- 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
Latest
• I pondered the word "orchestral" in my liner notes for the excellent new album Uprooted from Rotterdam-based Michel Banabila, released April 9, 2019.
• I had the great pleasure of being interviewed by Darwin Grosse for his excellent, longrunning podcast, Art + Music + Technology, and the episode went live on April 7, 2019: artmusictech.libsyn.com.
• I gave the opening talk on March 22, 2019, at the inaugural Algorithmic Art Assembly in San Francisco. I'll post a summary here soon, but for the time being, there's a great overview of the event at the website of cycling74.com, written by Tom Hall.
• 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.Upcoming
• June 23, 2019: There's a Disquiet Junto concert this Sunday at 8pm at Cabaret Berlin in Montréal, Quebec.
• 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.
• March 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.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.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).