- Morning sounds: spoon against bowl, baby's small cries as she wakes, cars passing on wet street, hard drives. #
- RIP, bassist Walter Payton Jr. (age 68), link between Preservation Hall Jazz Band & Lee Dorsey; father of Nicholas Payton http://is.gd/gtdRt #
- I love getting packages from Russia http://ow.ly/i/51dO #
- iPod Touch (gen 4) + Bluetooth keyboard (Stowaway) + G1 phone + Barnacle Wifi Tether (app) = pretty darn good and highly mobile setup #
- Picturing the vast warehouses where the robots making pre-election robo-calls will be stored once election day passes. Sleep well, robots. #
- [email protected] Good question, where to start listening to Milton Babbitt. I'd say this great Babbitt/Amirkhanian interview http://is.gd/gsqNZ in reply to tedfriedman #
- Morning sounds: hard drives, baby's breathing and trumpeting, light traffic, and what may be a neighbor's dryer. #
- Trading emails with Nigerian scamster trying to trick me out of iPod I put up on Craigslist is like communicating with brain-damaged cyborg. #
- Dreaming of a Wayne Thiebaud / Steve McQueen mash-up, "24th Street Intersection" meets Bullitt. #
- Man, now Nitzer Ebb is back. Who isn't back at this point? I want a Skylab reunion. #
- Dear @myspace congrats on redesign; now howzabout including blog posts in emails instead of just providing a generic link back to yourself. #
- Used to cafes playing music. Used to earbud sound bleed. Not used to multiple people at cafe on laptops watching videos without headphones. #
- Gotten in the habit lately of turning off music shortly before noon, in order to hear the bells. As habits go, it's a good one. #
- Once again don't notice that I've left the kid's Fisher Price Calming Vibrations seat on for half an hour, empty — calming, indeed. #
- "The National Do Not Call Registry doesn't cover political messages…you've probably noticed that lately" via @lifehacker #chatterpollution #
- Fireworks. #
- "Decibels measure…intensity of…trouble…physicist gets into because he didnʼt take off his shoes first" per CNiemann http://is.gd/glq5N #
- The iOS autospell for "Napster" is "baldish" #
- Happiness is discovering a brand new izakaya in your neighborhood. #
- The Radio Shack (excuse me, the Shack — oy) near my house is closed today due to "technical difficulties," according to handwritten sign. #
- Tuesday noon siren heard from inside ramen shop in SF's Union Square, muffled by walls, conversation, and slurping. #
- Elevators are Tetris in reverse, bodies shifting at each floor so as to maximize mutual distance. #
- According to the revamped Electric Company, the "ninja of the alphabet" is … the silent e. #thistweetisbroughttoyouby #
- RIP, tuba player Harvey Phillips (b. 1929), whose Ringling Bros apprenticeship taught him music serves an alarm: http://nyti.ms/aynoN0 #
- Honking from numerous automobiles pierces my headphones on the bus; it signals a win by the Giants. #
- "'the people's version' of the [Brion Gysin] dreamachine cell phone app" http://is.gd/geqc5 via @tommoody #
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
• 0465 / You Thank / The Assignment: Make a piece of music for someone or something for which you feel thankful.
• 0464 / Blanket Song / The Assignment: Play over a song, and then remove the original.
• 0463 / Making the Gradient / The Assignment: Make a piece of music inspired by the concept of a gradient.
• 0462 / Vade in Pace / The Assignment: Write a short piece of music that gets slower and slower as it proceeds.
• 0461 / Goldilocks Zone / The Assignment: Navigate a sonic space between the hospitable and the inhospitable.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 465 consecutive weeks to date.