Disquiet

[ July 5, 2009 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Roden’s Spelunking

A circa-1930s postcard, via the always excellent blog of musician-artist Steve Roden:

Roden explains that the card shows “engineers testing radio reception from within the depths of ‘endless caverns’, new market, VA. the men in the image are listening to the radio, nearly a mile from the entrance to the caverns. the back states clearly that ‘musical reception’ was ‘exceptionally good’.” More at the original post, inbetweennoise.blogspot.com.

[ July 4, 2009 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Orienting Cardiff-Miller

A visitor comments on the Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller exhibit “Opera for a Small Room,” currently at the Carnegie Museum of Art:

“I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. I didn’t know where I should be focusing my attention.”

Here’s a shot of the exhibit:

Full article at pittsburghlive.com. More at the museum’s website, cmoa.org (the museum link, judging by the URL, won’t function after the exhibit closes, on July 26).

[ July 4, 2009 / bookmark ]

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

• Afternoon: sound-art installation at Berkeley Art Museum. Tonight, Mose Allison and Bob (Schoolhouse Rock) Dorough. #
• Morning sounds: shower, fridge, coughing (visiting Mom, in guest room). And (I'm happy to note) my old laptop's louder than my new desktop. #
• Saw Edward Albee's At Home at the Zoo at ACT SF. Really solid, especially how two one-act plays written so far apart fit together so well. #
• Saw Edward Albee's At Home at the Zoo at ACT SF. Really solid, especially how two one-act plays written so far apart fit together to well. #
• New desktop computer set up. New high-pitched electronic whine has entered my personal soundscape. #
• My dad (age 74) is wired for sound. His dual Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids pick up his cellphone and his MP3 player. My dad is a cyborg. #
• Looking forward to new Michael Mann film, Public Enemies, especially to hear how he maps his minimal-techno fixations onto the Depression. #
• Dang. The guy from awesometapesfromafrica.blogspot.com is in San Francisco tomorrow night, and … so are my parents. #
• It's been a day of dub, experiencing what entering "King Tubby" into Pandora and LastFM yield. #
• Previous post from final chapter of seventh Parker novel, which I just read. Scene takes place with no dialog, save anti-hero's thoughts. #
• "The silence after the crash and clatter seemed to hum with emptiness. Parker moved more slowly, listening, listening through the silence." #
• Having a glass of Laphroaig. As with most great whisky, its name could easily be mistaken for the title to an Autechre track. #
• Easily spent 45 minutes today working to a single synth vamp, a minimal line from a 15-track Tony Allen afrobeat song: http://is.gd/1jBI4 #
• Reportedly this mix — http://bit.ly/JbxSF — is by Beck. It's something: out jazz, Allen Ginsberg, beatcraft, 8bit madness RT @1000DIGIKI #
• Digging free @thegrassyknoll iPod app. Wondering/worrying if Apple's app success supports DRM. Would easily copied apps sell less or more? #
• Morning sounds: shower ahead, footsteps to right, fridge to left, speakers (playing Tony Allen) behind. All save the speakers through walls. #
• Listening at length to iPod Touch apps: Bloom, Buddha Machine (odd not to hear tinny speaker quality), TonePad (could use more variety). #
• Planting coyote mint, listening to airplanes and hummingbirds. #
• Not sure what sport is consuming patrons at 3 bars in listening vicinity of Rosamunde on Lower Haight, but the event-doppler is excellent. #
• Morning sounds: laptop fan, plane overhead, ice cracking in coffee, bus passing, phone's sonar ping quietly noting arrival of an email. #

[ July 1, 2009 / bookmark ]

Top 10 Posts from June

Apparently these “top-10 posts” are useful, because the most popular post in June was … (1) the top-10 list for the month of May.

