I utterly failed at making a “best of 2021” list this year, as is often the case. I just don’t make lists like I used to, and I was never much of a list maker to begin with. I really did try, but the list never came together. Instead, today, here are three strong favorites I kept going back to, all from before 2021:
▰ Ben Monder uploaded, early during the pandemic, on May 15, 2020, this video of his elegant dissection of the classic song “Never Let Me Go”:
▰ The Michele Rabbia (drums, electronics), Gianluca Petrella (trombone, sounds), and Eivind Aarset (guitar, electronics) 2019 trio album, *Lost River* (ECM). Beautiful, hyperminimal ambient jazz. I love when music sounds like less than the sum of its parts: [ecmrecords.com](https://www.ecmrecords.com/catalogue/1552560452).
▰ I started listening to this instrumental version of the classic Grace Jones track [“Slave to the Rhythm,”](https://youtu.be/Rsi4dt-CdMc) produced by Trevor Horn, when Robbie Shakespeare, the great bass player, died. There is no official instrumental version, but this one, uploaded in October 2018, was constructed by a YouTuber who goes by Pacalo, and who appears to construct instrumentals for tracks that don’t have them (also check out INXS’ “Never Tear Us Apart” and Pet Shop Boys’ “Suburbia”).
I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet), which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up [in expanded form](https://disquiet.com/2021/12/31/ring-out-the-old/) or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself.
▰ RIP, Wayne Thiebaud, who died on Christmas at age 101 after bringing so much pleasure to so many eyes. I only got to speak with him once, on the phone while writing a profile of painter Mel Ramos, his lifelong friend, for [sactownmag.com](https://www.sactownmag.com/the-naked-eye/).
▰ If IMDB indexed furniture, the entry for Emeco chairs would be the longest page on the internet
▰ Dishwasher (two rooms over) to the left of me, rainstorm (outside living room window) to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle again
▰ I am totally down for Mos Espa parkour.
▰ I’m 67% (45% when I first tweeted this) of the way through Fonda Lee’s third Jade novel, *Jade Legacy*, and it’s truly thrilling. It never takes the easy way out. On the one hand, I’m sad to see the series come to a close. On the other, I’m so glad to see how compelling and transportive it is, how far it goes.
▰ There’s a lot I love about *Dickinson*, the TV series, and right now everything else takes second place after the jazz that plays every time Walt Whitman speaks.
▰ Excited to spend more time in Bogdan Raczynski’s new [https://clang.gg](https://clang.gg) community in the coming year. For fun, here’s an email interview I did with Bogdan 22 and a half years ago: [“Turning Japanese.”](https://disquiet.com/1999/06/01/bogdan-raczynski/) (In response, Raczynski likened decades-old interviews to high school yearbook photos.)
▰ My day began with @’s related to poetry (via [Rachael Nevins](https://twitter.com/RachaelNevins/status/1476583938432897029)) and to livecoding (via [Bogdan Raczynski](https://twitter.com/bogdanraczynski/status/1476589184769003523)), which is alright by me.
▰ So glad Bruce Levenstein is [digging](https://twitter.com/BruceLevenstein/status/1476658368483835905) the trio of Michele Rabbia, Gianluca Petrella, and Eivind Aarset on the 2019 album *Lost River*. One of my favorite albums of the past few years. The guitarist Eivind (autocorrects to Divine) Aarset is great as a leader and often at his best as a collaborator and supporting player.
▰ Mornings sounds, last day of the year: external drive beeps and whirs as it reboots; a bus’ breaks bring it to a stop briefly (clearly no one was waiting to board, nor did anyone disembark); a car speeds west on the wet street at pedestrian-defying clip; house creaks as it warms.
▰ This week in the annual end-of-year project, Disquiet Junto music community participants are stitching together year-end retroactive sonic diaries by concatenating brief snippets from existing tracks to represent the past year. Playlist in progress at [soundcloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0522).
▰ Only three episodes left of our *Dickinson* holiday spree*. :(
*née binge
▰ Only two now. :( :( On the bright side, when they’re over there are exceptional leftover Salvadoran tamales for lunch.
