The previous Disquiet Downstream entry from the musician known as Souns, “Senseless in Space” (here, from back in September of this year), was an accomplishment, and not just in musical terms. Sure, its ambiguous rhythmic play amid aquatic ambience was a pleasure to listen to, but perhaps more to its credit was simply how it had managed to distinguish itself amid the vast context in which it first appeared: as one track among 34 (yes, 34) on the Kikapu netlabel’s Wein, Weib und Gesang compilation, a mere eight minutes in the set’s nearly five hours (yes, five hours) of sound. Two months after the release of Wein, Weib came an 11-track Souns full length, titled Lights. The key elements of “Senseless in Space” are here in spades, the watery feel becoming literal on “Orange” (eight of the set’s tracks take colors as titles, including Duke Ellington’s favorite, “Indigo”), in which field recordings of splashy waves play against a low throb out of the Underworld handbook, and figurative on “Rain,” which samples a percussive rainstick (a closed tube filled with small beans). The familiar industrial undertow pervades the album, notably on “Open Tones,” a lengthy dirge, and “Red,” which has the jumpy pulse of a small machine come to life. The album note on the Kikapu sites explains that this music was created for use during the recent New Forms festival in Vancouver, for an event with “ancient healing” as its theme, and much of the music reportedly involves crystal bowls, credited to a Christine Duncan; also contributing is Anomalous Disturbances, aka ambient guitarist Terry O’Brien. (Souns, by the way, is a pseudonym for Michael Red.) Secular humanists should be forewarned that the album’s description is thick with talk of mantras and chakras, but the music doesn’t bear the marks of typical spiritual-shop background music; there are no canned tropes of indigenous spiritual ceremony, no sign at all of keyboard presets marked “Epiphany.” It’s just expertly textured extended tones that don’t swell so much as they rise up, gently but intently, like a Tule fog. Download the full album here, and check out the netlabel at Kikapu.com. A remix project from Souns, titled Coloured Lights, is said to be due out through Kikapu early next year.
Current Activities
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• I was on Vivian Host's Peak Time show (on Red Bull Radio) on March 11 to extol the timeless virtues of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, and related works. You can listen to a recording here: redbullradio.com.
• My latest article is a review in the March issue of The Wire magazine of the week-long Recombinant Festival (held in San Francisco), whose performance highlights included Herman Kolgen, Rrose, and Electric Indigo.Upcoming
• March 22, 2019: I'm giving a talk at noon on Friday at the Algorithmic Art Assembly, two days of events (Friday and Saturday) in San Francisco: aaassembly.org. The talk is titled "The Woodshed Is a Black Box" and this is its description in the program: "How a rules-based system formed, shapes, and fuels the long-running online music community known as the Disquiet Junto."
• May 7, 2019: This day sees the release of Rob Walker's book The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday (Knopf), which has entries about the Disquiet Junto.
• May 22, 2019: Final day of the semester of the 15-week "Sounds of Brands" course I teach once a year at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. I post occasional updates here. Follow the tag #sounds-of-brands.
• December 13, 2019: This day marks the 23rd anniversary of Disquiet.com.
• January 7, 2020: This day marks the 8th anniversary of the Disquiet Junto.Dates TBA
• 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.
• 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.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 Spanish (2018) and Japanese (2019).