this is such a thing. Just one track, “Divine and Bright (Black Noi$e Inversion),” is on Bandcamp, but the whole thing’s on streaming services. It has a heavy Bill Laswell vibe, which I mean as a high compliment.

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▰ One of Andrew Tasselmyer’s late-Jamuary tracks was a video of him performing just with a single app, the iPad classic called Samplr. Fantastic exploration of sonic stasis, the source samples being piano and strings.

▰ This video apparently goes back four years, but it’s new to me: a fine duet between great Norwegian musicians John Derek Bishop (synthesizer) and Eivind Aarset (guitar, heavy on the eBow).

#Jamuary 2025 19–22

Four more

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

After a break, as the work year kicked in, I did another five days of #Jamuary in a row. Again, the mode I’ve adopted is starting a patch in VCV Rack, and then tweaking the patch each day as I learn more about the given modules. If I this past week yielded one takeaway, it’s that I need to stop only thinking of patches as performances or compositions, and to also use them as source material within a DAW, such as Ableton, or even within Audacity, a multitrack editor. I do this on occasion, but I don’t focus on the approach enough. I’ll either push this patch a bit further, or move on to a new patch for the coming week.

▰ 19\31 — “Done Broke”: Breaking up the same sample actively into cues, having it play those cues random, and when it gets to a specific cue it repeats, a momentary centering, and then sets off in random mode again. Round and round.

▰ 20\31 — “Step Wide”: Another day with the same sample, building on the same patch, this time using one snippet on the 1, 2, and 4, and filling the 3 with a random bit from elsewhere in the source audio, always shorter than the main sample, so it repeats a bit and gets cut off sometimes. And on the 2, the main sample goes through a bit of distortion that’s always a little different from the previous time.

▰ 21\31 — “16 Stuff”: Same basic patch, pushed a little further, this time the sampling module replaced with a 16-step sequencer in which each step the sample is tweaked one way or another: pitch, volume, effect, etc.

▰ 22\31 — “Stride Gate”: Took a different approach this time, though still with the same sample and a sample player, but what happens is a square wave turns on and off the freeze effect, with the original audio passed through, and the mix set so if there’s freeze, that’s all you hear, and if there’s no freeze, you just hear the original. The alternation sets the pace, such as it is. This is all in VCV Rack.

Scratch Pad: Soundproof, Rodgers, Waiting

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Young child, perhaps in a bookstore for the first time, to parent: “It’s, like, soundproof in here.”

▰ Making abstract, rhythmic electronic music intended to sound like something falling apart in reverse? You could do worse than to study the first 42 seconds of Diana Ross’s (and Bernard Edwards’s and Nile Rodgers’s) “I’m Coming Out.”

▰ Well, it wouldn’t be Jamuary without an unwarranted takedown notice from SoundCloud

▰ Membership in the DisquietJunto is open: just join and participate. There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

▰ The music in the waiting room at the car dealership is “Hotel California.” I’ve been waiting an exceedingly long time. A service technician hums along as the song arrives at the line “You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.” I’m trying to discern if the individual is aware of the irony.

▰ Few situations make me feel like I’m in a Kobo Abe novel quite like sitting for a long time in a waiting room

▰ If I’ve done my math correctly, the 750th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project will begin on May 14, 2026

▰ Two books this week: I finished reading my second novel of 2026, Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch (following quickly after Flesh by David Szalay). I’ve been to London (and more broadly various parts of the United Kingdom) several times, but clearly not often enough to get the nuances of the rivers and monuments that are anthropomorphized here. The story, an urban fantasy reworking of Punch and Judy, made me want to re-read China Miéville’s King Rat, an urban fantasy reworking of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. … I also finished the first graphic novel I’ve read this year, the just-published collection in the often excellent Lazarus series, written by Greg Rucka and illustrated by Michael Lark. I really dig this long-running series, a plot-heavy not-too-near-ish-future sci-fi thriller, more timely than ever due to its emphasis on post-capitalist feudalism and the wages of longevity. After I read the first issue of this latest arc, I waited until the sequence of six issues, collectively titled Lazarus: Fallen, was complete before taking it all in in one sitting. (Note: Don’t start reading the Lazarus books with this one. Start at the beginning.) Lark is reported to be have suffered a stroke at the end of 2025. Here’s wishing him a smooth recovery.

#30s Buzz Saw Afternoon

When is a violin not a violin?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’d gone for a walk and was listening to an audiobook, one that is largely set in London. I’d been alternating between reading the book and listening to it. Now I was walking through San Francisco while my head was in London, a different sort of alternating. At one point in the audiobook, I heard something, the sound of a violin, and I thought that was an interesting creative choice on the part of the recording’s producer or director. Except the sound wasn’t a violin, nor was it part of the audiobook. The sound was a buzz saw from a construction site, a residence half a block away. I paused the audiobook and took a few recordings of the buzz saw until I got one with the minimum of wind, chatty passersby, and traffic. This is on a clear, quiet day, no planes overhead, and the wind pretty chill, if not entirely still. The more I listened to the buzz saw on its own, the less it resembled a violin, but it was never any less musical than when I’d first heard it.

Recorded around 11:15am on an iPhone 17 Pro on Thursday, January 22, 2026, in San Francisco. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of an ongoing series of field recordings that generally last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.