▰ Wow, *Dickinson* is a treat. TV has no shortage when it comes to flights of fancy, genre blending, hi/low mashups, public-domain spelunking, self-aware reboots, and professional-grade fan fiction. *Dickinson* is all of those, and it makes good on its source material and its conceit.
▰ Best receipt font of 2021
Side note: The “little spicy” following “medium spicy” is apparently how the kitchen is signaled to find the zone between medium spicy and very spicy.
And it’s a wrap. 2020 was the first year since I founded Disquiet.com in 1996 — this month having been its 25th anniversary — that I posted at least once each day. Today, the last day of 2021, marks the first time I’ve done so two years in a row. I imagine evolving priorities may change things at some point, but the habit got me through these two tough years. This year the activity came to a total of 434 posts, including this one. (I may be counting a couple of unpublished drafts in there, but they’ll see the light of day eventually.) And on that note, have a great evening and a great start to 2022.
A piece I wrote for an April 2012 edition of Art Practical
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
*I’ve learned that the publication Art Practical is no more. I used to read it regularly, but only contributed once, back in April 2012. I’m posting the full text of my piece, “Sonic Infrastructure,” here for archival purposes. The essay was part of an issue devoted to sound. The issue included an introduction by Tess Thackara (who invited me to contribute), an interview with Paul DeMarinis by Renny Pritikin, a discussion between artists Joshua Churchill and Chris Duncan, Matt Sussman on Infrasound, Liz Glass on the Tape Music Center, an interview with Jacqueline Gordon by Ellen Tani, a profile of Ethan Rose by Bean Gilsdorf, a discussion about the Invisible Relics exhibit at Park Life (a gallery in the San Francisco neighborhood I have long called home, the Richmond District), and an essay by Aaron Harbour drawing from his experience as a curator and DJ.*
. . .
**”Sonic Infrastructure”**
So, a sound artist walks into a chamber …
This joke-without-a-punch-line likely brings to mind the archetypal sound-exploration incident in which composer John Cage famously entered the confines of an anechoic chamber in pursuit of pure silence. As the oft-told (and, some have argued, perhaps apocryphal) story goes, Cage did not experience the silence he had led himself to expect. Instead, he heard something—two things, in fact: his heartbeat and his nervous system.
But there’s another chamber worth talking about, one with increasing prominence in the sonic arts: it’s called the ambisonic chamber. In contrast with the sonic exclusion one finds in an anechoic chamber, an ambisonic chamber produces absolute sonic immersion. It employs numerous speakers to reproduce not mere stereo sound or even 5.1-surround sound, but 360-degree sound. For example, a stationary ambisonic recording made in San Francisco’s Union Square at noon on the last shopping day before Christmas would reproduce the fully immersive experience of sound: the distant rattling of the Salvation Army bells, the “ho-ho-ho” of the Macy’s Santa, the multilingual voices of shoppers passing from and in every direction, the whir of news helicopters hovering overhead, and the rumble of skateboards passing underfoot.
Should you have the opportunity to enter an ambisonic chamber and happen to hear your heart pounding, it’s simply the result of an emotional response to the sheer imaginary promise inherent in such an installation. And, perhaps, the momentary desire to install such a thing in your living room.
**Global Network of SoundLabs**
A fully functioning ambisonic chamber is the heart of the SoundLab at Arup, an engineering consultancy with offices in San Francisco and dozens of other cities around the planet. Arup describes its ambisonic room as [“a controlled auralization environment that allows clients to experience and compare the acoustic performance of various design options.”](http://www.arup.com/Global_locations/USA/San_Francisco.aspx) The SoundLab doesn’t merely reproduce ambisonic recordings; it allows for computer systems to manipulate them, adjusting the recordings based on hypothetical physical environments. It is essentially the CAD of sound.
There are such ambisonic labs in more than half a dozen different Arup city offices, including not only San Francisco but also Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, and Hong Kong. The rooms serve consulting acoustic engineers in a wide variety of endeavors, from confirming that a proposed physical sound barrier will limit the noise produced by nearby mass transportation to tweaking the architectural design of retrofitted concert auditoriums.
