This is something of a record. When your website every weekday features free downloads, it’s rewarding at the month’s end to discover that a lot of the most visited posts had nothing whatsoever to do with free music. This past month, November, only three of the top 10 most visited posts at Disquiet.com were Downstream entries, and one of those three didn’t even have MP3 files in it.
The two MP3-related Downstream entries are (1) Thom Carter‘s field recordings at a church in Rye, England, and (2) three experiments in repetition by Hopen (aka Childe Grangier). Also popular was (3) a Downstream entry featuring an OGG file by Aairria (aka Marcin Drabot) of limpid synthesis and manipulated field recordings of rain.
(4) An “unboxing” of Tristan Perich‘s forthcoming release 1-Bit Symphony featured a Flickr-powered slideshow of his gadget-in-a-CD-case. Two of the semi-regular MP3 Discussion Groups made the top 10: (5) one on the album Mirrorball by John Foxx (of Ultravox!) and Robin Guthrie (of Cocteau Twins), and (6) one on the albums Choral and Etching by the group Mountains.
Two “Image of the Week” entries (which appear most Sundays) made the list: (7) one of a German installation that interprets an Alvin Lucier instructional composition, turning it into public art; and (8) another of images from artist Paul Madonna‘s current exhibit at the Electric Works gallery in San Francisco.
It’s at this point not uncommon for one of the weekly compendiums of twitter.com/disquiet tweets to make the top 10, though why exactly one such batch is more popular than another isn’t always clear. This month the winner included (9) such Twitter subjects as Unsilent Night, Oh No‘s Ethiopium album getting an unexpected expanded edition, the gadget Gristleism, the label Ad Noiseam, church bells, and classic electronic record labels.
And speaking of Twitter, (10) a mention of my first Twitter list, twitter.com/disquiet/ambient, also made the top 10.
The 10 most searched-for terms of the month were, in declining order of popularity: (1) “marclay” (as in sound artist Christian Marclay: 33 results), for the second month in a row; (2) “400 lonely things” (2 results, though I’ll likely have another mention soon); (3) “monolake” (53 results); (4) “sleep” (51 results); (5) “celer” (14 results); (6) “festival” (a probably unhelpful 129 results); (7) “japan” (147 results); (8) “kikapu” (presumably the defunct netlabel, not the native American tribe: 24 results); (9) “laurent” (which yields 14 largely unrelated results); and (10) “sculpture” (40 results).
On January 1, 2010, when the list of the top 10 posts of December gets published here, it’ll also note the 10 most read posts of all of 2009. Right now, at the risk of artificially buttressing their hegemony, those subjects include an installation by one of the above-mentioned musicians (involving balloons), a great Nintendo DS (and DSi) cartridge, and an album by an electronically mediated trumpeter, among other subjects. Hint hint.