Midway through last month, the audio irritants at 20kbps netlabel released Paranomia‘s EP Le Requiem Pour les Refrigerateures Solitaires — or, as they helpfully translate for us cognate-challenged types, Requiem for Lonely Refrigerators. From the coarse, scrunched sounds of the first of its four tracks, it’s quite possible to believe that audio emitted by an old Frigidaire is indeed the extent of Paranomia’s palette. But this is no concept album, which means you needn’t ponder the provenance of the pingy echo of “No Prestamos Servicio a los Viciosos” or hard distant techno of “Le Dompteur de Pingouins” in order to take pleasure in this often desperately minimal electronica. The 20kbps site credits Paranomia as “a sideproject by Estonian producer Talvel.” And it’s really no surprise that the landscape that gave us Arvo Part’s haunting minimalism would, a generation or three later, unleash such a parched and monastic digital music. In fact, the submerged vocals on “Les Fusillades Massives des Masses” could very well come from one of Part’s latter-day modernist Gregorian chants. Download a stuffed archive of the set, complete with “album” art, here. And visit the label at 20kbps.sofapause.ch.
Current Activities
Upcoming
• February 5, 2020: The first session of the 15-week course I teach at the Academy of Art about the role of sound in the media landscape.
• April 15, 2020: A chapter on the Disquiet Junto ("The Disquiet Junto as an Online Community of Practice," by Ethan Hein) appears in the forthcoming book The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning (Oxford University Press), edited by Stephanie Horsley, Janice Waldron, and Kari Veblen. (Details at oup.com.)
• December 13, 2020: This day marks the 24th anniversary of Disquiet.com.
• January 7, 2021: This day marks the 9th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.Dates TBA
• There are entries on the Disquiet Junto in the forthcoming book The Music Production Cookbook: Ready-made Recipes for the Classroom (Oxford University Press), edited by Adam Patrick Bell. Ethan Hein wrote one, and I did, too.
• At least two live group concerts by Disquiet Junto members in the San Francisco Bay Area are in the works for 2020.
• I have liner notes for a musician's solo album and an essay in a book about an art event due out. I'll announce as the release dates come into focus.Ongoing
• The Disquiet Junto series of weekly communal music projects explore constraints as a springboard for creativity and productivity. There is a new project each Thursday afternoon (California time), and it is due the following Monday at 11:59pm: disquiet.com/junto.
• My book on Aphex Twin's landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, was published as part of the 33 1/3 series, an imprint of Bloomsbury. It has been translated into Japanese (2019) and Spanish (2018).
disquiet junto
Background
Since January 2012, the Disquiet Junto has been an ongoing weekly collaborative music-making community that employs creative constraints as a springboard for creativity. Subscribe to the announcement list (each Thursday), listen to tracks by participants from around the world, read the FAQ, and join in.Recent Projects
• 0456 / Line Up / The Assignment: Interpret a painting by Agnes Martin as if it were a graphic score.
• 0455 / Inner Invertebrate / The Assignment: What does a moment (or a day) in the life of a jellyfish sound like to a jellyfish?
• 0454 / Lsoo Vneg / The Assignment: Encode the name of someone you love into a piece of music.
• 0453 / Dial Up / The Assignment: Imagine the technologically mediated First Contact through sound.
• 0452 / Let's Scream / The Assignment: Get cathartic. Be resilient. Turn your scream into music.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 456 consecutive weeks to date.