- Rare Outer Richmond night: everyone’s windows are open. Out for walk, it’s all hip-hop & saccharine elevatortronica in Asian & Slavic modes. #
- Afternoon listen: "Instrumental Hip-Hop" @pandora_radio channel. Pete Rock, Krush, Alchemist. Should credit producers, but otherwise great. #
- RIP, Alex Chilton (b. 1950). First concert I saw (in New Orleans) after 911. Everyone sang along. And we froze every time a siren passed. #
- Down at Ocean Beach, where the heavy surf serves as one of nature's great engines of generative sound. #
- No idea why brain had stuck on idea Scott Tuma was Souled American drummer, not guitarist. One of first bands I interviewed professionally. #
- Luc Sante on David Shields: "So what constitutes reality…? It can be as simple as a glitch…a dropped beat." http://is.gd/aLlTz #
- Too much fun. The late J Dilla's slo-mo electro take on Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance." MP3: http://is.gd/aJ90n Info: http://is.gd/aJ91F #
- Down at Ocean Beach, the roar of the surf provides audio accompaniment to the planes that pass mutely overhead. #
- Listening to Oddisee's Traveling Man; noodling how the city names of its 24 tracks align with how they sound. "San Francisco" fares well. #
- Happy Pi Day. Here's a neat way to turn the first 10,000 digits of pi (i.e., 3.14159 …) into a musical sequence: http://is.gd/aF39I #
Current Activities
Upcoming
• February 5, 2020: The first session of the 15-week course I teach at the Academy of Art about the role of sound in the media landscape.
• April 15, 2020: 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. (Details at oup.com.)
• December 13, 2020: This day marks the 24th anniversary of Disquiet.com.
• January 7, 2021: This day marks the 9th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.Dates TBA
• 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. Ethan Hein wrote one, and I did, too.
• At least two live group concerts by Disquiet Junto members in the San Francisco Bay Area are in the works for 2020.
• I have liner notes for a musician's solo album and an essay in a book about an art event due out. I'll announce as the release dates come into focus.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 Japanese (2019) and Spanish (2018).
disquiet junto
Background
Since January 2012, the Disquiet Junto has been an ongoing weekly collaborative music-making community that employs creative constraints as a springboard for creativity. Subscribe to the announcement list (each Thursday), listen to tracks by participants from around the world, read the FAQ, and join in.Recent Projects
• 0472 / Jam Time (1 of 3) / The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio that others will complete.
• 0471 / Phase Transition / The Assignment: The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.
• 0470 / Calendar View / The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.
• 0469 / [Missing in Caption] / The Assignment: Make music that pushes the constraints of descriptive television captions.
• 0468 / Mirror Rorrim / The Assignment: Create a new persona for yourself, and record a duet together.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 472 consecutive weeks to date.