Tag: current favorites

Current Favorites: Instagram Bits

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Another post in acknowledgement of the small bits of music that pop up on Instagram over the course of the week and are enchanting on loop. Instagram doesn’t particularly lend itself to the playlist treatment I do on YouTube.

▰ This is Sarah Belle Reid, based in Los Angeles, California, excerpted from a livestream concert, combining her flugelhorn with software and hardware synthesis:

▰ This is exactly the sort of lovingly sodden, deeply nostalgia-laden synthesis listeners of Orbital Patterns’ music have come to expect. He’s based in Rochester Hills, Michigan, and is one of my favorite modular synthesizer wizards:

▰ This is Todd Kleppinger, of Fairfax, Virginia, producing delightful melodic, rhythmic patterning on the Orca software, running on a Monome Norns Shield and stimulating an Elektron Digitakt.

▰ This is Mark Lentczner (aka Electric Kitchen, of Mountain View, California) producing industrial joy with a combination of the Recursive Machine and the Beebo from Poly Effects.

▰ Listening to UK-based Ryan Lerigo-Jones drum along with synth collaborators is one of my fave new pleasures:

I’m at instagram.com/dsqt, and I follow a vast amount of this.

Current Favorites: Samples, Horror, Perfume, Fusion

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.

▰ I’m a sucker for many things, among them low-key propulsive fusion featuring Rhodes piano and a muted, economical horn section, along with liner notes stating which drummer is in the right channel and which in the left. This is the new Dosh track, “If U Strike Me Down,” off the forthcoming album Tomorrow 1972. Dosh is Martin Dosh, longtime drummer for Andrew Bird’s band.


▰ There’s an excellent new Kev Brown hip-hop instrumentals set out, The Music Underneath! The “GOOD​.​” Instrumentals. I’d love to know what the opening track samples. Its stately procession reminds me of David Byrne’s Knee Plays.


▰ Heymun has been summoning up her inner synesthete, channeling perfumes into music in an occasional series she calls “Scent to Sound.” This floaty, enjoyably askew ambience correlates with her sense that the particular fragrance suggests “Butterflies fluttering in my stomach.”


▰ Clint Mansell has a new horror score out, In the Earth, for the Ben Wheatley film, and it is a dark, intense, highly recommended listen. One track, “Spirit of the Woods,” is up officially on YouTube, and all 16 tracks are on streaming services.

Current Favorites: David Shea, Anne Guthrie, Tuesday Drones

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.

▰ David Shea’s Live in Blackwood is a remarkable concert document, a performance recorded in nature and making the most of the environmental sound in which it is ensconced. Shea himself is first heard before he’s seen, his course whistle collaborating with birdsong. He them enters the camera’s view from behind bushes. Each phase of this series of sets, almost 37 minutes in total length, mixes varying instrumentation with different video approaches, such as a hovering drone shot while he plays a series of multicolored bowls that sound like massive tuning forks, and a forest walk while he combines samples, gongs, and field recordings. (I found this via a mention by Lawrence English.)


▰ On Gyropedie, Anne Guthrie elegantly combines field recordings, electronics, and instrumentation, notably her French horn, in a gestural, almost fleeting manner, finding common ground between the materials in fragmentary form.


▰ Compelling, rusty, serrated drone by the musician best know as/for Tuesday Night Machines, performed on an intriguing setup from the inexpensive synthesizer manufacturer AE Modular.


Current Favorites: Cooked Viola and Buddha Machines, Thawing Ice

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.

▰ On the double album If Not Now, released at the very end of 2020, Meredith Bates sends her violin and viola through a range of processing, yielding echoes and textures, layers and atmospheres, stutters and breakage. It somehow manages to be both intimate and orchestral at the same time. Bates is based in Vancouver, British Columbia.


▰ Three field recordings of what’s going on under the ice, captured by Ivo Vicic of Rijeka, Croatia, on Under the Ice – Secret Sounds of Nature. As Vicic describes it, what we’re hearing is a water stream, amomg other activity, recorded at a lake that has frozen over during the winter. Released earlier this month. (Thanks for the recommendation, Patricia Wolf!)


▰ In a 10-minute live video, Poland-baed Grzegorz Bojanek makes rough-hewn ambient music in realtime with a handful of Buddha Machines and effects pedals. Even if you’re entirely familiar with the source audio, you’ll be enchanted by the new territories Bojanek explores.


▰ The cacophonous fragility of Marcus Fischer’s mid-February “Thawing” is a field recording made during the Portland, Oregon, winter. Writes Fischer of the brief track: “Thawing ice releasing itself and falling from a large oak tree onto the snow-covered street below.”

Current Favorites: Luu, Fripp, Euclide

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 new release from Italian musician Elisa Luu (aka Elisabetta Luciani, based in Rome), Luu’s Strange Minimalism, packs more into four short tracks than most musicians do into a full album, even two albums. From the filmic post-classical “Violin, LuuV” to the pulsing minimalism of “Dicem, 15V,” the record is a strong example of why Luu is high on the list of my favorite musicians I have no idea why I don’t read about more frequently.

▰ Just a reminder that Robert Fripp is 45 weeks into his promised 50 weekly tracks of Music for Quiet Moments. If you’re more familiar with his far more widely viewed pandemic-era collaborations with his wife, Toyah Wilcox, then welcome to the introspective side of his personality and his playing. The latest was recorded in Paris six years ago:

▰ A beautiful Instagram series pairs Gregory Euclide’s photographs with one-minute loops of music by a rotating and expanding cast of contributors, including the OO-Ray, Stephen Vitiello, Jolanda Moletta, and Kirill Nikolai. There have been 159 entries to date. The latest is by Steve Ashby. Visit at instagram.com/thesisrecurring.