Six of the top-10 posts for June were for Disquiet Downstream (i.e., free legal download) entries. The most popular was (2) Durán Vázquez’s terror film for radio. The other five were (3) heavenly string reverberants from Oo-Ray, (4) Jakob Newman’s FM3 Buddha Machine mix, (5) an aggressive 8-bit (that is, old-school video game) entry from Lazerbeat, (6) blues great Junior Kimbrough remixed by Grassy Knoll, and (7) an album on the Dark Winter netlabel by Exuviae.

An image from (8) Yukio Fujimoto’s beautiful sound-art exhibit in Birmingham, England, made the top 10, as did (9) the June 13 roundup of my twitter.com/disquiet postings, and (10) the announcement I’d updated the site to WordPress 2.8.

[ June 28, 2009 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Guggenheim’s Orbit

Photo shot during performance of late spatial composer Henry Brant’s “Orbits” at the Guggenheim in Manhattan a week ago today.

Photo by Robert Stolarik. It originally appeared in June 22 issue of the New York Times, accompanying an article by Times critic Anthony Tommasini (nytimes.com). The caption reads: “Neely Bruce, at bottom of photo, leading 89 trombones, a soprano and an organ in the East Coast premiere of Henry Brant’s ‘Orbits’ in the rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum on Sunday night, part of both the museum’s Works & Process series and the citywide festival Make Music New York.”

[ June 27, 2009 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Hardcore of the Infinitesimal

How musician Christof Migone describes his conceptually driven, often microsonic music:

“A hardcore of the infinitesimal”

From an anecdote in a report by Carl Wilson on the belated reception of Mignone’s 2004 album Escape Songs, a collaboration with Veda Hille, in the Globe and Mail (theglobeandmail.com). More on Migone at christofmigone.com, and on Hille at vedahille.com.

[ June 27, 2009 / bookmark ]

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

• Doing lawn work in backyard. Flashback thought: "After these chores, I can go to my friend's house and play Steve Jackson's Melee & Wizard." #
• Back from gym, where yet again I found myself listening (on Android phone) to two things at once: consonant, interesting, believable as one. #
• Pretty much done with our dissection of Dave Hickey's book The Invisible Dragon at artsjournal.com/gap. Conversation better than the book. #
• Foghorns out of control in San Francisco Richmond District today. Need to get good mic to record them, to play on dreadfully sunny days. #
• What music without Michael Jackson sounds like: memorial playlist of MJ & (Jackson 5) instrumentals, lacking his vocals: http://is.gd/1ep3p #
• If you Twitter it's #followfriday: metal/breakcore monster @drumc0rps & sound artist @kabircarter & sound designer/musician @hugoverweij #
• Listening to various Michael Jackson instrumentals, in light of his reported death today. None of them sound particularly good without him. #
• Excellent music-making news for Nintendo DSi: an expanded Korg DS-10 cartridge is coming its way http://tinyurl.com/lpzwu8 — RT @Nobuooo #
• Afternoon sounds: electronic whine, engorged photocopier/printer, patterns of overlapping typing, murmur below, radios inside and outdoors. #
• A bunch of us are discussing Dave Hickey's book The Invisible Dragon over at artsjournal.com/gap. Feel free to join in. (Hickey has.) #
• Quite likely I am addicted to habanero. I start salivating at the word. Goes well with cold beer. And Madlib, Royce da 5'9", & Prefuse 73. #
• Morning sounds: typing, refrigerator whir, laptop fan, and the more frequent occurrence of buses during the commute window. #
• After 13 years of constant use my Dell Quiet Key keyboard is being retired. There's no repairing it. Words don't fail me, but characters do. #
• For all my love of movie scores, there are days when I wonder if, even at their most subtle, they're not much different from laugh tracks. #
• Thousandth Twitter post / Haiku of the Internet / Data ricochets #
• 20 years ago today near dawn, I stood — with buddy Andrew Jaffe, aka @defjaf — in Manhattan's Battery Park taking in Sun Ra & Don Cherry. #
• Wind's been so strong today, it hadn't even occurred to me until now to put on any music. #