On Repeat: Three Live Performances

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening (and, per below, viewing) from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Marcus Fischer documented a live solo set with electric guitar and dual reel-to-reel machines circulating a single, extended strand of recording tape. He uses the amps, and the space, and the unique qualities of his equipment to shape sound in real time. Pay particular attention to how he keeps the feedback under control.

▰  An ambient jazz performance by electric guitarist Eivind Aarset’s stellar double-drum band, recorded during their set on May 23, 2025, at Vilnius Mama Jazz Festival. The group features Audun Erlien, bass; Wetle Holte, percussion; and Erland Dahlen, percussion. I’ve found in recent years that I’m listening to fewer studio audio recordings and more live performance videos (which is the primary reason I pay for YouTube’s advertisement-free tier). In chamber music and in jazz especially, watching musicians who’ve played together for a long time is especially appealing and informative.

▰ I know next to nothing about choreography. The extent to which I’ve engaged with the topic is that I interviewed and researched several choreographers for my 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. This performance for two dancers caught my attention because the track they’re dancing to is “The Beauty of Dissolving Portraits” off The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint, by the great trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. The dancers are Sierra Drayton and Kaden Golding, performing a work by Ricky Ubeda, whom I believe to be the same person of that name who apparently won season 11 of So You Think You Can Dance in 2014, the same year the Akinmusire album came out. I don’t know how recent the piece of choreography itself is.

Stigmatic Ambient Music, Update

Mundane adventures in nonsense with ELIZA on steroids

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Per the above screenshot, if I currently ask Google what “stigmatic ambient music” is, the top link (on the right) listed as a source is a previous blog post of my own, from April 28. In that post, I detailed the absurdity of the idea of this non-genre, which Google’s AI mechanically divined gibberish to justify the existence of when I first inquired. Its broad-strokes response registered like a student who hadn’t studied for finals, let alone read a book all semester.

What is now even more remarkable to me is that the AI actively interprets my negative as a generally applicable positive — a statement documenting certain falsehood becomes, simply due to its presence on the internet, evidence of truth.

When I wrote that original post back in April, there were literally zero search results for “stigmatic ambient music” (with the quotation marks around it) on Google, which was the point of my initial experiment. As of this moment, a little over a month later, Google only returns four (yes, four) non-redundant results in the search return. There will now, as of this follow-up blog post, be a fifth result, and yet Google will likely persist in providing an encyclopedia-like description of something that doesn’t exist — caveat usor, and all that.

Scratch Pad: Frahm, Franklin, Mingus

And some #dronescrolling

/ 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.

▰ I thought I’d make a helpful playlist of music I tend to play in the background while working — less listen to than surrender to — and then I realized it’s pretty much just Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon and Nils Frahm’s Music for Animals.

▰ Occasional reminder to myself that 2027 will mark the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s original Junto club, as well as the mere 15th of the Disquiet Junto (and also its 800th consecutive weekly project).

▰ I don’t understand how anyone can enjoy Monopoly. Here’s a game called Cholera, for three or more players. Whoever rolls first dies first. Whoever rolls second dies second. Continue until final player. Final player rolls five times in a row, slowly, and on the fifth roll also dies. The game ends.

▰ I dug the Succession main theme music, even as it reminded me of things I couldn’t quite place. Just yesterday I was listening to a 1956 Charles Mingus album, and one of those things suddenly became apparent: “All The Things You Can C#” (off Mingus at the Bohemia). 

▰ Kind of amazed to wake up to news of a massive fire in the neighborhood, and I hadn’t woken earlier to the resulting sirens

▰ This week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Thorsten Sideboard posted on Bluesky news that the next AAAssembly — that is, the Algorithmic Art Assembly — will happen March 26-28, 2026, back at Gray Area in San Francisco. Stay tuned at aaassembly.org. ▰ Ethan Hein’s been in Memphis for a conference and he’s posting photos on Instagram of culturally charged relics, like the Hammond M3 organ that Booker T. Jones played on “Green Onions.” ▰ Bruce Levenstein posted on Bluesky an advertisement for 1980s computer camps sponsored by Atari that, for an OG TRS-80 owner like myself, provided a nice reminder me that the concept of a “digital native” may date back earlier than the term’s general application suggests. ▰ The DNA Lounge in San Francisco is owned by Jamie Zawinski, a former Netscape coder; he posted on Mastodon about an upcoming performer requiring a half dozen CDJs.

$upporting The Wire

It's important

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The great music magazine The Wire, fast approaching its 500th issue, due out this October, is suffering financial difficulties. The publication, for which I write on occasion, has set up a donation page, available at a PayPal address, which is also accessible via this QR code. A recent call they put out for donations has put them on better financial standing than they had been, and this new round of donations is to give them a stronger overall foundation. Alternately or additionally, you might subscribe.

And visit The Wire at thewire.co.uk.

Disquiet Junto Project 0701: Gap Ear

The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
The photo shows a blue sky with bright white clouds over a flat landscape with hills in the distance, plus the name and number of the project

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0701: Gap Ear
The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces.

Step 1: Choose a piece of music (whether your own or something in the public domain) and break it into sequential pieces. You might do this to a recording, or you might place gaps between parts of a notated melody (just to provide two different ways this instruction might be interpreted).

Step 2: Now, fill the various gaps, however many there may be, resulting from Step 1.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0701” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0701-gap-ear/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. The finished track will likely be maybe 50% larger than the source material.

Deadline: Monday, June 9, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 701st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Gap Ear — The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces — at https://disquiet.com/0701/