Orbital Patterns Goes Deep

In a new live video

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“A Vessel in the Fog,” uploaded to the YouTube channel of the musician who goes by Orbital Patterns just this Monday, is a live ambient piece. Textures twist and turn like clouds of smoke, turning in the air before vaporizing and being replaced by something else, something similar and yet apart. There’s numerous such elements at any given time, packed like sediment in a vibrant terrarium: surface noise, and muffled chords, and crunchy percussives like fall leaves under foot, and what sounds like psychedelic guitar riffs going round and round. It’s a beautiful piece, gaining depth as it goes, a deep bass tone slowly making itself heard and lending a slow, thoughtful pace to what might otherwise be an understated roil. It is clearly, so to speak, the title vessel.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C43KlOhAdlc). More at [instagram.com/0rbitalpatterns](https://www.instagram.com/0rbitalpatterns/) and [twitter.com/orbitalpatterns](https://twitter.com/orbitalpatterns).

Yo La Tengo Summon the Now

On a new single

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Terry Riley force is strong with this new Yo La Tengo single. Bearing the title “James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds (Monday),” it’s the famed indie-rock band in full meditative mode. It’s a flowing drone that has the raga quality of early Riley. If you’d said this is something off [the new Laraaji album](https://disquiet.com/2020/06/16/laraaji-goes-home-again/), it’d make sense, what with the echoey, zithery goings-on — except of course, the new Laraaji record is solo piano. So while that early ambient musician is revisiting the purpose of songs, this song-making band is exploring spaciousness, formlessness, song-less-ness.

Well, not song-less, so much as pre-song, proto-song, nascent song. As member Ira Kaplan explains in an accompanying note on the track’s Bandcamp release page: “If you’ve spent any time hanging out with us at our rehearsal space in Hoboken — that pretty much covers none of you — you’ve heard us playing formlessly (he said, trying to sidestep the word ‘improvising’). Most of the songs we’ve written in the last 25 years have begun that way, but often we do it for no other reason than to push away the outside world.” So, what this is is the space in which a song might occur, the raw stuff from which a song might arise. Sidestepping the word “improvising” feels like a solid step. This doesn’t sound like improvising so much as it does like three people finding common tonal ground, and upon finding it, holding onto it for as long as feels right, and not a moment longer.

“James set up one microphone in the middle of the room in case we stumbled on something useful for the future,” writes Ira (the James is fellow member James McNew). “Instead we decided to release something we did right now.” This is the sound of right now. Or it was yesterday, when it came out. We’re not currently inhabiting a now worth celebrating, and yet yesterday’s now was splendid — is splendid. Here’s to more of such a now, while the broader, untenable now persists.

The song’s release coincided with the launch of Yo La Tengo’s Bandcamp page. Track originally posted at [yolatengo.bandcamp.com](https://yolatengo.bandcamp.com/track/james-and-ira-demonstrate-mysticism-and-some-confusion-holds-monday-1). More from Yo La Tengo at [yolatengo.com](http://yolatengo.com/).

Details in the Beat

On a recent instrumental album from Jansport J

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

How the central sample seems to melt on “Antiques,” atop a rhythm that nudges along, little changes making themselves heard, a glitch on the beat here, a volume tweak there. How the snare on “KutKlose” is trimmed within a millisecond of its snare-ness, so compact is the repeated snippet. How the vocal-harmony sample on “letmyselfgo” is so muffled that it’s virtually unintelligible, and all the more musical for it (ditto the solo female voice reduced to a bell tone and a warble on “gimmethereason”). There’s much to love on *NoLetUps.*, a beat tape from Jansport J, released back in mid-March. Those are just some starting points. Dig in.

Album originally posted at [jansportjmusic.com](https://jansportjmusic.com/album/noletups-beat-tape). More from Jansport J, who is based in Los Angeles, at [twitter.com/JansportJ](https://twitter.com/JansportJ).

Current Listens: Philadelphia Beat Tape, Spacious Score

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Minimalist patterning. Atmospheric score. Philadelphia beat tape. Fripp’s quietude. 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

▰ Gorgeous little pre-release taste of *Memory Loops*, an album due out July 31 from Arms and Sleepers (aka Mark McGlinchey and Mirza Ramic). The soft repetitive patterns and descending melodic riff sound like the start of something, which makes sense since the track is the first of the album’s projected 14.

▰ Cello, violin, voice — spare elements are the building blocks for the roomy music Martha Skye Murphy composed for a film titled *The Late Departure*, by Ivan Krzeszowiec. Listen for the entrancing electronic touches, like the glitchy delay midway through “Connecting Flight.” (Felix Stephens on cello, Murphy on the remainder.)

▰ David Evan McDowell, aka Philadelphia-based musician æon, started 2020 with *Rebirth,* a dozen downtempo hip-hop (mostly) instrumentals full of jazz samples, surface noise, rhythmic play, and a remarkable sense of space.

▰ Robert Fripp continues to make good on his promise of 50 straight weeks of “Music for Quiet Moments” instrumentals. The latest, “Skyscape (Chicago 12 Oct 2005),” number 11 in the series, is more synth-driven than some of the others, though his guitar certainly makes itself heard.

Listening from Afar

Via social media

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Some of my earliest regular Twitter activities involved simply posting descriptions of what I heard: the whir of cars driving by, the droning inside a train, the birdsong outside a window. I consider such posts a form of field recording, just using words instead of a microphone (a perspective I wrote about at more length a few years ago at [nmbx.newmusicusa.org](https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/audio-or-it-didnt-happen/)). This activity happened back during a more civilized age, before social media became the conflicted zone it is today. These days it takes some solid muting and circumscribed attention to keep Twitter to something approximating useful and enjoyable. Once in a while I’ll go back to that old habit, and post what the world sounds like at a given moment. And sometimes the world answers back, not with an echo, but with reports from elsewhere, and not just on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/disquiet), but via [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/dsqt/) and Facebook, where I’ll post as well. This is what I [posted](https://twitter.com/disquiet/status/1281458093302276096) this past week:

Evening sounds: dishwasher and low-level electric hum. A single car passes, producing a light rumble, felt as much as heard\*, neither all that much. Time passes. No foot traffic. No animal sound. No voices.**
*Yeah, hearing is a physical sensation.
**Yeah, humans are animals.

And these are responses I received:

1: the loud cyclical white noise pulse of the AC fan and it’s low frequency throb felt through my desktop. Rain splatter on the steel AC case, rain splatter on the window glass, rain splatter on the plastic over the hole in the plastic AC side panel, all three distinct filters
(from [twitter.com/cranksatori](https://twitter.com/cranksatori/status/1281462920329789440
))

2: An indistinct, muffled thump from who knows where, a cat meowing repeatedly somewhere outside, the crunch of tires on gravel fades out into the distance, wind blows through the trees.
(from [twitter.com/PhilBerdecio](https://twitter.com/PhilBerdecio/status/1281468533814308864))

3: There is a heat wave going on where I am. Lucky to have air con, which has been running constantly. Reminds me of the sound inside the cabin on a long haul flight.
(from [instagram.com/sodajonze](https://www.instagram.com/p/CCc2zquAj-Z/c/18150819253005796/))