Five Nights

An online collaboration from Cody Ellingham and SJF

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

New Tapei: construction in the distance, a mid-rise building illuminated with color bands, the music an orchestral drone with a sublimated pulse. Hong Kong: viewed from above, a forest of lit skyscrapers, the music lending the drama of a thriller. Tokyo: a dark street corner, much of the light coming from a set of vending machines, the music introducing a glitchy twitch.

Those are three of the five cities that set the scene for Wander the Night, a collaborative online project from photographer Cody Ellingham, who has a way with images that seem intended to benefit from the projection of screens, and musician SJF (Simon James French), who has a way with held tones and underlying drama.

The website contains five pages, each pairing one of Ellingham’s striking photos along with a roughly 10-minute recording by SJF. The images are still, but a gentle current pushes clouds across the screen, from left to right. (Pictured up top is Bangkok.) For added emotional undercurrent, there’s an option to add some rain. It’s a beautiful collection, and a moody accompaniment if you have a spare screen at your disposal.

The score is also available for streaming and purchase:

Visit at [wanderthenight.com](https://wanderthenight.com/), and don’t expect to leave anytime soon. The photos are available as prints and in book form: [store.derive.tokyo](https://store.derive.tokyo/).

Listen Out a Window

Thanks to WindowSwap (dot com)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The great thing about [window-swap.com](https://window-swap.com) isn’t necessarily the view. WindowSwap is a site where people can experience browser-spanning views out other people’s windows, and the folks sharing their view generally seem to leave the microphones on. So you don’t just see. You hear. You listen. When you have a glimpse out a window in Wangerooge, Germany, for example, you can hear water gurgling, as well as what seems to be office noise. When the feed switches to Haridwar, India, there’s birdsong. A siren passes, the source unseen, by someone’s pad in Mexico City, Mexico. There’s pots and pans rattling from a home in the Indonesian city of Tangerang. It goes on and on, around the globe and back again. It isn’t an endless itinerary, though. I’ve only used it a few times, and already come to notice repeat windows.

If WindowSwap brings the world close, details from the individual settings make the notion of distance (that is, of difference) more amorphous. The Tangerang kitchen has a radio playing, of all things, Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual.” The shot of Bangkok, Thailand, is as generic as might be: open laptop inside, dangling power cables outside; nearby are sounds of construction work. And then there’s the houseplants, which are universal, with an emphasis on pint-sized succulents. As it turns out, nothing is unusual.

Nothing is unusual in part because a shared aesthetic has kicked in. No human is in view, at least not on the inside of the buildings. The window in each is likely centered and fairly horizontal, or outside the frame of your browser. No brands are to be seen. And what we hear is quiet precisely because the people doing the filming are themselves, for the most part, keeping quiet. We’re hearing their world in a unique circumstance where they are doing their best not to be heard. It isn’t everyday life; it’s life minus us (with some exceptions made for actual activity, generally at least a room away).

It’s also not everyone’s life. It’s a self-selecting cohort who have the interest and time to participate, and whose domestic life allows for such a thing. The supposed quiet of right now, amid the pandemic, can be overstated. There is violence, and protest, and anxiety, and noise. To a degree, the windows viewed through on WindowSwap comprise the opposite of disaster tourism. It’s a depiction of placidity in a world that is, in point of fact, anything but. That siren in Mexico City is the rare discordant sound in all the videos I witnessed. WindowSwap is, in a manner of speaking, another form of peer-to-peer sharing.

That said, though, the service is beautiful, and serene at a time when serenity is in short supply. In my office-chair travel, I didn’t just tour the quiet world; I also came across some familiar views, one from far across San Francisco, where I live, and another from a window on a rainy evening in Manhattan. The latter was especially familiar, and then I noticed the name Nomadic Ambience in its corner. That’s a [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqRTj-Nu_8to3jIBlXptOtA) I subscribe to, one of several that post lengthy, uncut footage of stationary and ambulatory periods. It was a uniquely internet experience to run into not someone but someplace, someplace that was familiar, a place I’ve never been and yet where I have spent considerable time. I often have such videos running in slow motion on a secondary screen at my desk.

