Current Listens: Questlove(s RBG) + Meditative Loops

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is my 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

▰ Friday night, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, Questlove of the Roots spun [three hours of Radiohead](https://youtu.be/BZpUUXhWf8w), chopped and screwed, as he put it, thick with reverb and delay, echoed to dubby extremes. He talked in between songs, and during them, about fending off stress-eating, and about his own political awakening during the Obama campaign, and how when he plays early Radiohead he has to remind himself that the band once employed what he calls “mortal instruments.” The screen displays details from his DJ software, confirming the mournfully slow BPM. (Thanks for the tip, Alex Hawthorn.)

▰ Jeannine Schulz keeps up the relentless pace of slow-music releases with [*Unfolding Circles*](https://jeannineschulz.bandcamp.com/album/unfolding-circles), five tracks of melty loops made from guitar parts and, of course, the textural quality of the degraded tape itself. (Based in Hamburg, Germany.)

▰ Three lengthy tracks of music for meditation comprise the [*Zazen*](https://insomniachotel.bandcamp.com/album/zazen) set by Insomniac Hotel. Dense, murky drones with melodic and percussive undercurrents. (Based in New Jersey.)

Listening to “King Lear”

Thanks to the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you study insults, then “King Lear” is an endless resource. If you study sound, there’s still some solid material.

. . .

“the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high.”

This moment (for sound-studies types) in Shakespeare’s “King Lear” is from when Edgar (in disguise) is tricking dear old (and horrifically blinded) dad Gloucester from jumping off a cliff.

The cliff isn’t actually there, of course. After the avoided jump, the two try to listen in the opposite direction, which is to say up. Edgar, who has convinced Gloucester that they have indeed jumped but by chance survived, reports:

“the shrill-gorged lark so far
Cannot be seen or heard”

And then King Lear shows up, as does a gentleman. The observational tables are turned when Edgar asks, “Do you hear aught, sir, of a battle toward?”

And the Gentleman replies:

“Most sure and vulgar: every one hears that,
Which can distinguish sound.”

It’s a beautiful turnaround.

. . .

If Shakespeare is even remotely your thing, take advantage of the rare benefit of Covid-19, which is that the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival has been presenting “King Lear” online for free, due to social distancing concerns, and that those shows are available worldwide to anyone with internet. The thing is, they’re only available live, and as of this writing, only three performances remain. They stream at [youtube.com/SFShakes](https://youtube.com/SFShakes). The way the troupe makes use of Zoom, the platform on which they perform, is amazing. Each actor is alone is her/his/their room, against a green screen, speaking their lines live, the individuals then combined against a background image as if on stage together. I watched last Sunday, and was blown away, not just by the work, but by the ingenuity.

. . .

One more sonic observation: because all the actors are performing on their lonesome, each spoken voice appears from within its own room tone. Each voice carries with it the space in which that voice is enunciating. Each actor is subject to a different echo, a different hum. They’re all on the same virtual stage, but they’re all in very different rooms. The strange ever-shifting background sound, the way each voice has its own contours, its own dimensions, makes a perfect match for the slightly low-resolution shapes that each human form takes on screen, as their features blur into the shared virtual background. Per chance the image on the festival’s website, at [sfshakes.org](http://www.sfshakes.org/programs/free-shakespeare-in-the-park?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI2ezJyO326wIVrB-tBh2mfwXQEAAYASAAEgJTt_D_BwE), is from the scene described above. That’s, from left to right, Yohana Ansari-Thomas as Edgar, Phil Lowery as Gloucester, and Jessica Powell as Lear.

. . .

There are three more [shows on the calendar](http://www.sfshakes.org/programs/free-shakespeare-in-the-park/performance-schedule-and-free-access-4351ea60-458d-4ff2-a030-4e35962367c0): Sunday, September 20, at 4pm; Saturday, September 26, at 7pm; and Sunday, September 27, at 4pm.

