- Evening sounds: footsteps, bus, house rattle due to bus, hard drives, refrigerator, airplane, bum fluorescent bulb. #
- ♫ Afternoon audio-stream: Grateful Dead (yes, the Dead) at their most spacey/experimental, titled "Infrared Roses": http://is.gd/4TwIN #
- Reading about composer Carl Stone in the 11/9 New Yorker — part of a story about LA-trotting chowhound Jonathan Gold: http://is.gd/4Tpwp #
- ♫ Audiostreams for the afternoon: sneak listen to excerpts from forthcoming @robinrimbaud 'Conversations with the Dead': http://is.gd/4SP9e #
- RIP, Albert Elms (b. 1920), film & TV composer (notably for the trippy Patrick McGoohan thriller series The Prisoner): http://is.gd/4SBDb #
- ♫ Afternoon free audio-stream: a 10-minute exercise in glitchy dub from DJ Erase (aka Daniel Troberg): http://is.gd/4RYJh #
- A: "The hum of time." Q: What did Nabokov's unpublished work need to survive before his son felt it was publishable: http://is.gd/4RTD4 #
- Morning sounds, post-sleep/pre-wake: muffled helicopter coming by from distance resembles, for extended time, an off-kilter foghorn. #
- MP3 Discussion Group: Is new John (Ultravox) Foxx & Robin (Cocteau Twins) Guthrie album shoegazeriffic or too new-agey? http://is.gd/4R9J5 #
- Morning sounds, in sequence: alarm (ancient-school hip-hop), alarm (snooze-breeze r&b), refrigerator, garbage truck. #
- Morning sounds: hard drives, shower, free MP3 of Jack Dangers remix of Terry Riley's "In C" — via @richard_kadrey: http://bit.ly/4ApBIR #
- Gym music: a whole lot of Stones Throw Beat Battle renditions. #
- In the mail today, three albums: one LP, one 7", one CD — what year is it? #
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).