According to a [Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jul/15/covid-19-travel-windowswap-photos) story by Poppy Noor, WindowSwap’s developers, Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam, are based in Singapore, and initially created it for friends during our extended pandemic, and later opened it up to submissions. The videos aren’t live, which explains why so many tend to be shot during daylight hours. The submission guidelines request the recordings be 10 minutes in length, long enough to immerse oneself in. And there’s a caveat, listed as an “update” on the submissions page, that brings up privacy concerns: “All videos have sound. So please make sure not to say anything private or sensitive. If you want your sound to be removed please let us know. Or record a video without sound. To safeguard your privacy, we will only display your first name in the credits. If you want your full name to be added, let us know.” Sound may have been a secondary consideration upon launch of WindowSwap, but it’s at least 50 percent of the experience.

Check it out at [window-swap.com](https://window-swap.com/). The above images are, from top to bottom, of Shanghai, Copenhagen, and Singapore.

Current Listens: Noctural Tokyo, Philly Beats

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

▰ Deborah Walker’s *Starflux*, on the Elli Records label, ends with a spectral reworking of the prior tracks, committed by Emanuele Battisti, who also mastered the record and, thus, knew Walker’s work intimately. The metronomic rhythms of the source audio are re-rendered with a halo effect, the earthy original material turned into something intergalactic.

▰ This isn’t music, per se. It’s an hour-long video someone took while walking around a neighborhood in Yokohama, Japan, at night. There is sound, however, the associated field recording of overheard chatter, and footsteps, and crosswalk signals. I usually have something like this running at half speed on a second screen when I work. Even better in black and white.

An added treat: the recorder of these videos, who goes by Rambalac, posts a map of the route. Here’s the one for this footage:

▰ A couple months ago I highlighted a set of Small Professor’s instrumental hip-hop, and then missed the arrival of a subsequent downtempo hip-hop collection, *A Jawn Supreme (Vol. 1)*. As the title might suggest, Small Pro, who traffics in expertly reworked samples, is based in Philadelphia. One highlight is the fractured piano lead on “Reflection,” in which the producer’s hand is just as light yet present as that of the original pianist.

This Week in Sound: Web-Only Edition

A lightly annotated clipping service

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I haven’t sent out an issue of the This Week in Sound email newsletter ([tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet)) in awhile, not since mid-May. The world and life are complex right now, demanding in unfamiliar ways. I had some material stored up last week, but just didn’t have the time. Or more to the point, I had time, but not the time; the time I had, I spent alternately. As many who are spending far more time at home than they might be accustomed to, the logical expanse of time that might result from stationary existence is an illusion; there is, in fact, less time. Certainly less productive time, because recuperation is harder to come by, and more necessary than usual. The world outside is both more quiet and, especially in metaphoric terms, more noisy. Inside, we focus, take breaks, make progress.

In any case, had an issue of This Week in Sound gone out last Monday, this is the core of what would have been in it. I hope to get back to the email version soon.

And 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.

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THIS WEEK IN SOUND

▰ “[A]nimals that lower their voices to sound bigger are often skilled vocalists,” goes an uncredited story at phys.org. “Both strategies — sounding bigger and learning sounds — are likely driven by sexual selection, and may play a role in explaining the origins of human speech evolution.”
[https://phys.org/news/2020-07-animals-bigger-good.html](https://phys.org/news/2020-07-animals-bigger-good.html)

▰ Mariusz Kozak wrote in the Washington Post about the role songs play in protests: “The first is that the meaning of music is deliberately imprecise — in technical terms, music is referentially ambiguous. The same song can be significant in different ways to different listeners, or even to the same person on different occasions. The second feature is that listeners can still connect with each other emotionally by moving together in synchrony with what they hear and with each other.” (via Diana Deutsch)
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/07/protest-chants-musicology-solidarity/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/07/protest-chants-musicology-solidarity/)

▰ Much as Darth Vader has that trademark breathing sound, “a distinctive ambient sound,” in the words of sound designer Ben Burtt, was also planned for Boba Fett. The problem was, the audience never heard it “because he never appeared in a quiet place.” Germain Lussier gets into the details.
[https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-boba-fetts-sound-was-a-mystery-for-almost-20-years-1844280863](https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-boba-fetts-sound-was-a-mystery-for-almost-20-years-1844280863)