Grace Notes

From last week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Some tweet observations I made over the course of the past week:

▰ “Host is not in the meeting yet”

▰ I frequently have the Monterey Bay Aquarium jellyfish live YouTube stream running at quarter speed on a spare screen (an old tablet) at my desk, and I recently noticed that if you click on the options menu, it reads “Captions – unavailable.” And I thought, but what if they were.

▰ Wonderful reminiscence by Eugene Holley, Jr., on the late Stanley Crouch, acknowledging his pugilism but focused warmly on the way Crouch “was supportive of young writers beginning their voyage into the literary dimensions of jazz”: [theundefeated.com](https://theundefeated.com/features/i-saw-a-different-side-of-stanley-crouch/).

▰ There will be a season 3 of Trapped! Burning question: will there be new music cues, or will the production reuse the preexisting material?

▰ AQI 0 (as in zero), and the fog horns are rejoicing.

▰ A beautiful Fantastic Voyage piece on Hilobrow by Matthew Daniel, for whom as a child the idea that “agents use shrinking technology to enter the body of a colleague and attempt to remedy the damage a clot in his brain has caused” was deeply personal: [hilobrow.com](https://www.hilobrow.com/2020/09/16/klaatu-enthusiasm-38/).

▰ I learned a lot from Stanley Crouch. He was also an early version of what I learned to call a hate read (cf., some of those Wynton Marsalis LP notes). RIP, deep thinker whose love of jazz was unquestionable (if at times a culture warrior in a less constructive sense of the term).

▰ Fog horns in full effect. Outdoor temperature at 61° and rising. Semi-hyper-local microclimate AQI at 48. I could get used to this, though I know better not to (Sunday forecast is looking ugly).

▰ Breaking news: it is possible currently to have the windows open.

▰ I believe I’m listening to the Tenet score backwards, if that’s what is meant here by “inverted”: [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQTrYDJ0Vr8&t=233s).

Today

These things are connected.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Today

I added an unnecessary “that” to a sentence because blue underlines in my draft email were annoying.

I said hi to an old friend on social media because some algorithm decided I should be reminded of their existence.

I carried my phone at a particular angle while going for a walk because Bluetooth was faulty otherwise.

These things are connected.

The Mechanisms

A score cue by Michel Banabila

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This loop is three minutes and thirty three seconds during which time moves forward and backward. There is a clickety-clack to it that tells you the mechanisms are functioning, but also that they are old ones. There is no expectation on the listener’s part that those clicks and clacks are literal, that they are fully in sync with range of sounds we hear, that they are the sounds of what is transforming what we hear. They may be in part, but more than likely the technological processing of which the music is fully redolent is beyond that which mere gears can accomplish. The clicks and clacks are signals of the transformation that is underway throughout. The results of which include piano that composer Gavin Bryars would nod approvingly toward: underwater like a shipwreck, like a memory. The ground-level fog of a drone has a breathless quality, held in a manner no mere mortal could achieve without something plugged in or otherwise powered. The little crevices here and there are like the broken pottery equivalent of grace notes, fractures that lend texture, warmth, humanity. It’s a beautiful piece. Based on the track’s title, “Cassette Loops,” those bits of mechanical curiosity are, perhaps, the sounds of the loops playing back, little plastic wheels turning round, seams causing a slight tug and then the tape’s release, motor running on the most mundane of batteries: the fragile enterprise writ small, and magnified through our loudspeakers and headphones.

The music is from an NTR documentary, [*Kein Geloel*](https://www.ntr.nl/Andere-Tijden-Sport/230/detail/Kein-Geloel-Fussbal-Spielen-Ernst-Happel-in-zijn-eigen-woorden/VPWON_1311789), by Thomas Vroege and David Kleijwegt, about sports figure Ernst Happel. Track originally posted at [banabila.bandcamp.com](https://banabila.bandcamp.com/track/cassette-loops). More from Banabila at [banabila.com](https://www.banabila.com/).