Of the top 10 most read posts on Disquiet.com, seven were from the (now) daily (and formerly weekdaily) Downstream section of freely legally downloadable audio — that’s out of 46 posts total for the month.
Along with them, these three pieces: (1) “Too Social to Fail? Thinking About Facebook, Netlabels, Free Culture, and Commercial Interests,” reflecting on the decision-making behind an ongoing experiment in the form of the facebook.com/disquiet.fb page; (2) “Building a Better Headphone,” in which the editorial illustration (by Kevin Van Aelst) to a Virginia Heffernan article in the New York Times about headphones (an article whose alternate headline could have been “Headphone Madness”) seems to have a slightly different message than the article itself (image below); (3) and “Warren Ellis, Ubu.com, Serial Storytelling,” which looks at writer Ellis’ decisions when curating the great avant-garde archive ubu.com in December 2010.
The seven MP3-related posts in the top 10: (4) a live improvisation with the new zither edition of the Buddha Machine by Dave Seidel (aka Mysterbear), (5) sleepy drones from Saffron Slumber (aka Kevin Stephens), (6) four variations on a track by Caribou (one of them downloadable), (7) a check in with the Stonesthrow Beat Battle during its 200th consecutive week (“Like Fight Club. But in Public. With Laptops.”), (8) a lecture on field recording by Gordon Hempton, (9) the occasion of a new netlabel called Absence of Wax, and (10) “Bach, Through a Sampler, Darkly,” in which Yasuo Akai glitches up the Goldberg Variations, heard here:
The top post of the last 60 days was a year-end recap about recommended iOS (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad) involving music/sound, and the top post of the last 90 days was a discussion about Brian Eno‘s album Small Craft on a Milk Sea.
The top searches for the month were (in declining order, allowing for some ties): autechre, drone (which yields 341 returns, in case you were wondering — well, 342 as of this entry), Harold budd, iphone, topic, ambient mix, banks violette, beck, buddha machine, caribou, cave, chris herbert, eliane radigue, grill, instrumental hip-hop, Jon hassell, kosma, spinach prince, stars of the lid, string quartets.