A Pox on the Inbox

PR at scale

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If I haven’t replied to your request for coverage, this screenshot from Gmail is why. I do want to hear your music — but I also want to hear other people’s music, and the less time I spend in correspondence, the more time I can spend listening. Thanks.

I set up filters in Gmail by email account (labels and PR firms, and for some artists, too). They’re in declining order of likely interest. I have them automatically bypass my inbox.

And to further clarify: No way I’ll read them all. I take a peek in declining order, and occasionally clean them out. I search for “http://bandcamp.com/yum” and mostly pay attention to level 0 and 1. A search in others (“soundtrack,” “ambient,” etc.) might yield something.

Not shown, simply because it’s much further down in the list of my email folders/labels: the 11,811 that automatically bypassed my inbox because they’re from Bandcamp.

I feel bad about complaining, because there’s tons of great stuff in there. As burdens go, it’s an embarrassment of riches. What’s not great is (1) people who re-add me to their subscriptions lists after I unsubscribe and (2) people who check back repeatedly.

What’s also sometimes burdensome is the natural sympathy one acquires for musicians who put all their time into releasing albums and tracks, only for them to face so many hurdles for it to get much an audience.

Loitering in Video Games

A virtual walk through Night City

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Uncanny Valley gets all the press, but there is another valley nearby, a Hyperreal Valley located in the Goldilocks Zone between the discomforting and the mundane, the failed experiment and the all too familiar. In place of the awkwardness of some neural network’s syrupy, glitchy, pixel-flesh puppetry, there is the sprawling atmospheric environment of broad-geography video games, places where you can stroll and get to know not only the neighborhood but a semblance of a world.

Here are two more sequences from *Cyberpunk 2077*, one shot [by day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm5VJw0NVkA), the other [at night](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqEGrKlpSsg), in both cases the position of the sun having nothing to do with astronomy and everything do to with a game-state variable deep in the code. In contrast with some of the others I’ve posted recently, these are motion-intensive. They aren’t records of loops shot from stationary corners. They are half-hour walks through fantastic imaginings of urban places. We don’t only hear the layered elements — traffic, conversation, machinery, advertising, etc. — but we hear them in relative position to each other, and from various vantages.


At 15:15 in the daytime video, there is a deep surge, part whale song and part industrial drone. What there is is a giant freighter hovering overhead. Then another comes into view, followed by a similar guttural utterance that veers on the atmospheric in scale. The taken-for-granted facts of the narrative are well beyond our own humdrum reality, and yet the result in the videos is disarmingly natural, very much the opposite of the Uncanny Valley. In fact, if you turn down the streaming quality to 480 on one of these and on a real-life walk around Tokyo or Manhattan, the differences would become even less recognizable.

Disquiet Junto Project 0488: Reverse Delay

Assignment: Do something you've been putting off.

/ 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, May 10, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 6, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0488: Reverse Delay

Assignment: Do something you’ve been putting off.

Step 1: Think of something music-related you’ve been putting off: finishing a track, starting a track, fixing a piece of hardware, updating a piece of software, trying out something one last time before discarding it. Whatever comes to mind. Preferably something that’s been bothering you.

Step 2: Make a piece of music that checks off the list whatever it was you recognized, in Step 1, you’d been putting off.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0488” (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 “disquiet0488” (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 tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0488-reverse-delay/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0488-reverse-delay/)

Step 5: Annotate your tracks 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.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 10, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 6, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Maybe the length is the issues — you’ve been meaning to do something very long/short for a long time.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0488” 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 488th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Reverse Delay (Assignment: Do something you’ve been putting off) — at: https://disquiet.com/0488/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0488-reverse-delay/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0488-reverse-delay/)

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet) for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is by Conrad Bakker, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

[https://flic.kr/p/tLfcL](https://flic.kr/p/tLfcL)

[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/)

A Meta-Excursion into Ambient Audio-Video

Which is to say, chill

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This isn’t a scene from [*Cyberpunk 2077*](https://disquiet.com/2021/05/02/current-favorites-raw-material-black-samurai-deft-esoterica/), apparently. It’s an original audio-video environment posted from the [Cozy Dreams](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBoGnCPtBJSnkCQ6hMEoqRg/videos) account on YouTube. It depicts a rainy night in a post-*Blade Runner* noir city, the small crowd lingering outside a cafe for an unlikely two and a half hours (the length of the cut, purpose-built for studying or otherwise chilling), but the urban street noise, filtered through the pitter-patter of rain (note that as viewers, we’re on the other side of the glass, which serves as both a window and as our own screen’s surface at once), and the welcome absence of what we learn in film-class to call non-diegetic sound (which is to say, there’s no score, no music, no sound not believably emanating from the other side of the glass), lends it all a solid sense of scenic coherence.