Such traditional engineering applications are, however, merely the beginning. As with the SoundLabs in its peer cities, the San Francisco Arup SoundLab, located in the company’s offices in the JPMorgan Chase Building on Mission near Second Street, is increasingly a source of sonic infrastructure for the arts. Shane Myrbeck, a musician, sound artist, and Arup employee, recently gave me a tour of the lab and a thorough overview of its implications for the arts. By way of example, he played me a piece of classical music as it would sound in a half dozen different venues from Vienna to Boston; the system flipped seamlessly from one to the next and back again. When I mentioned that the ambisonic chamber is like some sonic version of the Star Trek holodeck, Myrbeck said that an Arup colleague of his routinely refers to the room as such.
Bill Fontana’s Sonic Shadows (2010), installed on the catwalk atop SFMOMA’s atrium, was developed utilizing virtual, computer-design test runs in the Arup lab. The work takes sounds from inside the museum’s physical plant and reproduces them as sound art. The San Francisco office also assisted Arup’s New York office in several projects, including an ambisonic recording of a live 2009 performance by Lou Reed with guest saxophonist John Zorn of Reed’s Metal Machine Music (1975), as well as preparation for a Marina Rosenfeld performance at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. (They helped her plan how to best make use of the space for a performance of her Teenage Lontano [2008] as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial.) An Arup office also documented the ill-fated Ai Weiwei installation Sunflower Seeds (2010) at the Tate Modern in London with the intent to have visitors step on the one-hundred-million hand-crafted seeds, but that interactive element was cancelled after concerns arose about noxious porcelain dust.
Bill Fontana. Inside Sonic Shadows (2010). Courtesy of the San Franciso Museum of Modern Art.
The San Francisco Arup office is also working to build connections directly to the local arts community. Arup’s acoustic and lighting departments collaborated with blacksmith Jefferson Mack Metal to create Sent Forth (2011), an imaginary sonic time machine currently on display at Fort Mason. In late 2011, Arup allowed the ambisonic SoundLab to serve as a performance venue for a concert production by the arts organization ME’DI.ATE. The event featured the musician Greg Kowalsky and the duo Myrmyr, among others; Arup’s Myrbeck also performed.
Arup San Francisco’s SoundLab is slowly making its name alongside other long-running local institutions, most notably the music program at Mills and the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) department at Stanford. There’s an interesting distinction, though—San Francisco is expanding from being a sonic-arts center to being a sonic-arts-infrastructure center. Mills and CCRMA routinely produce graduates who carry elsewhere the cultural DNA of the Bay Area’s indigenous sound explorations. Arup joins a growing number of local individuals and organizations that are attracting client artists from around the globe to San Francisco to help them realize their ideas.
**The Codification of Glitch**
Barry Threw is one such an individual. Speaking over a dinner of Sichuan food in the Richmond District, Threw talked about the work he does at Obscura Digital. From its office in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, Obscura, not unlike Arup, manages the technological realizations of design ideas for an international client base.
Threw also discussed his own development projects, among which are a Bluetooth-enabled “sensor bow” for Berkeley-based Keith McMillen Instruments and sampler software for an orchestral work by the Oakland-based composer Mason Bates. Threw discussed in detail his latest venture: bringing to fruition a long-planned piece of general-use sound software designed by Markus Popp. Popp, who resides in Berlin, is best known as Oval, the electronic musician whose albums, such as 94 Diskont (1995), helped bring the word “glitch” to both media studies departments and the international club scene.
Sent Forth, a collaboration between Arup and Jefferson Mack Metal, sound by Shane Myrbeck
Currently, Berlin has more than its share of programming brainpower. It’s home to both the music production software company Ableton and the data-sharing service SoundCloud—and as a sign of the city’s increasing prominence, the journalist and musician Peter Kirn recently relocated his CreateDigitalMusic.com there from New York. Nonetheless, Popp selected Threw to implement his software idea. The two were introduced by Naut Humon, whose surround-video/sound Recombinant Media Lab employed Threw as an engineer and developer between 2006 and 2008. OvalDNA, the Popp/Threw sound-manipulation software, will be made available online for free in conjunction with a recent Oval album by that name. The tool will allow users to rework thousands of existing audio files, free of copyright restrictions.
