Listening to MP3s of sound from outdoor installations can be a bit like watching an Akira Kurosawa film on your laptop: less than faithful to the original. That said, as site-specific art with audio becomes more common, a seven-megabyte file sure does trump a roundtrip plane ticket for cost efficiency. Michael Samos created sound as part of a multi-speaker installation by sculptor Barbara Westermann, herself a specialist in audio-oriented art, like concrete-steel renditions of baby monitors and reliefs that suggest the music of the spheres. Their exhibit, Observatory Sounds, isn’t due for display until this coming autumn, at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York. But there are already two ways to hear it. Pick up a copy of Loud5, a “sound magazine” with a focus on sound art (more info at loud5.com) or download a seven-minute excerpt of casual noise, cycling tones, chance field recordings and light sonic manipulations (MP3) from Samos’ website, michaelsamos.com.
Current Activities
Upcoming
• August 15 - September 15, 2019: The Disquiet Junto is teaming up with Musikfestival Bern for a series of projects.
• August 29, 2019: This day marks the start of the 400th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project. It will be a collaboration with the novelist Malka Older.
• 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).