▰ “What started as a minor change to a common song has now morphed into a continent-wide phenomenon before our very ears,” writes Carly Cassella of a sparrow’s song, and its viral influence on the broader bird population. “Between 2000 and 2019, this small change has travelled over 3,000 kilometres (1,800 miles) from British Columbia (BC) to central Ontario, virtually wiping out a historic song ending that’s been around since the 1950s at least.” (via subtopes)
[https://www.sciencealert.com/this-sparrow-song-went-viral-across-canada-and-it-s-unlike-anything-we-ve-heard-before](https://www.sciencealert.com/this-sparrow-song-went-viral-across-canada-and-it-s-unlike-anything-we-ve-heard-before)

▰ “Scientists have developed a gadget that can reduce the intensity of noise pollution passing through an open window,” writes Anthony Cuthberston. “A proof-of-principle study is published in the journal Scientific Reports, detailing a prototype that makes use of 18 microphones and 24 speakers to eliminate half of the sounds passing through a window.”
[https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/noise-cancelling-windows-sound-reduction-traffic-pollution-a9610856.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/noise-cancelling-windows-sound-reduction-traffic-pollution-a9610856.html)

▰ There’s a fundraiser to save the Dream House of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.
[https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/save-the-dream-house-keep-our-dream-alive](https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/save-the-dream-house-keep-our-dream-alive)

▰ Reading John Zorn on the late Ennio Morricone is like reading Zorn on Zorn: “Having roots in both popular music and the avant-garde, Morricone was an innovator, and he overcame each new challenge with a fresh approach, retaining a curiosity and childlike sense of wonder.”
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/arts/music/ennio-morricone-john-zorn.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/arts/music/ennio-morricone-john-zorn.html)

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GRACE NOTES

▰ The local school district is SFUSD (San Francisco Unified School District). When there’s an auto-call with an announcement of some sort (tl;dr: “You probably wanna know if school will open come fall. Well, so do we.”), the alert pronounces it as if it were a name: “Suh-fuh-sed.”

▰ One word disappointingly absent from all those tracks listed in the upcoming expansive box set of my favorite Prince album: “instrumental.”

▰ I’m not practicing guitar. I’m performing a trio with dishwasher and passing traffic.

▰ Aretha Franklin foresaw the nuanced social negotiations involved when planning virtual-conference events during a pandemic. “You think you’re smooth / And you can pick and choose when the time is right.”

▰ I recently watched both seasons of Star Wars: Resistance, and the the best caption was “[distressed beep].” Those rollie droids sure are emotive.

▰ Once I realized that the voice actor of Neeku in Star Wars: Resistance is the same actor as Big Head in Silicon Valley, it all made sense.

▰ Heads up to musicians who regularly send out PR announcements to as many email addresses as they can. Those are, increasingly, showing up in my spam folder. Having your email designated as spam is the internet’s karmic response to what is, big surprise, actually in fact spamming.

▰ Why does Twitter keep recommending that I follow the account of a composer who died toward the end of 2016, an account that hasn’t been updated since about a month prior to the death?

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Subscribe to This Week in Sound at ([tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet)).

Listening to The Lawnmower Man

The digital future according to the filmed past

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Been re-watching some old cyberpunk (and “cyberpunk”) movies lately, among them *The Lawnmower Man* (1992). As someone who does record an audio journal most nights before going to sleep (and auto-transcribing it so that I can read it in the morning over coffee), I enjoyed feeling called out at this moment, when the scientist played by Pierce Brosnan dictates the findings of the day from his underground experiments. (That’s not my reflection in the screen. That’s another scene fading with the current one.)

And there’s this bit, which is in the *Blade Runner* mode of Roy Batty’s “tears in the rain” speech (from a decade earlier), straining for a bit of singularity grandiosity. The title character, recognizing his digitally enhanced ascension, proclaims, “Once I’ve entered the neural net, my birth cry will be the sound of every phone on this planet ringing in unison.”