ELECTRO-ORGANIC MP3S: A cough, of all things, lends some context. As if to underscore that what you’re hearing is, in fact, being performed live, amid several of the downloadable tracks by Doogie (aka Nathan Mclaughlin) at his website, fluxed.net, you can quite clearly make out someone clearing his (or her) throat. It may be Doogie himself, it may be an audience member, but it isn’t particularly distracting, and in fact hearing the familiar sound helps your ear get a sense of the space in which the performance took place, because nothing else here is remotely familiar. Soothing, yes. Artful, yes. Terrestrial, no. This is beautiful music, exemplary of the kind of electronic goods that get described, widely, as “organic.” Though the sounds are self-evidently artificial, their rendering is so warm, and they so suggest life forms the way they cycle and burble and quaver, that you can’t help but think of them as, well, organic. Particularly recommended is “Whats in a Species” (sic), a chimey formulation, like some cast-off riff by mid-period R.E.M. that’s taken on a purpose all its own (MP3). (The live tracks, recorded last November, feature accompaniment by one D. Fox.) “Keys,” from Doogie’s album The Spatulate Finger, released last September, is a drone that slowly changes over the course of nearly five minutes, from monastic om, to breaking-dawn lightness, to industrial burr (MP3).
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
• 0460 / Creative Destruction / The Assignment: Show how you got to a tortured sound.
• 0459 / From a Distance / The Assignment: Make music intended to be heard from afar.
• 0458 / Phrase Shift / The Assignment: Make music in a sequence of parts with shared elements.
• 0457 / System Alert / The Assignment: Compose sounds for an OS.
• 0456 / Line Up / The Assignment: Interpret a painting by Agnes Martin as if it were a graphic score.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 460 consecutive weeks to date.
One Trackback
[…] I’ve been listening to and writing about Nathan McLaughlin’s music at least since January 2006, back when he went by the name Doogie, and, at least to my ears, he’s never sounded more […]