Dust And Disquiet
Ping Weafer
What is your musical activity? Prior to joining Disquiet Junto in late 2021, I was a drummer/percussionist in various bands. While I certainly relished these opportunities, I also sought an outlet to create more experimental compositions that took advantage of multitracking and audio processing. I recognized that drone and ambient music was untenable within the confines of most standard rock bands, so I directed my attention toward audio production through the use of digital audio workstations (DAWs), eventually settling on Logic Pro as my software of choice.
In addition to my 100+ Soundcloud releases, I also have around 30 unreleased compositions that are currently collecting digital dust. Some of these songs are earmarked for my Cave Utensils project, a collaboration with an amiable British lad. A series of donkey oriented compositions and an eight minute deconstruction of Mambo Number Five will be released under the Cave Utensils alias in the foreseeable future. Other unreleased material include unfinished Disquiet Junto compositions, a dozen comedy songs intended for Babbling Blubber, plus some miscellaneous covers and originals that have yet to find a home.
What is one good musical habit? I occasionally go into music creation without having a preconceived notion of the finished product, and instead let the sound of an instrument or object dictate the general trajectory of the composition. This was particularly the case for disquiet0561, where Disquiet Junto participants were tasked with creating a composition using Samplebrain, a piece of sample mashing software designed by Aphex Twin. As prescribed by the prompt, I fed various bird and rain WAV files through the software and mangled the samples beyond recognition, eventually settling on a soundscape that resembled a glitchy sprinkler system. These unconventional means of song composition can manifest in unique creations that deviate from the chordal hierarchies ubiquitous in tonal music.
What are your online locations? I was relatively late to hop on the social media bandwagon, although I eventually bent to pressure by creating an instagram account in 2017. A Facebook and Snapchat account later followed, although these have since been abandoned. While I occasionally contemplate abandoning Instagram altogether, I might instead launch another account exclusively dedicated to music releases. As of early 2023, my songs have been released with very little, if any, promotion, and most of my followers are probably unaware that I release music on a near-weekly basis.
YouTube, Spotify, and Soundcloud are my primary means of listening to music, with Spotify being my primary streaming service. If an artist does not have their entire discography on Spotify, I will usually turn to YouTube to fill in the gaps. SoundCloud is the only platform I use to release my own music, although I might explore other websites such as BandCamp and Spotify once I finish Objects Around the House and Solitary Statue. I am also an avid user of Wikipedia and have made several thousand edits on the website.
What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? Most of my Junto submissions are recorded without the help of outside musicians, but I find collaborations to be the most fulfilling projects. One such opportunity was provided through disquiet0527, where participants were tasked with completing the final third of a song created by another musician.
Does being a drummer in some way give you a different perspective on making music than someone with a more generally chordal/tonal background, like a pianist or a guitarist? And if so, how?
Guitarists tend to write songs on a guitar and pianists usually compose on a piano, yet I rarely craft songs on a drum kit. Unlike the piano and guitar, most drums are unpitched instruments, rendering them largely incapable of producing recognizable musical notes.
My approach to music creation centers around a desire to create a compelling sound environment that makes use of both tonal and atonal elements. While my songs generally adhere to the 12-tone scale, they are often augmented with sounds not usually associated with music, such as animal noises and household appliances.
Today, many modern layers engulfed me from three sides: Trains of tourist-packed golf carts zipping past. Rental scooter riders bumping along cobblestones, their teeth rattling from the impact. Swarms of teenagers with floral backpacks and straw hats streaming through, blending with the flower-carpeted wall next to Santo Antnio's church just below. Bantu, Korean, and Konkani speaking visitors stepped into the church as a beggar woman held out her hand for alms and a dozen other languages swirled by.
Among Portugal's most celebrated writers, Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and died here in 1935. His poetry and prose are rife with Lisbon as a key character. His modernist writing is philosophical and poignant, nailing the experience of living in a fast new world as traces of the old one poked through. He spoke then as now to the unanchored modern soul, so much so, his image is everywhere in Lisbon. It is sculpted in bronze, painted on tile, inked onto dish towels, t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs. In these images he is almost always the same, a melancholy man in tailored suit, tie, tight mustache, wire rim glasses, and felt fedora. His gaze looks askew, pondering existence.
