Disquiet.com 25th Anniversary Countdown (2 of 13): LX(RMX)

An archival ambient advent calendar from December 1st – 13th, 2021

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet.com 25th anniversary countdown, day 2 of 13. In 2012, I had the pleasure of engaging eight musicians to explore the sounds of Lisbon, Portugal. These were: Steve Roden, Robin Rimbaud, Pedro Tudela, Kate Carr, Shawn Kelly, Marielle Jakobsons, Paula Daunt, and João Ricardo.

The project was done with an old friend of mine, Jorge Colombo, the phenomenal illustrator, photographer, and designer, to accompany an exhibit of his at the time. In the spirit of Fernando Pessoa (whose *The Book of Disquiet* provided the name for Disquiet.com), who wrote under (from within) numerous different heteronyms (or authorial identities), each participant did two tracks: one under their own name, and one under their pseudonym.

The result was this album:

They all worked from a single shared audio source: an ambient soundtrack of field recordings of urban Lisbon created by Elvis Veiguinha for Jorge’s installation exhibit.

More details at [disquiet.com/lx-rmx](https://disquiet.com/lx-rmx). Design by Brian Scott of Boon Design.

Holiday

A mesostic

/ By Marc Weidenbaum 
                   tHere is an undeniable quiet
                   tO time and space, 
           a sudden Languor
                attrIbutable to the annual turkey 
break, a consensual DoS offline event in the U.S.,  
                    A superpower in hush mode,
             suddenlY gone dark as North Korea

Disquiet.com 25th Anniversary Countdown (1 of 13): Pauline Oliveros

An archival ambient advent calendar from December 1st – 13th, 2021

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A week from this coming Monday — which is to say, December 13, 2021 — will mark the 25th anniversary of Disquiet.com. I’ll post one article highlight per day between now and then. The collection will serve as an archival ambient advent calendar. First up: [a 1996 interview I did with the great musician, thinker, and teacher Pauline Oliveros](https://disquiet.com/1996/12/20/deep-listening/):

I interviewed Oliveros several times and we corresponded a bit, as well. Shortly before she died in 2016, the two of us chatted via Facebook Messenger about her proposing a project for the Disquiet Junto music community. Clearly it never got to happen. Nonetheless, many Junto projects evidence her guiding influence: her curiosity, her interest in procedure, her humor, her emphasis on collaboration, and her trademark attention to deep listening.

After the first time I interviewed her, I sent her a gift of ECM CDs recorded by Dino Saluzzi, the Argentinian bandoneon player, with whom she wasn’t yet familiar. She later told me she enjoyed them. I always dreamed of a collaboration between the two musicians. That would have been something.

I’ve initiated this Disquiet.com 25th anniversary countdown with the Oliveros piece because she was responsible for rewiring my brain, and because the interview occurred in 1996, the same year I founded this website. The interview was for Tower Records’ *Pulse!* magazine, where I worked full-time as an editor from 1989 to 1996, and for which I later wrote freelance. I founded the website shortly after leaving Tower employment. Just a few months passed before I realized that I missed having a music publication that I felt was part of who I was. In the absence of one, I created one.

*Image of Pauline Oliveros by Canticle via [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Oliveros#/media/File:POliveros2010.JPG).*

Tweeting Audio

And the complications and temperament of sound in this new (or new-ish?) service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

So, it’s unclear to me how long this has been around, but you can tweet sounds. Not merely sounds that are links from other sources, but from within Twitter itself. I only got my new phone a few months ago, and all of a sudden today the iOS Twitter app had a little colorful waveform symbol next to the photo, GIF, poll, etc. options, and there was a little announcement saying it was new and I should try it out. So, I did.

My initial [tweet](https://twitter.com/disquiet/status/1465486513374785542), which isn’t embedding easily here, hence the link, contains 17 seconds of living room room tone (“living room tone”?). I could hear fog horns and passing cars from where I was seated, on the couch, when I recorded it, but I’m not sure how much is evident in the audio recording. Either way, this is nifty. Here’s what the tweet looks like:

It’s an interesting development. For many years, I’ve tweeted (in words) what I hear, and now I can just post sounds themselves. For example, at the start of 2019, I [tweeted](https://twitter.com/disquiet/status/1083039100658044928): “Morning trio for bathroom fan, passing commuter buses, and low-level electric hum.” And a few months [later](https://twitter.com/disquiet/status/1126854257871708161): “Morning sounds: plane overhead, typing, distant bus, low-level electric hum.”

Of course, it’s not that simple: Our phones “hear” differently from how we do. And describing is itself a form of recording, of inscribing. (I wrote an essay on this topic back in June 2017, “Audio or It Didn’t Happen,” for New Music Box: [nmbx.newmusicusa.org](https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/audio-or-it-didnt-happen/).)

It’s funny that this thing seems to be called “Twitter Voice,” since the human voice is to non-verbal sound what sight is to sound in general: an overbearing presence. I’m sure this will be used for more than voice. Oddly, there was [a Twitter blog post](https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2020/your-tweet-your-voice), which I vaguely remember, back in 2020 about the service, but I think today is the first I saw (well, heard) it in action.

A few more initial thoughts:

  • The Twitter embed isn’t functioning well on my website, but that may be an issue on my backend. Still, the fact that it isn’t simple to share the audio beyond Twitter gets at the ease and versatility of text and image online versus the complications and temperament of sound.
  • It was just two weeks or so ago that someone on Twitter said they wanted to know why they couldn’t just drag an MP3 to Twitter the way they can an image. You still can’t, but you can record audio on the spot (well, on your phone) and post it.
  • I wonder how the copyright bots will come into play.
  • From what I can tell, this isn’t on Android yet. I’m also not seeing it in the macOS client, or in the web browser.
  • Is there an official manner by which one can extract one’s audio from a tweet one has uploaded?
  • Certainly, the “Mute this conversation” option within Twitter means something unintentional in a Twitter suddenly filled with sonic tweets. I wonder if the word “mute” will be revisited if sound takes off.