2/3rds of Yo La Tengo

Live at Duck Creek

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I first heard about the Arts Center at Duck Creek when guitarist Bill Frisell played there with his trio two years back, in June 2023. Duck Creek is way out on Long Island, in East Hampton. I grew up further west on the island, toward the north shore. I mentioned the Frisell gig, which the venue uploaded to its YouTube channel, at the time, and have kept an eye on the place ever since, hoping that the concert schedule might coincide with my occasional visits back home.

All of which is how I learned about a newly uploaded, fantastic live ambient performance from June 21, 2025, by two thirds of the band Yo La Tengo, Georgia Hubley on electric guitar and Ira Kaplan on keyboards. With echoes of Robert Fripp and Laraaji, they played a quietly psychedelic set, initially gentle and then more abrasive and out there as it proceeded, with lots of warbling noises, backwards effects, and held notes on the eBow transformed through effects pedals.

While Yo La Tengo are rightfully thought of as indie rock, they venture into ambient zones on occasion, as on the track “James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds (Monday),” which appeared when the band first launched its Bandcamp page (it was part of the album We Have Amnesia Sometimes), and the instrumentals collection The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, which was all composed to accompany short aquatic documentary films by the late Jean Painlevé (1902-1989).

Side note: ambient, contemporary classical, new age, and guitar pedal fans will want to check out an Emily Hopkins harp performance at Duck Creek from last November:

Teensy 4.1

Making plans

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I picked up a teeny tiny little Teensy 4.1, and I’m looking forward to toying with it. I think my first project with it will be the “headless” Dirtywave M8 Tracker (which isn’t really headless because I’ll be using the laptop as the screen, and as the controller).

Beatles Forensics

"I, I could see"

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Yes, when John Lennon and Paul McCartney appeared — in one of the photos in the latter’s current exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco — to be contemplating handwritten notes that were blurry, which is to say, not the focal point of the image, I sure did take a close-up shot and flip the detail upside down so I could ascertain what song they were in the process of writing. It was “I Saw Her Standing There.” The exhibit is Paul McCartney Photographs 1964: Eyes of the Storm, which runs from March 1, 2025, through October 5, 2025.

When I first entered the exhibit, I found I immediately had an early Beatles song running through my head. Then it occurred to me that what might be neat would be to wander around the galleries and ask visitors what they were hearing in their heads. But then I realized that in some room several rooms away, audio from an ancient live performance was playing, and thus seeping into all the other galleries, and that the song in my head was, in fact, the song that the playback had ever so quietly placed there.

Font Generation

Or: Things fall apart

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Whatever new generation of cash register printers kicked in some years back is now, in turn, old enough that it’s begun to show signs of idiosyncratic deterioration, and the resulting glitch of mechanical shortcomings is coming into its own. I am here for these unintended fonts.

Scratch Pad: Teensy, Lowe, Athena

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Afternoon trio for passing bus, passing plane, and passing person singing to self

▰ Me: It’s incredible what you can do with merely a Teensy 4.1 and access to a 3D printer.

Also me: I can’t believe entire days have to pass before items arrive by mail.

Then: Me slaps me upside the head. 

Exit, pursued by a bear — which symbolically represents self-flagellation regarding impatience.

▰ Been a few years. If you’re headed back in time, please tell late-teens/early-20s Marc that in the future he’ll live a few blocks from Golden Gate Park where, quite often, Nick Lowe will perform (for free!) as part of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. Also this year: Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and Rosanne Cash (and, admittedly, a buncha people I’ve never managed to dig, but such is festival life).

▰ I have many favorite spots in the art museum at Stanford. In first place must go this statue, which is “a copy of a copy,” and the sculptor of which apparently lived backward in time (1935–1892).

▰ That was bizarre. I got some post directed at me from what was apparently a scam account claiming my Mastodon account had been shut down due to copyright infringement, and when I clicked on the post to see more details, it disappeared, likely because some Mastodon security apparatus removed it, or perhaps because the scammer backtracked.

▰ Finished reading one novel this week, but it’s one I’m editing, so I won’t identify it. Also read a bunch of comics, though not enough to round up to a graphic novel. And maintaining pace on Blood Meridian, Moby Dick, and one other.