A Midori Hirano Preview

From her forthcoming Invisible Island

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This track, a preview of Midori Hirano’s forthcoming album, *Invisible Island*, does crazy things to whatever space I’m in. It’s playing on my laptop, and just as I succumb to its warpy pleasures, it pulls some sort of widescreen magic trick and places sonar pings — half nextgen submarine, half ancient cetacean — as if they’re far far away from me: across the room, down the hall, in another dimension entirely. Twice I have paused this track, titled “Remembrance” (despite the fact that it keeps me moored in the moment, like it’s less something I’m listening to and more the score to me listening to it), so as to check if, in fact, something is making the sound elsewhere, but no, it’s just my laptop, having been hijacked by Hirano and put to her extended binaural purposes.

A Japanese musician based in Berlin, Hirano here explores a deeply filmic proposition. What begins as ambient spaciousness gathers a very slow pulse, the spaciousness gaining structure, and then, thanks to that sonar imaging, it takes on a sudden narrative heft. It’s a very promising first taste of what’s to come when *Invisible Island* is released.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/sonic-pieces](https://soundcloud.com/sonic-pieces/midori-hirano-remembrance). The album is due out February 7 on the Sonic Pieces label. More from Hirano at [midorihirano.com](https://midorihirano.com/) and [midorihirano.bandcamp.com](https://midorihirano.bandcamp.com/).

Harmonica Clouds

And variations within

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The layering comes quickly in this video from Ryan Kunkleman. A button is pushed and the harmonica disappears off-screen. We hear a few notes, and we expect the playing to complete a phrase, for the player to pause for a breath. This doesn’t occur. Instead, before the original phrase ever ends another one is layered atop it. Looping has been enacted. There will be no pause for breath for the nearly 13 minutes of this piece. What there will be is a steady accumulation and movement between the held tones of the harmonica, chords giving way to phrases giving way to chords, little moments occasionally peeking (and peaking) through the sonorous clouds.

The tools, in addition to the harmonica and microphone, are a recent piece of software called Cheat Codes ([github.com/dndrks](https://github.com/dndrks/cheat_codes)), running on a Norns, an open-source sound computer from Monome ([monome.org](https://monome.org/docs/norns/)).

This is the latest video I’ve added to [my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-). Video first posted at Kunkelman’s YouTube channel, under the moniker [esc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLTNGWyBSj4).

Ezekiel Honig on Listening to Make Music

From his 2014 book, Bumping into a Chair While Humming

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Finished reading the book *Bumping into a Chair While Humming: Sounds of the Everyday, Listening, and the Potential of the Personal*, a slim yet rangy 2014 collection of thoughts by the musician Ezekiel Honig. Honig is based in New York City. I bought the book from someone in Boston, only to find that a friend here in San Francisco printed the letterpress cover. It’s a small world.

It’s also a world filled with sonic potential. The way that everyday sounds can become raw material for music is the subject of Honig’s book. The title uses the experience of knocking into something physical, such as a chair, for the happy accident of being struck by sound in a way that registers with you personally. The book is written with musicians in mind, but the concepts are more broadly applicable and accessible. Four things stuck with me on an initial read:

1. How Honig characterizes an emphasis on the value of listening: “We become so concerned with what is in front of us that we forget about what is around us.” He’s referencing “the degree to which our hearing communicates the contours of our world.” That framing of listening’s geographic, spacial, and temporal qualities is a helpful reminder.

2. My favorite chapter is the third, “Hidden Expressions of Objects.” In it Honig uses a specific example (sampling paper related to his father, a former professor) to show how the source material that provides audio brings with it contextual information, including personal feelings, anecdotal experience, and history, which is infused into the work, even if at a level of detail that isn’t conscious on the part of the musician or self-evident on the part of the listener.

3. “It isn’t mimicking a space. It is one.” Tools such as reverb and delay can provide a sense of space, and yet have become so ubiquitous that the space is more conceptual than physical. Honig asserts that using the echoes and other qualities of actual physical spaces, such as hallways and rooms and the outdoors, shouldn’t be neglected.

4. “To finish is to essentially abandon a relationship that you’ve built up with the work.” There’s a whole section toward the close of the book about, naturally, the difficulty in finishing something. This is a subject I don’t think about a lot in the context of music, in large part because my own music-making is purely exploratory, with no particular intention on my part to perform or record, and because the Disquiet Junto music community is expressly focused on *starting* things, and on finishing them only in the context of having a deadline, not in the context of the work in any way feeling completed.

