The Amalgams of Brown + Scienide

On Drum Machine Tape Cassette

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The great beatcrafter Kev Brown teamed up with his regional neighbor J Scienide (Brown is in Maryland, Scienide in Washington, D.C.) for last month’s excellent *Drum Machine Tape Cassette (Instrumentals)*. It’s a baker’s dozen of throwback hip-hop, dense with dusty samples (I hear Crosby, Stills, and Nash doing “Dark Star” at one point, and what seems to be James Brown’s “Give Me Some Skin” later on). It’s all atmospherically downtempo, beautiful hodgepodge 4/4 mood music, amalgams of disparate elements, like raspy cymbals against choral vocals on “Vibrations Good,” and the swaggery funk of “Buck Rogers,” the chopped up piano and horns of “Duck Dynasty.” The best moments use tiny snippets to build something large and imposing, like how “Steroids” begins with nearly granular locked groove psychedelia before crunching a hard bit of echoed piano against a rigorous little trap set motif.

Album originally posted at [kevbrown.bandcamp.com](https://kevbrown.bandcamp.com/album/drum-machine-tape-cassette-instrumentals). It was released on October 29, 2021.

Tool Provenance

A video by Non Verbal Poetry

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

You’ll come for the “paint can kora-harp,” a makeshift version of the ancient West African string instrument, and you’ll stay for the way its pizzicato emanations — as if from dusty, aged, still tightly wound piano wire — are squelched and refracted, tweaked and echoed, by less self-evident electronic means. This is the work of Non Verbal Poetry (aka Edinburgh, Scotland-based Fen Warder), who recorded the piece by using a delay looper to process the live performance. Like the homemade string instrument, the piece of software (titled Otis, running on a device called Norns) is a hand-coded tool based on preexisting source material, in this case the Cocoquantus, a device created by Peter Blasser.

Video originally posted on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H2IJB0wRl4).

twitter.com/disquiet: Holiday Pause

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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](https://disquiet.com/2021/11/15/shangri-la/) in expanded form or [otherwise](https://disquiet.com/2021/11/09/unspeakable/) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ Cool. The latest Junto project is live ([disquiet.com/0516](http://disquiet.com/0516)) and a holiday is imminent. I haven’t taken a digital break (from Twitter and Facebook) in a while, so I’m bowing out til Nov. 29. Gonna write, read (Pessoa biography, ton o’ fiction), listen, chill, loiter in some video games, nap. Be well. ⏸

▰ “The host will let you in soon.”

All UX text makes more sense when understood as out-of-context quotes from H. P. Lovecraft short stories.

▰ This is what it sounds like when bees scream: “When she stuck a recorder at the entrance of a hive fringed by hornets, she heard a cacophony of noise.” More at [nytimes.com](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/science/bees-screaming-murder-hornets.html).

▰ “Too bag new asleep morel.”

At night I sometimes use audio notes to capture stray final waking thoughts. Sometimes the struggling speech-to-text tool, lacking a lucid dreaming mode, types out tentative guesswork immune to interpretation. I must listen to understand what I said.

▰ Weird. I’d swear the new Neal Stephenson, *Termination Shock*, and the final Expanse book were due out the same day, but the former came out today, and the latter’s now due at month’s end, same day at the final Fonda Lee Jade trilogy novel. And the new Mick Herron came out today. What’s with November?

▰ “A system of coded hand signals among tight-knit teammates and coaches confounds opponents with its speed and efficiency” (more at: [nytimes.com](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/15/us/riverside-california-deaf-football-team.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqohlSVUaBibIRp89rwOLn-POzLF5jXb6LSaSUzBDxqEZDoGOvknKYrZpbt83miiWTdoHMKMqQLY66N5jCHFXalvipIqYytNCKj8pqIm3UyRogcvEVu0xqHrhNDXnbbpznOP670qNbn3tWaPU1XclIQ1upcB1ZBr9jyxzs6TBGu523tZ52-5wRcwpAGddO1TZ-qXgGB58O92ZbhnD6gZQW-FRWjDbndD0-KtXOUwJSgqAFCUjlD56vNBMO9oXPLL8Lwoheaf9ibYRA29rJeS5FjQ5RguzXlKS0LqcE4_kNrI&smid=url-share)) I’m sports illiterate, but I’m all in (no ableist “all ears” jokes) for a story about deaf football. (via Dave Pell’s Next Draft newsletter)

▰ I’ll miss this place.

▰ Most recent music purchases by format, following [the lead](https://twitter.com/MarkRichardson/status/1461340799027884033) of Mark Richardson (former Pitchfork editor, currently music critic at Wall Street Journal, and who did [a nice interview](https://pitchfork.com/features/paper-trail/9388-aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii/) with me about my Aphex Twin book when it came out). I don’t actually buy a lot of physical music media. I have so much over decades, but I do on occasion:

LP – *Deep Voices (The Second Whale Record)*

CD – *The Consummation of Right and Wrong*
by David First/The Western Enisphere

Tape – 3 blank tape loops (4.25, 5.8, 8 seconds)

Download – *Wrong Names* EP by Loraine James

▰ Took a short walk to a wide angle view at lunch. (Panorama, actually.)

▰ That moment when you’re feeling like you’re getting pretty well settled into a new Neal Stephenson novel, and the screen tells you that you have now passed the 1% point.

A Glitch in the Canyon

Taking cues from the Algorithm

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It was only there for a moment, but scrubbing back through YouTube is so simple as to be an inherent part of the viewing process. For a moment, the album cover is in view, and there it is. In *The Matrix*, the appearance of a black cat, the experience of deja vu, is evidence of being in a simulation; the glitch in the matrix is a short circuit, flubbed data, a sign of the system failing to maintain perfect verisimilitude to real life.

Back up a week. A walk in the park. My interlocutor tells me that Joni Mitchell’s album *Ladies of the Canyon* has only one good song on it, “The Circle Game.” Not looking for an argument, I just politely note that the album has at least four other excellent songs (“Morning Morgantown,” “Big Yellow Taxi,” “For Free,” and, of course, “Woodstock”), and arguably more. Two days later, I bring up the conversation opener with someone else, who says the same. I bring up the other songs, and my second interlocutor is astonished, not having remembered many of them were even on the album. I search and put my cellphone up the screen as evidence: one screen against another screen, to be displayed across town on a third screen. This is not an argument. It is not a debate one wins. One simply opens the window, points to the clear sky, and everyone agrees the sky is clear, no matter what they had thought previously.

And then, today, YouTube recommends I watch [a short video](https://youtu.be/xfXMoGmb74w) about a small apartment in Paris, around 350 square feet. I live in a small home, but by no means that small, and I occasionally watch small home videos to marvel at and even take tips from the organization and design. At 7:10 in the video’s nearly over timeline, I pause and scrub back. Something looks familiar as one of the residents is giving a tour, at that moment of how the home stereo system is secreted behind plain panels. A home this small must have only the essentials. What is true of furniture is true, as well, of books, and of record albums. You see where this is going. And yes, there, briefly in view, is the sliver of an image: the cover of *Ladies of the Canyon*.

I’ve been rewatching the TV series *Person of Interest* lately, and doing some writing about artificial intelligence, so these things are on my mind, key among those things: the way a nascent intelligence might make its presence known. I thought I was watching a “small home” video because I’d watched a few in the past. I came to wonder if it had been recommended because of some searches I’d done of a record album nearly a week ago, something then viewable for a second or two, and even then just as a tiny image beneath someone’s arm. I came to wonder if by pausing the video to confirm, I had now further encouraged the Algorithm to send future messages through barely visible snips of relevant cultural artifacts.