Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Topic Archives: field notes

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

  • I wonder if my whole interest in drones has to do with the 13-year-old me wishing the opening notes of Yes’ Fragile would go on forever. #
  • Incredible sonic moire outside Old Navy in downtown San Francisco between store-entrance stereo speakers and drumming busker. #
  • PR email received for band whose picture, artfully, doesn’t show faces. No description of music, just links to streaming services. #
  • I suspect @tinyletter may have held up the Disquiet Junto email because it had three embedded links. Spam red flag. #
  • The Disquiet Junto email just seems to have been received, even though it was sent yesterday afternoon by @tinyletter. #odd #
  • We email a lot with our neighbors. I don’t miss the continuous phone ringing that was the soundscape of my childhood. #
  • Yojiro Imasaka’s inspiring photo of an alley: http://t.co/bLprwyAs. It’s the graphic score Disquiet Junto musicians interpret this week. #
  • The gritty-spectral background photo, by Yojiro Imasaka, for my Twitter page serves as a graphic score in the new Disquiet Junto project. #
  • Instructions for 19th Disquiet Junto are now live: http://t.co/XdRJsrQ9. Project due this Monday at 11:59pm, wherever you are. #
  • “rojiura” is a Japanese word for alley #
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Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

  • I’ve been thinking in rhymes since MCA died. #
  • Anyone strongly recommend a password manager? This “store your passwords in the cloud” thing seems, er, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. #
  • 5th piece in this week’s Junto is by @ETALABEL (Poland). Like how each piece’s waveform is clearly divided in three: http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 #
  • Tatsuya Yoshida from the Ruins is playing the Hemlock tonight. (In San Francisco.) #
  • Disquiet Junto is 2 shy of its 180th participant in 18 weeks. Number 178 is Athens, Greece–based Sim_psi: http://t.co/yny4EKyp #
  • RIP, MCA. Instrumentals: “The New Style”: http://t.co/SKTNMvjx. “Sabotage”: http://t.co/B6X36Vdk. “Flute Loop”: http://t.co/A0230aL3. #
  • Cancer Is Killing Music #

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Patch & Static: The Top 10 Posts & Searches of April 2012

Among the top 10 most popular posts of the past month, April 2012, were (1) an interview with Morton Subotnick (“The Patch Cord Godfather”) and (2) the announcement of a live Disquiet Junto concert in Chicago on April 19.

Five of the 10 most popular posts were drawn from the daily recommended free downloads: (3) thoughts on hotel bedside radio (“The ‘Classical’ Button”x), (4) a sound collage by Jane Burton and Doris Lake (together working under the moniker Public Domain), (5) Carl Ritger (aka Radere) working with a tape-based four-track recorder, (6) the static-based work of C. Cu, and (7) a preview track from the forthcoming IoNiZeR album.

Also in the top 10, not (8) one but (9) two weekly automated collections of what is posted at twitter.com/disquiet, and (10) the top-10 list from March 2012.

The most popular searches on the site during the month of April were: junto, salvagione, weidenbaum, mallet, would-be messiahs, autobiography, automaton, bitlabrecords, modular, Peter 7 Paelinck, rjdj, subotnik, Vitiello, ableton, amirkhanian, autechre, bars, cacophony, friends.

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Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

  • RIP, Swiss artist David Weiss (b.1946) of Fischli/Weiss: Rube Goldberg-ish video The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) http://t.co/05DZynwH #
  • RIP, Joe Muranyi (b. 1928), latter-day Dixieland clarinetist in Louis Armstrong’s band: http://t.co/5xUFnQiN, http://t.co/KrGmazuP #
  • 17th Disquiet Junto project already has 2 new 1st-time participants: Biel, Switzerland’s @tobiasreber & NYC’s @clownfacee. #
  • Somehow got a http://t.co/ygIzHsQ1 MBAir cover at Apple store in @soundcloud orange/grey today even though they’re not on the @acmemade site #
  • Note from daycare today says my kid has started a band with two other kids. My kid turns 20 months on Monday. #
  • The telltale pocket-fabric swish with which begins the semi-surreptitiously recorded bootleg of a lecture. #
  • Anyone have any experience with the mailing-list services of http://t.co/abAJFrlp or http://t.co/2oFj6v4s? #
  • Read my first Kindle Single: Jonathan Biss’ Beethoven’s Shadow. Pondering his informed critique of the shadow cast by recording equipment. #
  • Wonderful! RT @tobiasreber: posted my 1st disquiet #junto contribution on soundcloud. glad I could finally participate http://t.co/0d6EsmUR #
  • Downtown San Francisco is like a busker convention today. #
  • Coldplay’s “Trouble” is Pink Floyd fan fiction. #
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Tangents: Lethem/Cage, Kracfive Gaming, iOS Updates

News, quick links, good reads

4’33 Neoteny: Jonathan Lethem gave the tenth State of Cinema address at the 55th San Francisco Film Festival on April 21, and wired.it posted a bootleg of the audio. The sprawling lecture, which is highly recommended, is very much a novelist welcoming film to post-relevancy. Of course, Lethem turns matters of relevancy on their head, employing the concept of “neoteny,” in which juvenile traits surface in adult behavior (that is a poor paraphrase). In the process of outlining his thinking, he attributes neotenic qualities to John Cage’s 4’33″, describing it as the sounds a child might accomplish before even beginning to learn to play piano. Lethem’s latest book is a study of Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, which was produced by Brian Eno (continuumbooks.com).

Ball, Game: The name Noah Sasso will be familiar to longtime readers of Disquiet.com due to his having been a founding member of the Kracfive collective (kracfive.com), whose Iron Chef of Music was a big presence on this site for many years, and was an influence on the development of the Disquiet Junto. Like many electronic-music practitioners, Sasso has an active role in game development, and his new project, BaraBariBall, will debut at the NYU Game Center’s Third Annual No Quarter Exhibition (nyu.edu) on May 18. He’s posted this video trailer (at vimeo.com) for the game. It has that perfect mix of pixel elegance and stellar fluid motion, like watching basketball through mosaic sunglasses:

Sasso says it was developed for Windows and Mac but has no current planned public release. More on Sasso at strangeflavor.net and soundcloud.com/strangeflavor.

App Updates (iOS Edition): Tabletop, a virtual music studio with device emulators, has improved the manner in which one swaps between devices. …
Animoog has debuted a SoundSet by Richard Devine in its in-app storefront. …
The Buddha Machine app has been updated to include sounds from the Buddha Machine 3.

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