Tag: current favorites

On Repeat: Acoustic BOC, Giacometti Ambience

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:

▰ Gorgeous acoustic guitar rendition of Boards of Canada’s “Over the Horizon Radar” by the same guy, Simon Farintosh, whom I interviewed a few years back about his Aphex Twin transcriptions:

▰ Here is pianist Hania Rani performing, live, some of the music from her beautiful score to the film The Giacomettis, which I mentioned earlier this month. The footage was shot at Atelier in Stampa, Switzerland. That’s a former barn Giovanni Giacometti, father of artists Alberto and Diego Giacometti and architect Bruno Giacometti, in 1906 turned into the family studio. Listening to this solo concert while alone at home is a highly recommended. Headphones are great, but better yet, play it loud and transport the sonics of the Atelier into your own room.

▰ The title to René Margraff’s “Hiccup” may be the result of sorting out a playful alternate word for the light glitch the musician brings to this otherwise plaintive, subdued drone. It’s a magnetic piece, just drawing the ear in even as it risks disturbing the very trance it insinuates.

Current Favorites: Peel, Reidy, Ide

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

An occasional answer to a frequent question: “What have you been listening to lately?” These are annotated, albeit lightly, because I don’t like reposting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.

▰ One highlight of the various artists album MSCTYEXPOUNKNOWN PLEASURES ZONE is a mix of drones and wordless vocals by Hannah Peel. The record also features work by Loraine James, Akrafokonmu, Yuri Suzuki, mcconville, Bill Fontana, and Yuval Avital.

▰ Julia Reidy’s World in World is an album of otherly tonal, often textural, experimental guitar tracks with occasional vocal touches.

▰ Yasushi Ide’s new album, Cosmic Suite2​-​New Beginning-, includes a variety of collaborators, among them DJ Krush for this dubby treat, “Outer Space”:

Current Favorites: Büşra Kayıkçı, Vitiello x Quiet Club, Circuitghost

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.

▰ The Turkish musician Büşra Kayıkçı is the latest musician featured in the excellent Project XII series from Deutsche Grammophon. Her new single, “Bring the Light,” is a propulsive, athletic take on Philip Glass’ arpeggio-heavy minimalism. Listen for how she carves out space for individual notes amid the flurry. It’s tremendous.


▰ There’s not much in the way of liner notes for That Which Remains, a new EP by Circuitghost, but over on the llllllll.co message board, it’s explained to be remnants from a previous EP, All That We Lost. It’s a beautiful amalgam of small sounds in which textures are put to percolating, rhythmic use.


▰ This 2017 collaboration between the Quiet Club, an Irish collective, and Stephen Vitiello, the American sound artist, just popped up on Bandcamp. Titled Black Iris, it’s an ever-changing assortment of sound objects, from bells to scifi wiggles, borrowed audio narrative to dramatic creaking, footsteps to feedback, just to name a few, improvised live.

Current Favorites: Unreal Real Birds + Video Game Birds

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.

▰ Jason (Bassling) Richardson posted this remarkable video he shot of a lyrebird doing its thing. The variety of sounds, which really do bring to mind a synthesizer, are all the more striking in the context of the bird’s dance.


▰ I spent much of a morning this week listening to just wind chimes, occasional distant thunder, and intermittent bird chatter — all from the video game Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. (Thanks, Naxuu!)


▰ Jesse Goin & Nathan McLaughlin team up on Earth Tones Miniatures, a time-slowing mix of acoustic guitar and deep, soothing drones.


▰ Yoshio Machida’s Modulisme Session 041 is an exploratory album of synthesizer music: part minimalist patterning, part brutalist industrial noise-making


Current Favorites: Raw Material, Black Samurai, Deft Esoterica

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.

▰ Raw material is often some of my favorite listening, and so while these short loops (collected as Field Notes 02) by Simon James French are intended as source audio for music-making, in fact the ambient tones, field recordings, and general droning-goodness are fine just unto themselves.


▰ Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison) scored the new Netflix anime series Yasuke, about an African-born samurai, and while the soundtrack album has plenty of cinematic instrumental hip-hop (“Using What You Got” is a particular fave), it also has chill for days (check out “Shoreline Sus” and “Enchanted”).


▰ Claude and Ola Aldous publish the zine Deft Esoterica, and they also make their own deftly esoteric music, on display on vol, nine tracks of rangy experimentalism, with an emphasis on noisy field recordings, fragile piano, and old-school scifi synthesizer.


▰ As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve never actually played Cyberpunk 2077, but I’ve spent an enormous amount of time with YouTube videos of its ambient street noise playing on loop. This video is a good example, though the title is a bit ambiguous, so possibly not all the sound is from the game itself: