The Miracle of Television

And the marvel of Lissajous figures

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These images are the logo of a 1949 book titled *The Miracle of Television*. I wasn’t sure if the logo was specific to the book, or was more broadly that of the publisher, Wilcox & Follett Co. Two friends (Deb Chachra and Jason Richardson) explained they are Lissajous figures, meaning they’re almost certainly specific to the book.

*The Miracle of Television* was published in 1949, or 21 years prior to Harlan Ellison’s *The Glass Teat*, which could have been titled *The Misfortune of Television* (“ours has become a society where shadow and reality intermix to the final elimination of any degree of rational selectivity on the part of those whose lives are manipulated”).

Karlehag’s “Spring”

Live modular synthesizer performance

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


This is a dream of a piece by Tobias Karlehag, whose “Spring” is an evershfting melodic line, supported by a shimmering sequence of ambient pads. The melody is quite brief and cyclical, and yet something about the accumulation of tones, the slight variations in permutations, the occasional appearance of what seem to be choral vocal samples, all adds up to something far more life-like than the individual parts might suggest. Throughout, Karlehag’s darts in and out of view, maintaining the balance, implementing small changes.

This is the latest video I’ve added to [my ongoing YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-) of fine live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUpKRMkLSUA). More from Karlehag at [tobiaskarlehag.tumblr.com](https://tobiaskarlehag.tumblr.com/).

Danish Turbines

As recorded by Robert Cole Rizzi

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Robert Cole Rizzi files this sonic report from wind turbines near where he lives in Kolding, Denmark. The recordings employ the [Geofón](https://disquiet.com/2020/01/14/geofon-lom/) made by LOM, an instrument company in Bratislava, Slovakia. The Geofón is an especially sensitive microphone, its technology having originated for seismic measurements. In the six tracks that Rizzi posted, we hear the mechanisms and the drones, the death-ambient routinized turbulence, of the wind machines doing their thing. Some of the tracks are quite violent, notably the third, which includes a squeal that on first listen might be mistaken for that of a bird, though the subsequent repetitions makes clear it’s simply a result of the machine turning. While all the tracks have a meditative sameness once they get rolling, they aren’t immune to change. Track five in particular seems to rev up at one point, like it’s suddenly increased power. Many of the tracks have the industrial whir of those extended YouTube videos of the engine room of the Starship Enterprise. The first and fifth are my favorites. If deep gray were a sound, it would sound like these tracks, especially if it were a deep gray that’s rich with imperfections and prone to wear.

Playlist originally posted at [soundcloud.com/rizzi](https://soundcloud.com/rizzi/sets/windturbines-recorded-with-lom-audio-geofon-and-usi-pro). More from Rizzi at [twitter.com/RobertColeRizzi](https://twitter.com/RobertColeRizzi).

Current Favorites: Luu, Fripp, Euclide

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.

▰ The new release from Italian musician Elisa Luu (aka Elisabetta Luciani, based in Rome), [*Luu’s Strange Minimalism*](https://labelnetlabel.bandcamp.com/album/luus-strange-visions), packs more into four short tracks than most musicians do into a full album, even two albums. From the filmic post-classical “Violin, LuuV” to the pulsing minimalism of “Dicem, 15V,” the record is a strong example of why Luu is high on the list of my favorite musicians I have no idea why I don’t read about more frequently.

▰ Just a reminder that Robert Fripp is 45 weeks into his promised 50 weekly tracks of Music for Quiet Moments. If you’re more familiar with his far more widely viewed pandemic-era collaborations with his wife, Toyah Wilcox, then welcome to the introspective side of his personality and his playing. The [latest](https://youtu.be/5hyv4xLlT2I) was recorded in Paris six years ago:

▰ A beautiful Instagram series pairs Gregory Euclide’s photographs with one-minute loops of music by a rotating and expanding cast of contributors, including [the OO-Ray](https://www.instagram.com/p/CLpJ16jhFOX/), [Stephen Vitiello](https://www.instagram.com/p/CLWvU1TB3zG/), [Jolanda Moletta](https://www.instagram.com/p/CLGBN7-hd09/), and [Kirill Nikolai](https://www.instagram.com/p/B1JtQ0xBmaB/). There have been 159 entries to date. The latest is by [Steve Ashby](https://www.instagram.com/p/CL0b4aYhuKj/). Visit at [instagram.com/thesisrecurring](https://www.instagram.com/thesisrecurring/).

