From a Whisper to a Whisper

From Tatami-ya Music of Aukland, New Zealand

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Much of the beauty of this “lofi ambient track” by Tatami-ya Music is what doesn’t happen. About 30 seconds in, after an opening sequence of tones as spacious and cloudy as the image superimposed in the video on the music equipment, a harder beat kicks in, only to be repeated at such a slow pace that each time it’s as if it might not even have returned.

In different hands, the song would have proceeded from whisper to, if not a scream, then a bludgeon, but the hard beat never does more than it does from the start. It doesn’t ramp up. It doesn’t accelerate. It doesn’t populate the track more than it does initially. The restraint leaves room for not only the sparsely accumulated sounds to be heard, but for the listener to experience a lingering sense that it might, in fact, yet go in a different direction.

Track originally posted at [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK3rbZ4KA34). Tatami-ya Music is Hidenari Nozaki, who is based in Aukland, New Zealand. More at [instagram.com/ghiden](https://www.instagram.com/ghiden/) and [soundcloud.com/tatamiya-music](https://soundcloud.com/tatamiya-music).

Current Favorites: Unreal Real Birds + Video Game Birds

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

▰ Jason (Bassling) Richardson posted this remarkable video he shot of a [lyrebird doing its thing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP6x3UOXAqE&t=34s). The variety of sounds, which really do bring to mind a synthesizer, are all the more striking in the context of the bird’s dance.

▰ I spent much of a morning this week listening to just wind chimes, occasional distant thunder, and intermittent bird chatter — all from the video game [*Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2QVG2yxFm0). (Thanks, Naxuu!)

▰ Jesse Goin & Nathan McLaughlin team up on [*Earth Tones Miniatures*](https://nathanmclaughlin.bandcamp.com/album/earth-tones-miniatures), a time-slowing mix of acoustic guitar and deep, soothing drones.

▰ Yoshio Machida’s [*Modulisme Session 041*](https://modulisme.bandcamp.com/album/modulisme-session-041) is an exploratory album of synthesizer music: part minimalist patterning, part brutalist industrial noise-making

twitter.com/disquiet: Theater Anxiety and Media Ambience

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each week, collating tweets I made at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet/), my public notebook. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ The sequel to *A Quiet Place*, a film about a society in which survivors of a worldwide catastrophe take extreme caution whenever leaving their homes, will apparently be available “only in theaters.”

Which is to say, the bar for the cinema sensorium has been lowered as a result of the pandemic. Simply entering the movie theater exceeds whatever Sensurround had ever been hoped to accomplish.

▰ I enjoy buying downloads. I also feel a threshold-breaking new utility (app/device/service/protocol) remains necessary for doing so to become mainstream, mainstream being necessary for downloads to pass a threshold at which they will become financially meaningful for musicians.

▰ Me at 6:45am: Yawn.

Me at 7:15am: Oh, yeah, it’s May the 4th. I’ll watch *Bad Batch*, but it’s not like I’m gonna be celebrating Star Wars all day. C’mon.

Me at 9:00am: Oh wow, this [Star Wars *Biomes*](https://disquiet.com/2021/05/04/star-wars-biomes/) audio-video feature is awesome and I’m going to play it on loop until dinner!

Pretty much the only shortcoming of these Star Wars *Biomes* videos is they don’t entirely ditch the music. Fortunately, the environmental sound of the various locations is prominent most if not all the time.

▰ Netflix needs a third button for “I really enjoyed this and I never want to watch it or anything like it anytime again in the near or foreseeable future.” Pondering what that hand gesture is.

▰ That thing where you’re looking at Goodreads and you go to click the “Want to Read” button and, just as you do so, the advertising banner finally slides into place, thus pushing down the rest of the page, leading you to instead trigger a full-page view of the book’s cover.

▰ Really enjoyed [the dense environmental sounds of *Cyberpunk 2077*](https://disquiet.com/2021/05/07/loitering-in-video-games/), so rather than just watch recordings on YouTube I got a copy. Somewhere a database is registering the machine language equivalent of “This player simply wanders around town and then stands still for a half an hour.” … Somewhere another machine on the network replies, “The player’s digital signature resembles that of someone who did the same thing in *Pikmin* 20 years ago.” … Further down the stack comes a whisper on the wind from an ancient BASIC subroutine: “I know that kid. Used to carry a binder of floppies around with him in high school.”

▰ I think I need to add “Loitering in video games” to the Disquiet.com profile.

▰ The phrase “panting sibilantly” was one of the first descriptions in the captions for *Mayans M.C.* this week.

▰ And on that note, have a great weekend. Listen to one of your favorite TV shows. Admire the emotional heft of the word balloons in a favorite graphic novel. Record the outside and bring it inside. See you Monday. Or maybe Tuesday.

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.