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).

Disquiet Junto Project 0456: Line Up

The Assignment: Interpret a painting by Agnes Martin as if it were a graphic score.

/ 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 Monday, September 28, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 24, 2020.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0456: Line Up

The Assignment: Interpret a painting by Agnes Martin as if it were a graphic score.

Step 1: Look at the work of painter Agnes Martin, best known for her parallel lines.

Step 2: Select an individual work that suggests itself to you as a musical score.

Step 3: Record a short piece of music that interprets the painting selected in Step 2 as if it were a musical score.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0456” (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 “disquiet0456” (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-0456-line-up/

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 Monday, September 28, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 24, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0456” 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 456th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Line Up (The Assignment: Interpret a painting by Agnes Martin as if it were a graphic score), at:

https://disquiet.com/0456/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0456-line-up/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Fripp: 21 of 50

Another weekly quiet moment

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A reminder that Robert Fripp is making good on his promise of 50 weekly solo instrumentals. The series is titled “Music for Quiet Moments,” and this has been week 21. The tracks are often archival, the current one dating back to June 2004, and recorded in Oslo, Norway. That appears to be when Fripp was touring as part of the unlikely G3, which teamed him with the more flamboyant Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. A post at Fripp’s official DGM Live website, [dgmlive.com](https://www.dgmlive.com/tour-dates/1733), humorously notes the audience’s disinterest in his ambient soundscapes.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmITe-Uc-fE).