- Going Twitter-dark Dec 22 at 5:30pm Pacific, through morning of Jan 3. May break silence for Instagr/am/bient project notice. #
- The 15th Instagr/am/bient track (of 25) arrived; 10 to go, 2 to be trimmed. The parallels of visual and sonic filters soon to be shared. #
- Thanks to Jaime Crespo (http://t.co/PtwPMjk0) for drawing my Twitter-background boombox. It’s the 21st monthly Sketches of Sound piece. #
- Thanks to @bartalos for drawing the bicycle horns that were my Twitter background for past month! It was the 20th monthly Sketches of Sound. #
- The trailer to Prometheus employs the screams (among other things) from the 1979 Alien trailer: http://t.co/MUtF8ogd per @io9 #
- Are there iOS or OS X apps making creative use of Home Sharing? Or is it solely an iTunes-to-iTunes (or in iOS, “Music”) thing? #
- Morning listen: Cliff Martinez’s score to Espion(s). #
- RT @xeni: Has anyone else who had MRI ever considered that the opening stanzas sound like intro to “Blue Monday”? And the chirping is cute. #
- Another 4 Instagr/am/bient track in my inbox this morning. We’re up to 13 completed (1 pending edit) and 12 due. More than halfway there. #
- Have now received 10 of the 25 Instagr/am/bient tracks. Two need a little trimming, 15 more to come by Christmas Eve. #
- Always nice when the band that’s due to play the cafe where you’re getting some writing done turns out to be a string quartet. #
- The Wikipedia fundraising photos are funny. But a phrase like “personal appeal from an author of 2,463 Wikipedia articles” is a cry for help #
- Thanks! RT @SactownMagazine: Check out great Atlantic piece about silent computing by Sactown writer Marc Weidenbaum: http://t.co/hhfpwqdC #
- Going Twitter-dark for a week or so, except when time to mention Instgr/am/bient album’s release. Dark on eve of Dec 22, back on Jan 3 morn. #
- The Instagr/am/bient entries are coming in left and right. Remember, they should be between 1 minute and three minutes in length. #
- Generative sound app new/improved RT @ThicketApp: #ThicketReboot released and free! Video: http://t.co/dt3veWPR iTunes: http://t.co/4OGZMj5i #
- Noon bells against a plaintive airplane drone. #
- We have a winner! The first stage of the Voight-Gnirut Fail Test is getting the joke. RT @GlennF: @disquiet The Gnirut Fail? #
- What’s the opposite of the Turing Test, where you see bloggers fall for the fawning praise of comment-spammers looking for link-backs? #
- New Thunderbird installed. Hopeful that little “crashes a lot” thing has been ironed out. #
- Thus far in my home-stereo fiddling, none of the words in “Universal Plug and Play” (aka uPnP) seem fully valid. #win7 #ios #lion #android #
- RIP, Norman Krim (b. 1913), early Radio Shack owner and “electronics visionary” who championed the transistor http://t.co/WwarVZXf #
- This is @cdmblogs at its best. Thoughtful commentary, developer overview of generative app development (Pugs Luv Beats) http://t.co/gZqvb0QA #
- Odd @TheEconomist “Amen Break” story: Why now? No comparison to “Funky Drummer.” Ubiquity attributed to “some people.” http://t.co/Dz2wTXWf #
- Frank survival research. RT @xeni: IN CLOSING, MRI is like an SRL show inside tiny metal coffin. I’ll close my eyes & think of Mark Pauline. #
- Tuesday noon siren while reading Hickory, Dickory, Dock with my (nearly) 16-month-old. #
- In netlabel-land, the exquisite corpse at @vuzhmusic‘s dystimbria.cc is one of my favorite things, so much so I forget to write about it. #
- [email protected] Was gonna say the Boats CD is best way to greet dawn, but any overstatement would be untrue to the music’s understatement. in reply to taylordeupree #
- It’s a measure of Rezor’s work that Dragon Tattoo contains some of my favorite loud music and quiet music of the year. #
- The Boats’ Ballads of the Research Department (12k) is a fine dawn listen. #
- For those about to light the candles, here’s the Hanukkah remix project I put together last year with @tabletmag: http://t.co/ls8MA1yq #
- “Ambient overblown” is a relative thing. RT @ooray: Mostly done with my instagr(am)ient track for @disquiet. Overblown & symphonic as usual. #
- