The past month’s visits to Disquiet.com were weighted unusually — it’s almost always the case that the most popular posts involve the week-daily free-MP3 recommendations, from the Downstream section of the site. But in September, only four of the top ten were Downstream pieces: (1) the remixed African hip-hop of Oh No‘s Ethiopium, (2) the blues-tronic remix that Grassy Knoll perpetrated on Junior Kimbrough, (3) a how-to lesson in making underwater microphones by Leafcutter John, and (4) some mid-1970s experiments with minimalist drones by Terry Fox. (In August, by contrast, a full eight of the top ten were MP3s.)
In addition to those tracks, also popular this past month were: (5) news of the Gristleism gadget collaboration between Throbbing Gristle and FM3 (creators of the Buddha Machine), (6) an image of birds on a wire that was turned into a lovely melody, (7) consideration of how to make silent hybrid cars sufficiently noisy, and (8) my review of the first concert of the first ever On Land Festival in San Francisco (featuring, among others, William Fowler Collins and Darwinsbitch).
Earlier in September, I put out a request for input from readers toward the site’s redesign (see disquiet.com), and despite some Twitter dissent among the commenters, (9) one week’s worth of collected Twitter comments (with mentions of Breakbeat Era, Dario Argento, Ennio Morricone, and a lot of thunder) made the Top 10, as (10) did — and this isn’t an infrequent occurrence — the Top 10 list from the preceding month, August.
The top eight (meaningful) searches for the past 30 days were: Buddha Machine, Autechre, dubstep, languorous, makezine, MOCA, MP3 Discussion Group, and Oum Kaltoum (the latter of which yields, to my chagrin, a null return — at least until the creation of this post). And a whole lot of other searches were tied for spots nine and ten.