Disquiet – Page 511 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Current Listens: Total Hassell, Davachi’s Organs

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

July 26, 2020July 26, 2020 / 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.)

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰

NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases

▰ Much of my week’s listening involved playing the new Jon Hassell on repeat, enjoying the pre-release privacy a bit before meaning accrues around it after the set reaches a broader audience. *Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)* was released on Friday to an audience awaiting its portal-like function, how it opens a window into the Fourth World, and it is everything they might hope for, filled with glitchy atmospherics, futurist fusion, and field recordings from alternate realms.

<a href="http://jonhassell.bandcamp.com/album/seeing-through-sound-pentimento-volume-two">Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) by Jon Hassell</a>

▰ The minimalist setup of Russian musician Pavel Milyakov derives transcendent techno from live manipulation of held guitar drones. It’s part of the excellent Patch Notes video series from Fact magazine, and this time it in fact does include patch notes, if you want details of what Milyakov is up to.

▰ Sarah Davachi’s next album, *Cantus, Descant*, isn’t due out unil mid-September, but the first track, with an accompanying video, is already online. The album appears to be a collection of music for organs, and was recorded on a variety of them in Amsterdam, Chicago, Vancouver, Copenhagen, and Los Angeles. The initial track, “Station II,” is a series of slowly evolving chords that overlap, layer, and transition with an eerie grace.

▰ As the name suggests, the *exp[MTL]* EP from Vigi Beats is experimental: brief sketches of how beat music could be. All but one is under two minutes in length. The five tracks, labeled A through E, pursue alternately frantic and loungy beatcraft, breaking pre-existing recordings in the service of forging artfully erratic new ones.

<a href="http://vigilantebeatmaker.bandcamp.com/album/exp-mtl">exp[MTL] by Vigi Beats</a>

This Week in Sound: Windows on the World

A lightly annotated clipping service

July 25, 2020July 20, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the July 20, 2020, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound ([tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet)).

As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰

THIS WEEK IN SOUND

▰ “Sonic aesthetic moralism has been taken up by NIMBYs opposing affordable development, suburbanites in defense of their decision to live far from the city core, urban planners rallying around pedestrian-friendly street design, public-health officials citing the physiological effects of noise, and environmentalists advocating for sustainable building practices”: Kate Wagner takes admirable issue with the perceived concepts of “good” and “bad” noise. (Thanks, George Kelly!)
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/the-struggle-for-the-urban-soundscape/614044/](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/07/the-struggle-for-the-urban-soundscape/614044/)

▰ “The absence of noises, replaced in parks by the sounds of leaves crunching under shoes or birds creating their own symphonies, is what draws so many of us to them,” says a director of the National Parks Conservation Association, in an article by Jenny Morber, referring to natural silences “values” that are “under threat.”
[https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-is-noisy-these-groups-want-to-restore-the-quiet/](https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-is-noisy-these-groups-want-to-restore-the-quiet/)

▰ “Sound studies experts say that while LRADs and flash-bangs are worrisome tactical escalations that can permanently injure people by rupturing eardrums, they are rooted in the long, uncontested tradition of the state utilizing sound as a means of social, cultural and political control”: Luke Ottenhof on the use of sonic weapons by law enforcement.
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/14/us-police-sound-weapon-protests](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/14/us-police-sound-weapon-protests)

▰ “The game in Anaheim might well have had the loudest pregame boos in modern baseball history”: Sam Miller on what sports fan will miss beyond sports itself. (Via Dave Pell’s Next Draft)
[https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29417320/what-mlb-fans-lose-boo-houston-astros-opening-day](https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29417320/what-mlb-fans-lose-boo-houston-astros-opening-day)

▰ “When chickadees see a pygmy owl, they increase the number of “dee” notes and call “chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee.” Here, the number of sounds serves as an active anti-predation strategy.” Nice details in this piece by Andreas Nieder on the power of numbers among animals. (Thanks, Fari Bradley!)
[https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/animal-kingdom-power-of-the-number-instinct/](https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/animal-kingdom-power-of-the-number-instinct/)

▰ “State Supreme Court Chief Justice Donald Beatty late Friday afternoon ordered state judges and magistrates to stop issuing ‘no-knock’ search warrants to police.” You must knock, or ring, before entering.
[https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article244152347.html](https://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article244152347.html)

