Let’s close out the week with a new (yes, new) track in the Other Minds catalog at the voluminous Internet Archive, at archive.org. Up as of this evening are seven live entries from this year’s Other Minds festival in San Francisco (the series’ 11th), among them a 20-minute piece by septuagenarian legend Phill Niblock, “Sethwork,” in which he performs on vaguely termed “electronics” along with guitarist Seth Josel, who employs an e-bow to extend his tones to the horizon (yes, the e-bow is the same tool that long ago distinguished the Celtic rock of the band Big Country). “Sethwork” was performed on February 24, 2005, at the city’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The piece is an absolutely beautiful drone, a slowly cycling hum that enacts its epiphanies not as singular peaks but as an extended experience of intense tonality. You could argue that epiphanies are to ambient music what redemption is to literary fiction: a crutch, if not an outright cliche. But work like Niblock’s also suggests that the epiphany is a defining, inherent characteristic of ambient music. Either way, “Sethwork” is deeply imbued with it. (The file is only downloadable via FTP, but the site provides clear instructions; just search for “niblock.” The search also brings up an older entry, a continuous, 45-minute live recording of a record-release party held in 1980 at the New York City venue the Kitchen for Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” in which Other Minds guru Charles Amirkhanian interviews Anderson, Niblock and other scenesters. The entry’s archive.org listing advertises, “No splices!”) Oh, and more on the the e-bow at ebow.com.
Current Activities
Latest
• 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).