Disquiet – Page 462 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Current Favorites: Luu, Fripp, Euclide

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

March 7, 2021 / 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.

<a href="https://labelnetlabel.bandcamp.com/album/luus-strange-visions">Luu's Strange Visions by Elisa Luu</a>

▰ 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/).

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

From the past week

March 6, 2021March 7, 2021 / 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.

▰ 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.

Drumcorps’ Glitch-Mediated Metal

RIYL your fond memories of Prong, Slayer, Fugazi, and Godflesh processed by Max Headroom's digital-native grandkid

March 5, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="https://drumcorps.bandcamp.com/album/better-days">Better Days by drumcorps</a>

To say this isn’t ambient would be an understatement, and it’s noted here simply because I veer less and less in my writing about music from the quiet zone, whether unnatural or natural or hybrid environments. So, yeah, don’t sit too close to your speakers, and attenuate that volume if you’re using headphones. This is, on a Friday, exactly what I needed. It’s Drumcorps hitting hard with not just his trademark glitched-up drum’n’bass-mediated metal, but the raw thing, as well. It’s RIYL your fond memories of Prong, Slayer, Fugazi, and Godflesh processed by Max Headroom’s digital-native grandkid. The first track is a trick, a sleight of ear, in which the metal starts off without the seams showing, cut and plastered so suddenly that it could be mistaken for (heck, maybe it is) simply a break-neck live performance by someone capable of playing back in realtime what we once craved software to accomplish for us. Either way, the realism soon enough fades in favor of the computer-addled automatic mash-up that Drumcorps is so good at.

It’s interesting how songs like Prince’s “Dance On” and Prong’s “Prime Cut” (prime aesthetic examples to me of human-machine music interface) once seemed so intense, and now don’t. They broke norms at their time, but they’re more (easy) listenable now, the tension gone. What’s great about Drumcorps is it has some of the intensity those songs had when I first heard them. And he’s been at it a long time, and still keeps it fresh.

Drumcorps is Aaron Spectre, originally from Massachusetts and now based in Amsterdam. More at [drumcorps.co](https://drumcorps.co/).

Disquiet Junto Project 0479: Truck Radio Rain

The Assignment: Locate three sound sources and make something with them.

March 4, 2021January 16, 2023 / 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, March 8, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 4, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0479: Truck Radio Rain

The Assignment: Locate three sound sources and make something with them.

Step 1: Locate online (freesound.org, for example) or record by yourself the following three sounds: a vehicle driving speedily, static between radio stations, and rain.

Step 2: Make an original piece of music using those three sounds. Do what you want with them, but only use those three sounds.

Background: “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating,” John Cage said in his 1937 lecture, “The Future of Music: Credo.” He continued: “The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sound effects, but as musical instruments.” In this week’s Disquiet Junto project, we take the proposition literally.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0479” (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 “disquiet0479” (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-0479-truck-radio-rain/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0479-truck-radio-rain/)

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, March 8, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 4, 2021.

Length: The length is up to you. Yes, 4’33” is a not inappropriate length.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0479” 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 479th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Truck Radio Rain (The Assignment: Locate three sound sources and make something with them) — at:

https://disquiet.com/0479/

This Is What It Sounds Like When Dunes Groan

George Vlad files a report from Namibia

March 3, 2021March 4, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

George Vlad reports from the desert of Namibia, where he recorded this hour of what sand dunes sound like. He identifies the locations as Dune 45 and the Skeleton Coast, and explains that the audio was taped both above- and belowground. The extended length of the document suits Vlad’s experience, which he says involves the ears adjusting over time to the environment and recognizing detail that at first is invisible:

>”Spend a little time letting your ears become accustomed to the sparse soundscape though. After a few hours you’ll start hearing more and more detail where previously there seemed to be none. There’s a constant low frequency energy caused by the movement of air and sometimes by the sand dune itself resonating. The wind ebbs and flows at various speeds, occasionally spraying sand on to the hard crust of the sand dune. The insects flying by offer a sense of scale and immediacy.”

Two thirds of the recording was accomplished with microphones designed for use underwater, what are called hydrophones, here pushed deep into the sand. The result is, as he notes, often “abstract,” the wind muted at the surface, and the audio less immediately identifiable. Where above there is air and texture, below there is an ever-threatening churn, what Vlad likens to a “groan.” On his website, [mindful-audio.com](https://mindful-audio.com/african-desert/), he explains that these are a subset of audio captured at almost a dozen sites around the country.

Audio posted at George Vlad’s [YouTube](https://youtu.be/cRkK0bIfrAc) channel. He’s based in Guildford, England.