Everything Merges

Jeannine Schulz gets pecussive, gently

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Jeannine Schulz had a prolific 2020, and while her most recent record dates back to the end of July, coming up on two months ago, there’s little reason to worry about a longer pause ahead. That was the brief *Tiān*, following shortly on [*When Fragments Align*](https://jeannineschulz.bandcamp.com/album/when-fragments-align), both of which were self-released, and, back a bit further in March, [*Luminous*](https://polarseasrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/luminous), which came out on the Polar Seas label. *Tiān*, like *Fragments* before it, expresses a welcome expansion of the held-shutter, soft-focus, deep-field ambient music that Schulz has produced over the past couple years. It introduces light but certain textures, actual percussive elements that set and keep a pace. How those sounds, notably in the singsong “Xīn,” merge with the backing sound field, how their presence gently pushes the haze to the rear without formally drawing a line, is part of Schulz’s considered compositional accomplishment. A simple delay on a secondary pulse echoes into the distance, merging beat with atmosphere.

Schulz is based in Hamburg, Germany. Album released at [jeannineschulz.bandcamp.com](https://jeannineschulz.bandcamp.com/album/ti-n).

Yes, You Want to Listen to Bowed Glockenspiel

A Lullatone sample set that is great before it's even sampled

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

While it’s true that I think the internet excels especially at works in progress, where the audience can witness the given musician’s process, it remains also the case that work considered (merely? purely? solely?) raw material can be an end unto itself. Which is to say that while the best listening to recorded music is often when it isn’t even done, often the very best listening is the stuff that exists before the music-making can be said to have begun. Which is to say, some sample sets are listenable until themselves.

The material in the new sample set from Japan-based act Lullatone, all bowed glockenspiel, is a fine example. Just listen the pristine, soaring, organ-like beauty of the sample. And then, of course, try out the cooked versions, four reworkings of the source audio: ambient, distorted, granularized, and “reverse reverb.”

Set first released at [lullatonesamplesets.bandcamp.com](https://lullatonesamplesets.bandcamp.com/album/bowed-glockenspiel-sample-set).

twitter.com/disquiet: Doorbells, 9/11, DAWless

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 in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ Music theory keeps you young. In music theory years, I am at best a first grader.

▰ The doorbell died after years of me writing about doorbells. Which I’ll write about more later. Main thing: shoddy temp replacement while I waited for actual replacement. Concern: when the new doorbell arrives, I won’t know. But: UPS just phoned from outside the front door. Whew.

▰ Currently immersed in un-ASMR: working inside a building the outside of which is being prepped for painting thanks to vast amounts of scraping, scratching, and knocking.

▰ I was in Golden Gate Park reading a novel on a park bench, and I thought someone was playing an Eric Dolphy album nearby. Turned out it was one of those tiny motorized toy boats on Spreckels Lake. The thing, less than a foot long, had capsized and its engine was churning away.

▰ The next to last concert I attended pre-pandemic, I mentioned, in passing, the concept of “DAWless” to a musician in their early 60s, and they laughed out loud. I cherish that laugh. Its memory has kept me company.

▰ In the Echo of No Towers: On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, [I spoke with Stephen Vitiello](https://disquiet.com/2011/09/08/stephen-vitiello-wtc-911-floyd/) about his World Trade Center tapes. It’s informative that the audio’s from Hurricane Floyd, climate issues having received far less investment than the war on terror.

▰ First concert I attended after 9/11 was Alex Chilton, I think the Friday following. This was in New Orleans, where he and I both lived at the time. The concert was sparsely attended. Even a hint of police car lights bleeding in from the street made clear how on edge everyone was.

▰ “You have to see *Heat*.” Says David Costabile’s louche-bro, Wags. Glad that *Billions* is back at its game. As with *Unforgotten*, it’s both distracting and comforting (stars: they’re just like us) to watch so many of scenes set with the actors socially distanced from each other.

▰ *Reminiscence*: Come for the prestige TV Philip K. Dick / Kim Stanley Robinson mashup; stay for the sound design as a grand piano slowly descends through the ceiling into a massive, fully submerged concert hall.

▰ Found some old, unwatched *Elementary* episodes on the DVR to fill time during Wednesday night’s region-wide internet outage. Just glad I’d caught the evening’s *What If…?* episode about the zombie apocalypse before this actual apocalypse arrived.

▰ “I was forest bathing and I mistook you for a creek.” The soft-spoken Carmel (Regina Hall) to Tony (Bobby Cannavale), whom she’s stumbled upon peeing onto a giant tree in the first episode of *Nine Perfect Strangers*.

▰ I’ve realized the reason playing “All of Me” is like eating potato chips is because it starts on C and ends on a B, which you naturally bring back to a C and then you start over again, and you realize your haven’t even eaten your lunch on your lunch break so you eat potato chips.

In related news, as of today’s lunch break I can play “All of Me” on guitar with my eyes closed, which is me always planning for some potential (distant!) future when, you know, one’s eyes might no longer work.

▰ What could be more ambient than muting the word ambient for a few days

▰ And on that note, have a great weekend. I have a heap of work to complete before day’s end, and zero plans this weekend, the best sort of plan some weekends.

– Listen to TV captions.

– Cook by ear.

– Use noise cancellation as the mobile sensory deprivation tank that it is.

Three Takeyuki Hakozaki Videos

From what became What Comes After

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These three videos have footage of the installations that led to each of the three tracks on *What Comes After*, the Takeyuki Hakozaki album I wrote about [earlier this week](https://disquiet.com/2021/09/06/takeyuki-hakozaki-hako/).

This is “Air,” with the fans and tuned guitars:

And this is “Magnetic,” with the tape rubbing along the guitar strings:

And this is “Complex,” for loops and synthesizer: