Back in 1996, when I launched Disquiet.com, part of its foundation was an ongoing experiment in comparative literature focused on the poet from whom the website derives its name: Fernando Pessoa, best known for his The Book of Disquiet.
Part of that subsite, available at disquiet.com/pessoa, is a side-by-side series of multiple renditions in English by various translators of one single, brief Pessoa poem, “Autopsicografia.”
Thanks to reader Douglas Storm, there are now 16 different versions of the poem — well, 17, including Pessoa’s original, in Portuguese.
Storm forwarded the translation to me this morning. It’s by Richard Zenith. The comparison is posted at disquiet.com/thirteen.
The editors at I.D. magazine, for its current (September/October) issue, asked over two dozen people to recollect an “iconic toy” from their childhoods, and to provide an “emotional design critique” of that object. The full collection of 27 such childhood recollections, each with illustrations by Maayan Pearl, such as the one below, is available at 
The subject of Arad’s reminiscence is the sole one among the 27 objects in I.D.‘s survey that involves sound, which for all the tin xylophones and My First Sony toys of the past, brings to mind a question: Are there more sound-making toys today than there were in the less electronically mediated past? Think of how today there are so many noise-emitting, audio-constructing devices in our age of computer games, portable apps, and widespread electronic music-makers. My presumption is that abstract, undirected musical play is much more common today than ever before. The question, now, may be whether kids raised on sonic toying and audio-games will continue, as they get on in years, to include them as part of their lives, habits, and art — or whether the instinct to play with sound will become something left behind in the toy box, if not the dust bin, rather than discovered later on in life.
Sergey Suokas (aka Slow) is a Russian musician with a penchant for placid surfaces and anxious undercurrents. His still compositions may or may not run deep, but what’s active just below the surface taunts and attracts undeniably. His new, six-track album Dual Box on the Resting Bell label includes quickly vibrating shoegazer minimalism set above a richly throbbing bass and interspersed with backward-masked motives (“Dreaming,” 
The drone that is Gavin John Sheehan‘s Shell of the Curved Centennial begins like nothing so much as the sound of a speaker attached to a stereo system that is not fully grounded. There is that low level buzz, less like a headache than a stray but insistent thought. It’s the electrical-audio equivalent of a breeze or, depending on one’s mood, a smell. What follows that opening drone, which quickly rises in volume, can be heard as a variety of things — as a down-the-rabbit-hole voyage into its dense drone-ness, or as a carefully delineated composition that explores the initial drone’s pulse and tone. One needn’t make an immediate decision — just listen as secondary and tertiary sounds make their appearance, slowly shaping the initial drone into an organ-like musical instrument. Pulses become beats, layers suggest harmonies, and gentle beading turns into an internal variety akin to some nanoscale chamber ensemble (