Marc Weidenbaum

One Prayer Bowl Ringing

The sound of one prayer bowl ringing is quite a bit more than the familiar lulling waveform when that ringing is sent through myriad processing routines. This is why while Jason Charney’s “Pratītya,” named for the Buddhist concept of “pratītyasamutpāda,” veers from its opening ring tone, that which follows — overtones, and cicada chatter, percussive…

Disquiet: 15, 10 & 5 Years Ago This Week (2013.51)

5 Years Ago (2008): This week I was in Tokyo, where I came upon a book titled Art Space Tokyo: An Intimate Guide to the Tokyo Art World. I was headed to a concert at the club Super Deluxe, so I didn’t but a copy, which was unfortunate because it quickly went out of print…

Push-Button Music

Disquiet Junto Project 0103: Tinsel Song

The project: Make a song based on last week’s “sonic tinsel” project. Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join…

A Very Scanner Christmas

When you hear that Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, has recorded a cover of “White Christmas,” perhaps the first thing that comes to mind is surveillance audio of Santa making his annual sleigh ride — a sound art version of the Official NORAD Santa Tracker. Scanner made his name — that name — early on by…

Silence Beyond Punctuation

In the recent solo piano piece by Elizabeth Velvdon, “The Pure Water, Filled with Light,” the light may very well be the spaces between the notes. That’s an unnecessary distinction, because silence is a kind of note unto itself, so safer to say that the light is the space between the parts played between the…

Disquiet: 15, 10 & 5 Years Ago This Week (2013.50)

A friend suggested that I begin posting a regular peek into this site’s archives, so I am going to experiment with a “This Week [X Number of] Years Ago” project. There are no posts from December 1993, so I can’t do 20 years ago this week. I do, that said, have some print archives to…

A Drone in Progress

The Bell Mechanical describes the drone in question as a work in progress, which begs the question as to how it might be improved. Drones in general have a holistic if not entirely natural aura to them. The distinction is that they often sound self-contained, almost automated, more field recording than composition, and yet they…

Megaphones, Parabolic Concrete, and Waterfalls

We were confronted on the street corner by an evangelical wielding a large, battery-powered megaphone. This being a soundwalk, the appearance on this very cold day of the screaming man in the t-shirt was something akin to an act of serendipity. As he burdened us with the fear of eternal damnation, all I could think…

This Is Not a Speaker

17 Years at 1 URL

Seventeen years ago today I purchased the URL Disquiet.com. Each passing year, when I have the time, I write a bit about that process, that time period. I think I’ll give myself the additional Oulipo constraint of utilizing only as many sentences as there are years to the anniversary, though of course parentheticals, em-dashes, semi-colons,…

Disquiet Junto Project 0102: Sonic Tinsel

The project: Record original secular holiday music: glistening, reflective, gentle. Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate.…

Threadbare Exotica from Amsterdam

“Shake Rain” by Oval Angle starts like a white-noise whir. Given that there is so much white noise flourishing in experimental music of late, one wouldn’t be surprised, let alone disappointed, if it had continued with its wooly, slightly jittery gait. But then brushy shakers and a fluttery keyboard line, of the sort that Money…

Casually Framed Documents of the Sonic Quotidian

The Touch Radio series of podcasts, an offshoot of the esteemed Touch Editions label, has reached its momentous 100th episode, and it is marking the occasion with just the sort of low-impact gesture that would be expected of an enterprise that traffics in the everyday. See, much of the Touch output is field recordings: expertly…

Drum Solos Revisited

The drum solo has long been synonymous with extravagant posturing, with the worst excesses of rock’n’roll virtuoso exhibitionism. The reputation is unfortunate, but whatever one thinks of drum solos, the forthcoming album of solo drum work by Machinefabriek is something entirely apart from the usual associations. The source audio for Machinefabriek’s album — its bland…

Music from What Ails You

Alison Doyle has not posted a new track to her SoundCloud account in nine months. The last one was less than a minute in length, a field recording of the sound of the Arts Music Building at Cornish College. What is heard is someone’s piano practice, routine stuff, from a distance. The music, the performance,…

Modular Jazz

The musician who goes by mudlogger, aka Ubon Ratchathani of Thailand, has been uploading modular synthesizer experiments. Among them is this piece, “OrLo,” which he describes as “modular jazz.” No doubt it gets that description because the white noise percussion suggests a robotic trap set, and the intransigent pneumatic piping sounds like a European free…

Life After Nintendo

There are several dozen tracks thus far in the “sound diary” credited on SoundCloud to Corruption, who gives as a residence Funabashi, Japan. Many are noisy escapades, tagged simply as “sound diary,” while the one dated “2013.11.19″ and given the subtitle “like a moth to a candle” bears a second tag: Nanoloop. That’s the name…

Disquiet Junto Project 0101: Analog Binary

The project: Make a phase composition based on the sounds of three switches. Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just…

Sound of Commerce

John Kannenberg is a sound artist with a particular interest in place. Much of his work is raw or lightly edited recordings of physical environments, notably art museums. He has, in the past, reversed the idea of sound art by making sound art of places that house art. He travels with his audio recording equipment…