twitter.com/disquiet: Autoplay, Debris, Green Shoots

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each week, collating the tweets I made at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet/) (which I think of as my public notebook) that I want to keep track of. For the most part, this means ones I initiated, not ones in which I directly responded to someone. I sometimes tweak them a bit here. Some tweets pop up on Disquiet.com sooner than I get around to collating them, so I leave them out of the weekly round-up. It’s usually personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. They’re here pretty much in chronological order.

Looking back at the tweets makes the previous week seem both longer and shorter than it was. The cadence is a way to map how time progressed. The subjects are another map of the same territory.

▰ Making dumplings is my favorite new weekend activity. Made a batch on Saturday, froze 40 or so, and just boiled these for lunch.

▰ When writing email, I put M at the bottom to sign off. Email lingers in abandoned tabs or the drafts folder before I finish. Often the M trails offscreen when I go back to revise. I might “M” an email four or more times. I might not notice until after I hit send.

M

M

M

M

M

▰ Got the new John Pham comic and it was instantly the most beautiful thing in my home.

▰ It’s not lost on me that I ordered two synthesizer modules designed for maximized slowness (collectively they’re called Sloths, and I got the Apathy and Torpor, the third being Inertia) from Australia, so the longest waveform of all is the arc of the package’s journey to my home.

▰ Tired: The Anxiety of Influence

Wired: Laptop stand

▰ Finished season 1 of Wisting and recognized that when watching a subtitled show in a language I don’t know, when I first pick up an episode where I left off, I’m surprised it’s not in English: In my brain, the accent of the speaker and the words in the captions have merged. (That’s in contrast with, say, Shetland, which is a subtitled show in a language I reportedly know but in this case don’t remotely understand.)

▰ 1974, Robert Fripp: “the attributes of the new world: small, mobile, independent, and intelligent units”

2021, 2HP Modular:

When Fripp spoke of a “small, mobile, independent, and intelligent unit” he meant himself, following the (in retrospect temporary) end of King Crimson. As he put it at the time: “instead of King Crimson, you’re now getting me.”

Now instead of him, get a few millimeters of tech.

▰ On the one hand, the interface on this podcast publishing tool makes me feel like it’s 2005. On the other hand, that would mean 2020 never happened.

▰ I love a good waveform. This is from the Google Recorder app’s new web interface.

▰ Debris, episode 1: very X-Files (though more straight-faced), fairly Fringe (minus the humor), so far no evidently sonic clues, but given the subgenre provenance it seems inevitable.

▰ AI is everything we don’t yet recognize as AI:

ELIZA just repeated my words.

Netflix just sifted what I dig.

Waze just game-theoried a fast way home.

Google Docs just guessed my sentence.

The AI-seeing quantum consciousness just extrapolated evolution across the metaverse.

▰ Thursday night

▰ It’s not even 8am (in California), and Bandcamp emails have already surpassed Netflix stream.

▰ Sonic realism doesn’t especially concern me, but I was watching TV¹ last night. Two investigators entered a classic storage room with shelves of (empty, brand new) “evidence” boxes, and all I could think was this room wouldn’t sound this way if those boxes had anything in them. Part of it was, I think, that a show about investigating does, to some degree, prime its viewers to pay attention. In a better show, the fact that the room sounded that way would itself be a clue. Here, however, it was just production sloppiness.

¹After working, reading a ton, writing over my daily quota, exercising, making dinner, doing the dishes, and practicing guitar, so leave it be, you TV-haters. :)

▰ That thing where you have a nrw computwe kweboard and you;re stikk ajustinh to it evem though it;s the sane layout as yout prevopis keyboarf

▰ Green shoots

▰ Another reason to hate autoplay. The album that YouTube Music decided to play a split second after Prong’s Beg to Differ ended was easily twice as freakin’ loud.