- 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 pondered the word "orchestral" in my liner notes for the excellent new album Uprooted from Rotterdam-based Michel Banabila, released April 9, 2019.
• I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Darwin Grosse for his excellent, longrunning podcast, Art + Music + Technology, and the episode went live on April 7, 2019: artmusictech.libsyn.com.
• I gave the opening talk on March 22, 2019, at the inaugural Algorithmic Art Assembly in San Francisco. I'll post a summary here soon, but for the time being, there's a great overview of the event at the website of cycling74.com, written by Tom Hall.
• 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.Upcoming
• June 23, 2019: There's a Disquiet Junto concert this Sunday at 8pm at Cabaret Berlin in Montréal, Quebec.
• 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).