Threw agrees that there’s a wealth of digital engineering resources in the Bay Area supporting international artists. He also suggests that one reason local technologists enjoy collaborating with people from elsewhere is the wanting state of the major-league Bay Area arts institutions. For a region that is home to Google, Twitter, Apple, and Facebook, the artistic seasons at the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera, as well as Cal Performances in Berkeley, are decidedly retrograde.
**Icelandic iOSphilia**
Back in 2008, Threw worked with Scott Snibbe on a media installation for the Beijing Olympics. And thanks to a growing suite of mobile apps and other bespoke innovations, Snibbe has become a key example of a Bay Area technologist who has helped secure the region’s reputation for providing next-generation implementation resources. His Snibbe Interactive, based on Howard Street near Seventh Street in SOMA, counts among its clients science and history museums from Mexico to France to Thailand.
As at Arup and Obscura Digital, much of Snibbe’s work involves providing somewhat behind-the-scenes support to institutions; yet sometimes credit is given where it is due. He has had perhaps his most public success this past year with the release of Björk’s Biopholia. The Icelandic techno-chanteuse engaged Snibbe not only to develop the images projected during her concert tour, but also to code a groundbreaking app for Apple’s iOS platform. The app was no mere interactive advertisement for the full-length recording. It was itself a kind of “full-length app,” as it were, with different mini-apps extrapolating interactive experiences from each of the album’s individual songs. The video-game reviewer for the New York Times called it [“among the most creative, innovative and important new projects in popular culture,”](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/arts/video-games/bjorks-biophilia-an-album-as-game.html) and he didn’t even like the music that much.
Arup, Threw, and Snibbe are simply three examples in which San Francisco technology is the engine on which the global sonic arts increasingly run. There is plenty of precedent for the Bay Area providing sonic infrastructure to the world; the region is home to the leading sound technology firms Dolby and THX. Instruments from Don Buchla’s debut analog synthesizer (1963) to the contemporary virtual tools of Cycling 74—most notably Max/MSP—originated here. San Francisco’s current generation of innovators can easily take a drive down memory lane: along Highway 101 in Redwood City is the roadside logo of the legendary audio-storage firm Ampex, founded by Russian immigrant Alexander Michael Poniatoff back in 1944.
_____
*This article [originally appeared](https://disquiet.com/2012/04/21/sonic-infrastructure-artpractical-com/) in April 2012 as part of the online publication Art Practical, which is now archived at [archive.org](https://wayback.archive-it.org/15633/20210126121419/https://www.artpractical.com/feature/sonic_infrastructure/).*
*More on the Myrbeck at [shanemyrbeck.com](https://shanemyrbeck.com/portfolio/sent-forth/), the Fontana at [sfmoma.org](https://www.sfmoma.org/read/bill-fontana/), and Biophilia at [snibbe.com](https://www.snibbe.com/biophilia).*
The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 3, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 30, 2021.
Disquiet Junto Project 0522: Just Backdated
The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.
As is the tradition at the end of each calendar year, this week’s project is a sound journal, a selective audio history of your past twelve months.
Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2021 — or you might opt for even more elements, choosing a segment for each week, or each day, for example. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, your own devising, and not drawn from third-party sources.
Step 2: You will then select one segment from each of these (most likely) dozen audio elements. If you’re doing a dozen items, one for each month, then five-second segments are recommended, for a total of one minute. Ultimately, though, the length of the segments and of the overall finished track are up to you.
Step 3: Then you will stitch these segments together in chronological order to form one single track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.
Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0522” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0522” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.
Additional Details:
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 3, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 30, 2021.
Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0522” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.
Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.
Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).
For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 522nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Just Backdated (The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments) — at: https://disquiet.com/0522/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0522-just-backdated/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0522-just-backdated/)
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.
