I’ve been meaning to post this photo since I mentioned attending the excellent recent Andrew Pekler and Jan Jelinek (and Chris Otchy) concert at Gray Area here in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. Just for the historical record, that is Pekler’s setup on the left and Jelinek’s on the right. They did not play at the same time. Otchy opened, then came Pekler, and then Jelinek.
Tired: Getting reminders on social media to say happy birthday to (or otherwise reconnect with) deceased friends.
Wired: Stumbling on newly uploaded recording sessions featuring deceased friends.
The prolific concert recorder who goes by 3.Cameras.and.a.Microphone on YouTube just posted a previously unreleased jazz fusion studio session featuring the late Tony Passarell, an old friend, with limited available details about the source material’s circumstances. The players are listed as, in addition to Tony: Stephen, Charles, and Robert, with no last names. There’s a scribbled addition in parenthesis, which appears to be “Davon.” The date given is “8/14/13” — August 14, 2013, a Wednesday. It’s a loose affair, featuring presumably Passarell’s sax, plus guitar, bass, and drums.
The phenomenon called EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon — apologies for the redundancy there — is one in which voices are heard emanating from noise: signals in the static. For one type of listener alert to EVP, this can be accepted as a fascinating illusion, a demonstration of the mind’s capacity to identify patterns and to lend them meaning. For another listener, it can be experienced as a voice from beyond, perhaps from beyond the grave, or perhaps from across the event horizon to the singularity, a truly electronic voice. Either way: ghosts in the machine.
The word “voice” means something specific in the context of synthesizers, where a voice is an identifiable individual instrument within a larger system, or perhaps a standalone instrument. A “voice” in that context has enough source material and controls that it can be utilized for expression. There’s a difference between an oscillator, which simply emits a sound, and a voice, the latter concept invoking a collection of additional tools that allow it to be shaped and used to express something.
The concept of EVP comes comes to mind during this live performance by Nick Lisher, who records as Lesjamusic, because the noise is rich enough that the sense of something melodic-like happening does so, to a large degree, at a substrate level. The helpful thing about a performance like this one is that you can watch the technology be employed as you listen to the sounds, and thus get a sense of what’s happening, at least in terms of an alignment of cause and effect. In this case, the musician has done us the additional benefit of explaining a bit of what’s going on in an accompanying note. If you keep an eye on that yellow button toward the right of the screen, you’ll recognize moments at which changes occur. Explains Lisher, this is when “a new fragment is being captured and stretched.” At those instances, melodic cogency occurs not deep beneath but, instead, at the top level, and then the top level slowly becomes the drone within which other subtler sounds occur — or at least appear to.
This was at the corner. I resisted the urge to snag it.
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 sometimes wonder if the Algorithm processes that much of the music I Shazam is stuff I can’t stand, so I can avoid it in the future. The Algorithm can’t regularly distinguish curiosity from affection from dislike.
▰ Listened to some old Power Station albums for the umpteenth time and remain astonished by Tony Thompson’s drum production
▰ I love when it’s clear a website has tweaked its backend because suddenly the RSS reader is full of a dozen or so old posts
▰ I’ll take a small pleasure at the end of the week. I use an phone app a lot, and I so send a note to its developer with a small suggestion, and less than a day and a half later my suggestion is part of the app, and now I’m using the app even more regularly. Doesn’t matter, really, what app, or what feature. Just a kind of interaction and response and sense of connectedness I marvel at, and hope not to stop marveling at.
▰ End of week:
▰ A lot of foghorns and a lot of wind, that’s what’s going on here. Have a good weekend.
▰ I didn’t finish reading any books this week, but I’m about halfway through the first Bosch novel (by Michael Connelly), The Black Echo, and about a quarter of the way through The Mushroom at the End of the World (by Anna Lowenhurst Tsing). I love how seemingly unrelated books that one might read at the same time end up having connections. For example, without giving too much away about the Bosch book, both it and the mushroom book center around skills gained by people in Vietnam and around Southeast Asia, and how those skills then get transferred to the United States: in one case, of military veterans committing crimes based on skills learned in tunnel combat; and in the other, of mushroom hunters foraging in the forest.
