- 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
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).