The name of this band is (Sound of Impact). Those parenthesis are part of the name, the reference likely to how the crash of a plane is registered in the transcript of black box recordings. At least that’s what Big Black, the rigorous minimal hardcore band, intended when it used the term for the title of one of its albums. (Sound of Impact), judging by its recent release on the noisejihad netlabel (MP3), is rigorous, minimal and hardcore, though not in any of the ways that Big Black was. The release, a half-hour life recording from a festival held this past summer, is a harsh noise-feast that dispenses with the standard noise m.o. (drones) in favor of an ever-shifting litany of detritus. The root element is the kind of sound a standard microphone records in the wind, that shuddering randomness your ear can’t quite get a grip on. Inserted throughout are sound clips, radio signals, glitches and tones. More info at noisejihad.dk/netlabel.
Current Activities
Upcoming
• Autumn, 2019: I'll have a new piece in The Wire.
• 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.
• March 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.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.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).