Disquiet – Page 642 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Depth of Field

Guitar + modular, via Australia-based Betsy Hammer

March 14, 2018March 15, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

A post shared by Betty Hammer (@betty.hammer) on Mar 8, 2018 at 5:03pm PST

This brief Instagram clip from Betty Hammer — aka Liesl Hazelton — shows her performing electric guitar, in the background, through an array of synthesizer modules, in the foreground. That depth of field serves as well to describe the music. You can see her hands playing the guitar, but by the time it reachers your ear those modules have done a lot to the source audio, pushing it from a simple plucked string to something more like a Caribbean steel drum played at the very far end of a long metal corridor. Meanwhile the synth is deploying its own snare beat, the pace evident in the soft red light that is as large as Hammer’s hand.

Clip originally posted at Hammer’s [Instagram page](https://www.instagram.com/p/BgFTi_jhmcd/?taken-by=betty.hammer). More from Hammer, who lives on Norfolk Island, Australia, at [lieslhazelton.com](http://lieslhazelton.com/).

What Sound Looks Like

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

March 12, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Excavated some cassettes of turntablism music (turntable as instrument) while cleaning out some of my old boxes this past weekend. Back then, around 1996 and 1997, when these were released, turntablism was often documented and circulated on cassette. These days, 20-plus years later, a lot of my listening is manipulation of the cassette tape itself, as well as digital approximations of tape manipulation. Some of the turntablists whose work is shown here have long since left traditional turntable vinyl behind and now use computer software that turns the turntable into a tactile controller for audio files.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

RIP, Russ Solomon (1925-2018)

A brief remembrance of the late Tower Records founder

March 10, 2018March 10, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

A little Russ Solomon (RIP) story from my years at Tower Records: I worked as an editor at *Pulse!*, the magazine published by Tower, full time from 1989 to 1996, and I continued to freelance for Tower after I left to take another job. The Tower corporate offices were in West Sacramento, and during my time as a Tower employee I lived in Sacramento (and briefly Davis), having moved out from Brooklyn for the job in 1989 after writing a few freelance pieces for the magazine. (Those articles’ subjects included electronically mediated cellist Hank Roberts, soul-punk band 24-7 Spyz, and alt-country act Souled American.)

After my first few months at *Pulse!*, the magazine’s office was moved across the parking lot from the main Tower corporate office building. This move meant a load of improvements: more space, better light, less noise, fewer interruptions. The move also further established what was already a solid editorial separation between the magazine and the company’s retail business.

*Pulse!*, of course, reflected Tower’s merchandising ethos, in that it covered as wide a range as possible of music. That was the point. We didn’t just cover the pop, rock, r&b, and hip-hop of most music magazines at the time. We had a classical columnist, and a separate opera columnist, and a Christian contemporary columnist, and a variety of jazz columnists, among many others. We kept on retainer reporters in cities around the world to contribute brief local scene reports. These days, having “big ears” — an appreciation for music across genres, with an emphasis on the connections between those genres — is an everyday occurrence, a listening norm, in our post-streaming, niche-market era, but back in the early 1990s the breadth of coverage in *Pulse!* distinguished it from most other music magazines.

In my time at Tower, the range of its publications expanded. I co-founded its classical magazine, *Classical Pulse!*, with the opera critic Bob Levine. And then in 1994 I created Tower’s first email publication. That’s what is now called a newsletter. Named epulse (everything back then was e-this and e-that, the way later it was i-this and i-that), the epulse newsletter ran weekly, more or less, for 8 years up until 2002.

Then Pulse! closed down fairly suddenly in 2002, after 19 years of publication. The closure was due to Tower’s financial instability. When in 1996 I left *Pulse!*, I had stopped editing the epulse newsletter for awhile, but then I picked up the responsibilities again later on. I ended up writing the final cover story for *Pulse!*, about rapper/producer Missy Elliott, before any of us knew it would be the magazine’s last issue. And when *Pulse!* shut down in 2002, we shut down epulse, too, naturally.

Or so we thought.

Because the very next week I got a call magazines’ (newly former) publisher. Apparently Russ Solomon had called him and asked why epulse hadn’t come out. *Pulse!* had been shut due to financial matters, he explained, but epulse was such a low-budget thing that Russ wanted it to continue. And so it did. Editorial coverage of music was core to Russ Solomon’s idea of what Tower was about. Little old epulse kept it going as long as possible. Epulse continued to be published, at his request, for another year or so, until bankruptcy finally shut down Tower for good.

*This is lightly adapted from a thread I posted at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet/status/971237033942241280) the day after Russ Solomon died.*

What Sound Looks Like

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

March 9, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Repetition is a form of change.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

Disquiet Junto Project 0323: Music for Meditation

Record a piece of music suited to meditation.

March 8, 2018March 9, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the [Disquiet Junto group](https://disquiet.com/junto/), 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.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0323) for the duration of the project.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, March 12, 2018. This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, March 8, 2018.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0323: Music for Meditation**

Record a piece of music suited to meditation.

Step 1: Consider music appropriate for meditation. Think of the sounds, the tones, the forms that might suit such a thing.

Step 2: Record a short piece of music for meditation. Make your track a set number of minutes (that is, a length divisible by 60 seconds), preferably between 7 minutes and 20 minutes. Whatever length you choose, insert a bell/chime sound precisely one minute after the track begins and precisely one minute before the track comes to an end.

Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0323” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0323” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 4: Please consider posting your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0323-music-for-meditation/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Other Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, March 12, 2018. This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, March 8, 2018.

Length: The length is up to you. The instructions suggest 7 minutes and 20 minutes.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0323” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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 preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 323rd weekly Disquiet Junto project (Music for Meditation:
Record a piece of music suited to meditation) at:

https://disquiet.com/0323/