These are the top 10 most viewed posts on Disquiet.com for the entire year of 2009, during which 474 posts were published on the site.
A new department debuted on Disquiet.com this past year, and while there have only been four entries in it thus far, all four made the top 10 of the year. The department is called Listen?, and each entry is a stream-able hour-long playlist of tracks that have some theme in common. In descending order of popularity they were: (1) “Guit-ronic Mix: 6 Solo 6-Strings,” (2) “At Play in the Field: Found-Sound Mix,” (3) “Eno/Byrne Re-Mix: Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet” (really just a repurposing of the 2006 album I commissioned and compiled, based on samples from the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne), and (4) “Inaugural Mix: Beats, Drones, Surface Noise, Ether.” Perhaps tellingly, the one without a strong theme (the inaugural mix, which was more a proof-of-concept than a proper mix) was the least popular of the four.
Two entries in the daily Downstream department of legally freely downloadable music made the list: (5) an example of group composition at freesound.org based on open-source samples, and (6) remixes of music from the TV show Battlestar Galactica.
One of the year’s many (7) MP3 Discussion Groups made the list, the one on Jon Hassell‘s album Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street on the ECM record label. (The popularity of these 10 entries was roughly the same, but for folk keeping track, the Jon Hassell discussion technically ranked in popularity in between the two most and least popular Listen? entries.)
Two reviews of commercial releases: (8) one on Monolake‘s balloon-based installation, Atom/Document, and another (9) on both turntablist Rob Swift‘s album Dust to Dust and a movie score by Alex Wurman (What Doesn’t Kill You).
And for reasons beyond me, also making the list, of all the “Images of the Week” from last year, was one showing (10) the sign at the front of the San Francisco offices of the makers of the software Max/MSP.
“At Play in the Field: Found-Sound Mix” was my favorite of last year. It unlocked some part of my brain and got me to wade into the weird sound waters here.