- Listening to Breakbeat Era's Ultra-Obscene on vinyl while tidying cable spaghetti in my office. How is this album already a decade old? #
- This so-called "dry lightning" over San Francisco is insane. The house just rattled like a big bass drum in some sludge-metal song. #
- Story hed from today's @nytimes uninformed, obnoxious, or both: "At Last, Artists Harness the Internet" At last? http://is.gd/3bQVd #
- Crazy bright light flashes over San Francisco at 4am while foghorns drone. Straight outta Close Encounters. Lightning storm? #
- Someday soon, I'm gonna go to a chamber music concert, and listen to the whole thing through @rjdj #
- Friday morning sounds: foghorns out in force. #
- Excellent in empty office to not be at all confused to hear cute melody emanate from someone's cellphone buried deep in an unseen handbag. #
- Man, Ennio Morricone to conduct his own work at the Hollywood Bowl? This may require a trip to Los Angeles: http://is.gd/37yx3 #
- Glad iTunes 9 includes liner notes. Wondering if the ones I did for the Nina Simone: Nina Sings Nina album I compiled will be part of this. #
- Morning listen: an interview with Italian prog-rock group Goblin about scoring Dario Argento's art-horror flicks: http://is.gd/34Zcp #
- Uploaded my first @audioboo field recording (of a ceiling fan), inspired by the @hearthisworld project of @alexismadrigal http://is.gd/33oCW #
- One of the great things in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is hearing music out of context, especially Ennio Morricone score cues. #
- While shopping for oven, thought of a guy in junior high who named his RPG character Electrolux. I'd laughed. Others hated the anachronism. #
- Seems meaningful/fitting that the opening of Miles Davis's "Freddie Freeloader" covered on Kind of Bloop compilation sounds like Steely Dan. #
- Installing all of Ableton Live 8's libraries seems to take longer than installing Windows 7. #
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.