O Livro, among Pessoa's most popular works, is a novel written as diary entries of a lonely, observant bookkeeper in early twentieth century Lisbon. Margaret Jull Costa, my edition's translator, suggests in her introduction that O Livro can be read non-sequentially, opened at random, savoring whatever entry opens up. I'd seen my grandmother and aunts do this with books of mystical poetry while thinking on a matter for which they sought guidance.
Pessoa became my obsession when I was invited to participate in the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Taking Pessoa, and his novel, as its icon, Disquiet is a two-week intensive series of literary workshops, readings, and activities with over a hundred other writers from around the world. Its intent is to pull people out of their everyday worlds back home and plunk them into this dynamic and distinct place, a world Pessoa felt contained everything. I saw that as Disquiet took people out of their familiar routines, they gained fresh views and experiences that knocked the dust off everyday life. "We've taken to calling this Disquieting," Jeff Parker, the program's director, told me.
Like Pessoa, a famed flneur, I wandered the streets, striving to inhabit Lisbon old and new. Pessoa's desassossego came too, a twisting serpentine word describing betwixt-and-between sensations as well as feelings of being momentarily caught unaware at a doorway between two incoherent but viable realities. Lisbon is itself a threshold place, a geography of rolling, hard to pin down hills along the bank of a massive river emptying into the Atlantic, a place of worlds going out and worlds coming in.
I stood from my anchored perch and walked west along the river, shop windows passing like movie frames. A sewing shop packed with threads and buttons. Sleek rows of fanning multicolored refrigerators in sky blue, pale green, cherry red, pastel pink, and mustard yellow. Sardine cans stacked floor-to-ceiling. Thyme, laurel, and oregano bundles hanging over bins of ginger and chili peppers. A crowded ginjinha stand selling medicinal shots of sour cherry eau de vie. A bakery with trays of traditional pastel de nata custard tarts. A sidewalk billboard for McDonald's, "I'm Lovin' Chiado," next to a man selling pyramids of just-plucked plums and peaches from a nearby orchard.
I arrived at Lisbon's historic riverside market, the Mercado da Ribeira, its painted tile entry leading me into a wide high-roofed hangar-like space opening up to radiating long aisles of multicolored produce, with cheese makers, butchers, fishmongers, and herbalists arrayed along the perimeter.
I moved deeper, finding the second half of the traditional market converted into TimeOut Market Lisboa. Amalia faded as Nora Jones crooned from overhead speakers. Celebrity chef kiosks on the edges served people from around the world tucking into new Portuguese cuisine at rows of communal long tables in the center. Most diners seemed to stare for long intervals at their phones or stage selfies and stories for folks back home.
"All of us, we who dream and think, are assistant bookkeepers in a textile company," O Livro said. "We draw upon the accounts and make a loss; we add up the figures and pass on; we close the account and the invisible balance is never in our favor."
My last day, I climbed farther west along the river to join Disquiet's closing celebration on its last day of workshops. I passed narrow grocery, knick-knack, and hardware shops wedged into slim, steep streets. A tiny antiquarian bookshop halted me, its window displays centered on Pessoa's works surrounded by cookbooks and tomes on Freemasonry, Templars, and mysticism. Nailed to a shelf in back hung Pessoa's black and white portrait in a gilt gold frame. I recalled that he had once lived with his Theosophist aunt, attending her sances. He seemed at home here, his gaze less melancholic.
I climbed more, the Tejo's snake blue body appearing far below. Arriving at my destination in a neighborhood of houses hidden behind high garden walls, a guard greeted me and pointed to a stairway inside. "Follow it down to the garden in back," he said.
Seemingly simple, after several subterranean dead ends later, I finally glimpsed sunlight, then a terrace and garden lush with lantana, marigolds, roses, and velvety lawn. A pool glimmered at the edge. Jasmine and the strange sensation of familiarity pricked the air.
I stepped out into my aunt's garden. She was behind me in her big jewelry and flared taffeta skirt, sweeping through French doors, heels clicking on the marble floor, carrying a platter of fragrant rice. Famous for her hospitality, she would tell me to set the fruit bowl I carried, tumbling with mulberries from her orchard, onto the linen covered table by the shimmering pool. It was 1976, the last time I visited that place on the other side of the world from my native Colorado, a last idyllic summer visit to Tehran. A portal I thought forever closed, opened.
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