- The rumbling of the Outside Lands concerts — from inside the house, it's all tribal pounding. No melodies, no riffs, no hits. #
- Compiling tracks for a friend's wedding party: instrumental hip-hop, various strains of country. Pondering a third, broadly defined genre. #
- Commute audio synchronism: woman teaching son English & Japanese with talking dictionary; guy next to me practices bartender flash cards. #
- A/B: Autechre's "Cfern" — original: http://fizy.com/s/139p10 & cover excerpt by Alarm Will Sound from a/rhythmia album: http://is.gd/2CpUn #
- RIP, Ellie Greenwich (b. 1940), Phil Spector Wall of Sound colleague ("Leader of the Pack," "River Deep, Mountain High"): http://is.gd/2AqcJ #
- Earth Wind & Firefox, Swell IMAPs, RSS Kelly, PowerPoint Station #internetbands #
- USB40, FTP-FUNK, Atom and the Ants, POP Will Eat Itself #internetbands #
- Best audio-visual chance synchronism of the day: taxi driver doing exercise squats in Tenderloin in time with Nas instrumental on my iPod. #
- 2nd best audio-visual chance synchronism of the day: bus makes stop outside my home just as nextmuni.com announces its arrival in browser. #
- Description of a surprise gunshot from Stark/Westlake's 12th Parker novel: "a flat, echoless clap in the middle of the sunshine." #
- Evening sounds: hard drives, dish washer, the ping of an arriving email, the fizz of a bum fluorescent bulb. #
- Just dialed the 212 phone number shown in Roy Lichtenstein's 1962 painting Desk Calendar, on view @mocalosangeles. It's been disconnected. #
- The 16-screen Christian Marclay audio-video installation at @mocalosangeles is a must-see/-hear. All sounds and images of everyday objects. #
Current Activities
Upcoming
• July 28, 2021: This day marks the start of the 500th consecutive weekly project in the Disquiet Junto music community.
• December 13, 2021: This day marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of Disquiet.com.
• January 6, 2021: This day marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.Recent
• 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.
• A chapter on the Disquiet Junto ("The Disquiet Junto as an Online Community of Practice," by Ethan Hein) appears in the 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.)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
• 0494 / Insect Menagerie / The Assignment: Record a 20-second clip of the sounds of an insect that you yourself have invented.
• 0493 / AudioCorrect / The Assignment: Think about the utility and the useful failures inherent in autocorrect and apply this to your music.
• 0492 / Kintsugi Rework / The Assignment: Employ the Japanese technique of mending broken ceramics as a metaphor for remixing.
• 0491 / Footsteps Sequencer / The Assignment: Compose a piece of music structured upon a walk through your home.
• 0490 / In Conversation / The Assignment: Compose a piece of music structured like dialog.
Full IndexAnd there is a complete list of past projects, 494 consecutive weeks to date.