▰ Geoff Manaugh picked up that story about noise-cancelling windows, and ran with it, exhibiting characteristic extrapolative aplomb: “combine luxury frequency-reduction techniques with seismic wave-mitigation and perhaps you’ve just designed the future of architecture in global earthquake zones.” (Thanks, Thorsten Sideb0ard!)
[http://www.bldgblog.com/2020/07/structural-audio/](http://www.bldgblog.com/2020/07/structural-audio/)

▰ “A recent Stanford University study found the speech-to-text services used by Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft and Apple for batch transcriptions misidentified the words of Black speakers at nearly double the rate of white speakers”: Jeff Link on racial bias in voice recognition. (I don’t know much about this website, which has a modest Facebook and Twitter following, but the piece is well-researched.)
[https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/racial-bias-speech-recognition-systems](https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/racial-bias-speech-recognition-systems)

Marc Kate Live on the Prophet 12

A performance from the 2019 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival

July 24, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

One highlight of last year’s San Francisco Electronic Music Festival was a disarmingly simple set on the part of local musician Marc Kate. While many participants in the annual festival bring a richly performative aspect to their work, not to mention a range of devices, Kate sat behind a single Prophet 12 synthesizer atop a card table. I reviewed the concert series that year for *The Wire*, noting that Kate [“plays stately, increasingly lacerated chords.”](https://disquiet.com/2019/10/11/reviewing-sfemf-2019-in-the-wire/) There were a lot of performers in 2019 and only a little room in the review, so that’s all Kate got in the piece. Now he’s uploaded the performance, all 20 minutes, giving it a larger audience than it did that evening. When you listen, and you should, do pay attention around the halfway mark. That’s when the piece, which bears admirable qualities of the *Blade Runner* score, transitions from gentle atmospherics to threatening ones, from chamber music to something far more orchestral. Early on, the tones are not necessarily comforting, but the drones have a sleepy quality, with hints of the depth of night, the undercurrent of something wicked coming this way. Then the wickedness arrives, and does it ever. The second half is full of climatic (and climactic) tumult, the force and bluster of a raging storm, combined with the anxiety of an alien invasion. It’s a pretty masterful performance.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/nvrknws](https://soundcloud.com/nvrknws/marc-kate-live-at-san-francisco-electronic-music-festival-2019). More from Kate at [marckate.com](http://marckate.com/).

Disquiet Junto Project 0447: Listen Ahead

The Assignment: Make some music for the near future.

July 23, 2020July 24, 2020 / 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, July 27, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 23, 2020.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0447) for the duration of the project.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0447: Listen Ahead

The Assignment: Make some music for the near future.

Step 1: Imagine what the world will be like in six months, what your world will be like six months from today.

Step 2: Make some music that reflects what you imagined in Step 1. You might make music about that time, or music that responds to that time. In some manner, make music for the near future.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0447” (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 “disquiet0447” (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-0447-listen-ahead/

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, July 27, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 23, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. The future can feel a long ways away, but the music needn’t be long.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0447” 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 447th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Listen Ahead (The Assignment: Make some music for the near future), at:

https://disquiet.com/0447/

The Dark Side of Ekin Fil

At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic

July 22, 2020July 22, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Back in mid-April, perhaps when it felt more like an end might be in sight, when the new abnormal was more new and more abnormal, a group of musicians under the umbrella of Katuktu Collective individually recorded nine tracks with a shared theme. The album is titled *Isolate With I.* It’s described as follows:

>A compilation of music recorded entirely during the coronavirus pandemic in two parts, a dark and a half-light, messages in a bottle from our island to yours. Both parts are free downloads; if you hear something that resonates with you, please visit the individual tracks for more information and to support the artists directly.

This album is the first half, the dark half. (If you didn’t know the title of the second half, you might read the “I” as first person. It’s a Roman numeral one, in fact; the second album is *Isolate With II*.) The participants include C. Brickell, German Army, Fading Tapes, Danni Rowan, the Corrupting Sea, Aidan Baker, Anders Brørby, Brian Case, and Ekin Fil. Fil’s track, “Detour,” is a highlight, the underlying rumble like a train running fast, the intermittent patches of noise like echoes in a series of tunnels. It’s so stark, so precise, one could easily imagine that the piece isn’t electronic, and that she had scored it for strings and timpani.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/ekin-fil](https://soundcloud.com/ekin-fil/ekin-fil-detour). The full album is available for free download at [katuktucollective.bandcamp.com](https://katuktucollective.bandcamp.com/album/isolate-with-i). More from Ekin Fil at [ekinfil.com](http://www.ekinfil.com/).