Genre Chatter
What's in a name?
“That’s not ambient.”
“No, it’s not. It’s ambient music.”
“But it’s not ambient.”
“Yeah, ambient is an adjective here, not a category, more a tag. It’s not ambient. It’s ambient music. Music with an ambient quality.”
“So, it’s not ambient music. It’s ambient music.”
“Yeah.”
About Today
(I made this before the noise started.)
Current Favorites: Four Turntables, Eight Needles
Heavy rotation, lightly annotated
A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.
▰ [Maria Chavez reworks]((https://mariachavez.bandcamp.com/album/asleep-awake-ekawa-peelsa-spring-2021)) recordings of singing bowls on four turntables, each equipped with remarkable [“double needles,”](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=956561938159653) meaning we’re hearing two different parts of each record simultaneously, for eight separate lines of audio:
▰ Christopher Hanlon submits deeply lofi, nostalgia-rich, crackly instrumental hip-hop in supreme slow motion with [“Old Blue”](https://soundcloud.com/chrishanlon/old-blue):
▰ Evgueni Galperine and Sacha Galperine’s superb score for the series [*Scenes from a Marriage*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGSZ7tz2FpY) deserves a listen as close as the microphones were placed to the instruments, which by all appearances was quite very close, indeed.
twitter.com/disquiet: Air Strike LARPing
From the past week
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/2021/10/08/the-chimes-of-edith-finch/) or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.
▰ Remember: Every time the Blue Angels fly by, an ambient musician gets radicalized.
▰ Blue Angels, leaf blowers in the sky
▰ I haven’t been home in nearly three weeks. Listening to my home again for the first time after that long is going to be like opening the box set of domestic ambient sound.
▰ “Host is not in the meeting yet.”
Some days this is a generic statement. Others it has Lovecraftian undertones.
▰ The new compact is more compact than the old compact.
▰ We appreciate the appropriate use of a semicolon.
▰ After three weeks away from home, I found it took me a long time to just sort out how these monitors, this keyboard, and this camera even connect with my laptop.
▰ I trust there may be a “silent” episode in the upcoming *Hawkeye* series, as the excellent Fraction/Aja comics prepared us for, but that “The Boy from 6B” episode of *Only Murders in the Building* is gonna be a tough act to follow.
▰ First night back in the neighborhood after three weeks: banh mi.
Second night back: Sichuan.
It is good to be home.
▰ Third night: empanadas, albeit across town.
▰ People: You’re into sound. You must love when the Blue Angels fly over San Francisco.
Me:
▰ Next weekend’s the quiet zone between Blue Angels noise extravaganza and muffled pop overload of Outside Lands. The air show was scheduled from 10am to 4pm today but so far it’s been pretty quiet. Fingers crossed. Noise cancelling is meaningless when you feel it in your chest.
▰ Scuse me while I flip off the sky
▰ Lost a follower. Someone must luv them Blue Angels big time.
▰ People are like, Marc hasn’t been this mad since that museum in Brooklyn wouldn’t let people draw in the David Bowie reliquary.
▰ TIL Hellboy takes place in Burlingame
▰ I can’t say I loved the novel A Dragon Waiting by the late John M. Ford, but I did dig parts of it.
▰ And that’s a wrap. A bit more work, some tidying. Enjoy the weekend, even if there’s an air strike LARP convention happening overhead. Pretty much all I care about now is the final John le Carré novel comes out Tuesday. Well, not “all.” I’m just practicing my hyperbole. Be good.