As a longtime listener to ambient music and, more broadly, ambient sound, I welcome the audio-visual equivalent as a form of cultural production and self-expression. YouTube is filled with this sort of material, and exploring the accounts and videos, as well as the threaded conversations on such posts, is itself an excursion, a meta-excursion into these myriad fictional excursions.

Video originally posted at [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JEdRM1J5AU). Cozy Dreams’ YouTube account lists Belgium as its place of origin.

ASMR + Zoom Backgrounds = Star Wars: Biomes

It's May the 4th, didn't you hear?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Today was a holiday in the most commercial of senses. May the 4th is the punny annual rite in which people around this globe praise the franchise that unfolds a galaxy far, far away — and they do so with no small amount of support from the … what’s the correct reference? The mothership? No, that’s *Close Encounters*. The mother lode? That’s more *Indiana Jones*. Let’s just say that Lucasfilm and Disney do not disappoint. This year this meant the debut of a new animated series, and a one-off *Simpsons* tie-in, plus various toys and online activities.

Among the latter is an 18-minute video — more to the point, an audio-video feature — that is among the most rarefied artifacts ever produced as part of Star Wars. Titled *Biomes*, it is a sequence of CGI scenes from various settings, among them Hoth, the ice planet first seen in *The Empire Strikes Back*; Tatooine, the twin-sunned desert that Luke Skywalker fled in what later became known as *A New Hope*; and Crait, the red-streaked salt fields that made for a picturesque battle in *The Last Jedi*.

The sequences are all atmosphere, which is to say they are devoid of plot, and to a good regard of action, as well. We hear no voices, at least not intelligible ones, though there are some beeping probe droids passing by in the opening scene and, later, some noisy tauntauns, heard from far above. When we get to Tatooine, we witness the stranded R2-D2 and C-3PO before they’re separated, and R2 does let off a little trill.

The point of view is entirely that of the director. There is no character, no vessel, whose experience or vantage the scenes depict. There is just landscape and figures, and there is sound. Each sequence is rich with its indigenous noises: wind across the desert of Tatooine, birds and beasts around the village on Sorgan from *The Mandalorian*, porgs squawking above the ocean world Ahch-To. This gets at the “biome” aspect of the scenes. These aren’t quite full-on naturalist National Geographic scenes, because they do feature key moments from the stories that have been set here. For example, we don’t just see Ahch-To; we see see it as the Millennium Falcon takes off. We don’t just hover over Crait; we do so amid the battle.

Likewise, we don’t just hear the noises inherent in the places. We also hear bits of the musical themes familiar from John Williams’ scores. These aren’t triumphant. They work hard not to do what the scores usually do so exceptionally, which is to telegraph story and to build momentum. Here, they’re all transitional themes, interstitial ones. They are, in other words, as close to environmental sounds as the music might get.

It would have been great if *Biomes* had gone full biome and dispensed entirely with music. As it stands, though, they are a beautiful thing to behold, and an interesting development, seeming to have resulted from a recognized kinship between the phenomena of ASMR (which has trained audiences to appreciate closely heard sounds) and of animated Zoom backgrounds (which have let people transport themselves to other places during conference calls). *Biomes* is more than a collection of screensavers, thanks in particular to the immersive nature of the audio. These are environmental set pieces, like an expanded version of the Ralph McQuarrie portfolio from the first Star Wars movie. They are part of the beauty of the Star Wars storytelling mode, with the story itself kept at a remove.

*Star Wars: Biomes* streams at [disneyplus.com](https://www.disneyplus.com/video/234e175d-e478-48ba-a29c-f91ccaf1b77c).