Side note: I occasionally misplaced the book while reading it because it has no print on the spine. I realized I have several books with blank spines. I rounded up a few and I’ll start keeping them in one spot on my shelf. Right now this includes, along with Honig’s book, two exhibit catalogs: *Bill Beckley: An Accidental Poet (1968)* and *Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building, and Acoustically Tuned Space*.

More on the book at [ezekielhonig.com](https://www.ezekielhonig.com/bumping.php). The physical edition was limited to 300 (I got number 101), but helpfully there’s an [ebook](https://www.amazon.com/Bumping-Into-Chair-While-Humming-ebook/dp/B077BLSCQ8/) version, too.

Synth Learning: “In and Near C”

My first 2020 track for Weekly Beats

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s a new year, and I’m giving [weeklybeats.com](https://weeklybeats.com/disquiet/) a go again. I only posted a few tracks two years ago when I last joined in. Unlike many other weekly music communities online, Weekly Beats is quite open-ended: “The objective of Weeklybeats is to encourage musicians to be productive, creative, and have fun,” states its FAQ. By contrast, in the SB Beat Battles, everyone works with the same shared samples. In the Naviar Haiku, everyone works from the same short poem as inspiration. And in the Disquiet Junto, everyone follows the same instructions for a different project.

In my brief Weekly Beats writeup, this is how I described what’s going on: “A drone in and near C for the start of the new year. The source note is from my Arturia MicroBrute. It goes through a reverb pedal, the HardWire RV-7, which then goes into my Eurorack modular synthesizer. Several things happen then: three separate bands of the spectrum (via the MakeNoise FXDf module) are individually combined with snippets being frozen in the Clouds module (triggered by a square wave from an oscillator, the Dixie II), and I’m manually saving and playing loops using the Soundmachines UL1 (recording and playing as triggered by two foot pedals via the Monome Walk module). That’s a broad-strokes description.”

Here’s a photo of the patch in my modular synth:

Just a few more notes: Where it says Clouds above, it’s actually Smog, a smaller version of the Clouds module. There’s some low-level LFO activity going on, as well. Waves from my Batumi, squashed into something less wildly fluctuating by my WMD S.P.O., are influencing the volume of one of the FXDf, and the “position” and “texture” of the Smog audio. One thing I was trying to do throughout was ever so slightly alter the tuning of the audio being replayed by the UL1 looper, the idea being to have something close to C that would create moire/beading with the C itself. I was using a lot of the various options within the MicroBrute to make the C as complex as I could, and I slowly turned all of those knobs down at the very end, until the track was silent. That about covers it.

The track is on both [weeklybeats.com](https://weeklybeats.com/disquiet/music/in-and-near-c) and [soundcloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/in-and-near-c).

Button Down

Reading a location

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Riddle me this: When is up down and down up? One answer that I hadn’t previously considered: When someone didn’t take the time to properly sort out the wiring of a pair of doorbells on a small multi-unit residence.

Judging by the relative wear on the metal and the paint overlay seen here, it’s likely that the lower button is the original and that the top button was added during a subdivision at some point. Swapping the natural correlative locations of the buttons certainly wasn’t anyone’s purposeful intention, so the handwritten corrections must have been an afterthought, like the subdivision itself.

It’s interesting that street addresses aren’t provided, just “down” and “up,” not A and B, or two consecutive numbers. Whoever visits this building is expected to know, in advance, who lives on the top floor, and who lives below. Visitors for whom Chinese is their primary language are provided a helpful translation in simplified characters. The simplification keeps the characters singular, but as a non-speaker I am left to wonder if they contain additional meaning. If nothing else, they fit the limited space better than less-simple Chinese would have, and clearly better than does the English, which here has been bent to fit the confines. What I also don’t know is if the Chinese lettering exhibits the limits of constraints that are evident in the English.

Then comes the question of which came first, the Chinese or the English. I like to think the Chinese was there first, and the new inhabitants deciphered the text, realized the benefit of the labels, and added an English translation thereof. Having moved to a predominantly Chinese neighborhood, the new tenants immediately had to learn some of the language. Alternately, perhaps the Chinese inhabitants came later, and were led to imagine that labeling apartments “down” and “up” was just what people here did, and they added their translation so as to follow the perceived local norms.