Benediction for a Synthesizer Kit

From Michigan-based Orbital Patterns

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you follow YouTube musicians’ live recordings, you get a sense of their gear, and even occasionally register changes: new additions, sudden absences, swapped-out arrangements. Heck, even changes to the draperies and a new paint job. Sometimes such evolutions are announced in the form of “first patch” sessions or mini-tutorials of hard-won tips. Less frequently you’re alerted in advance, as is the case with this benediction from Michigan-based musician Orbital Patterns. A new central processing unit for his synthesizer is due imminently, and this video is, apparently, his last set with the current setup. It’s a beautiful, sprawling mix of melodic patterning and peculiar noises, elegiac drones and sonic coarseness, at once cinematic in its breadth, and at others as personal as a closely mic’d hush.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Su06CtD0Ng). More from Orbitan Patterns, aka Abdul Allums, who is based in Rochester Hills, Michigan, at [orbitalpatterns.bandcamp.com](https://orbitalpatterns.bandcamp.com/).

Physical Graffiti

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It was a pleasure to write liner notes (full text: [“Palimpsests All the Way Down”](https://disquiet.com/2020/07/04/nathan-moody-de%e2%80%8b-%e2%80%8bstill/)) for Nathan Moody’s new album, de​/​Still, a “musical score” that he created as an aural interpretation of TJ Norris’ photography. All the more so, because the album was a proper physical release. My copy of the CD just arrived from the record label, Flag Day Recordings. Get the album at [flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com](https://flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/de-still).

Current Listens: Varied Pianos, Archival Afrobeat

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. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)

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NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases

▰ Erika Nesse makes music with fractal algorithms, in [this case](https://soundcloud.com/conversationswithrocks/piano-track-6) applied to the sounds of a piano. Get lost in the patterning.

▰ Film composer Matija Strnisa slows the pace of the piano on [“Tender Loneliness”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FMIcXhz67A) to a near standstill, and then fills the spaces in between the notes with a drone that’s like cozy warm wool. A cue from the score to *House of Hummingbird* (벌새), from director Kim Bora (김보라).

▰ The label Comet Records is reissuing classic albums by the late Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, including this pairing of two extended takes with Fela’s Afrika 70 ensemble. [*No Accommodation for Lagos*](https://tonyallen.bandcamp.com/album/no-accomodation-for-lagos) was recorded in 1978. Allen passed away April 30, 2020.

▰ The form of Matmos’ [*The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form*](https://matmos.bandcamp.com/album/the-consuming-flame-open-exercises-in-group-form) is 99 musicians’ tracks layered into an ever-shifting collage, the commonality being the tracks were all recorded at the same speed (99 BPM, naturally). The three-CD set comes with a map of the contributions, and that may be the best way to experience it — watching and listening for transitions and studio-yoked collaborations.

▰ Ten tracks of sublime instrumental music: fragile surfaces that cover depth, tension, and resolve. This is the album [*Out of the Valley*](https://modernarecords.bandcamp.com/album/out-of-the-valley) from composer n-So (aka Nick Angeloni). Music for slow mornings — or perhaps better yet, meditative music for anything-but-slow mornings.

Grace Notes

From last week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Some tweet observations ([twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet)) I made over the course of the past week, lightly edited:

▰ When you join a Zoom call a couple minutes early and everyone has their cameras off and they’re typing and it sounds like rain

▰ “In his lap, Yeats’s Collected–the yellow-jacketed Macmillan edition–and in the CD tray Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina, long hushed by the time Bachelor found the body, but its lingering silences implicit in the air, settling like dust on faded surfaces.” The minder of a network of elderly informers in Mick Herron’s novella The List comes upon a dead body. I already dug the series (Slough House), and this line sealed the deal. (Bachelor is the last name of the story’s protagonist.)

▰ It’s at 1:43:46 that Miles Davis appears in [this 1987 footage of Prince performing live](https://youtu.be/v_aAug_PpUM?t=6227). Everything to that point is tremendous but that bookmark is where to start: the smile on Prince’s face, how he conducts the band to make space for the trumpeter:
https://youtu.be/v\_aAug\_PpUM?t=6227

▰ Kinda crazy that the new company combining Rolling Stone, Billboard, Vibe, and other publications is called [PMRC](https://pitchfork.com/news/rolling-stone-billboard-vibe-more-to-operate-under-new-joint-venture-pmrc/), same initials as the Parents Music Resource Center, which gave us parental advisory stickers back in the 1980s.

▰ “Waiting for the host to start this meeting”

▰ I am fairly certain that I will at some point today no longer have “Interplanet Janet” running through my head. I am almost equally certain that it will immediately be replaced by another Schoolhouse Rock song.

▰ “Host is not in the meeting yet”

▰ Last night I watched the TV series The Repair Shop. Just as stuffed-animal vets were fixing the voice box of a WW2-era Irish teddy bear, the shofar bleated from a synagogue down our street, and I briefly thought that was the teddy bear’s sound. Had to mute the TV to sort it out. It was an especially confusing mundane synchronicity because at that very moment, the show’s host noted that the voice box sounded less like a bear growling and more like a lamb baaing.

▰ That amazing, mournful live three-hour Questlove set of dubbed-out, chopped and screwed Radiohead tracks has shuffled off the mortal coil that is YouTube, so I’ll go back to listening to the Tenet score [backwards](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQTrYDJ0Vr8).

In the Name of Corruption

Covid-era Tokyo archiving

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

While the [SoundCloud account](https://soundcloud.com/corrption/tracks) of Tokyo-based noise-maker Corruption [remains](https://disquiet.com/2020/09/15/covid-era-corruption/) mothballed, the musician’s [Bandcamp account](http://corruption-music-drugstore.bandcamp.com) has another archival update. *ミジンコ daphnia emotions* is 31 tracks recorded between 2013 and 2019. They range from what might be a video-arcade field recording (“emwrec#msl”) to lounge-tempo pop techno (“pole”) to sequenced white noise drones (“cold wind”) to especially Aphex-y melodic sweetness (“pause”), just for starters. And of course, the most unclassifiable tracks are where it’s really at, notably “mga,” in which what sounds like a breeze running through a tunnel is transformed into a squelchy melody. The variety gives a sense of the range that Corruption has been up to for years over at SoundCloud, where nearly 1,000 tracks have been collected. Presumably these are favorites culled from that expanse.

Album originally posted at [corruption-music-drugstore.bandcamp.com](https://corruption-music-drugstore.bandcamp.com/album/daphnia-emotions).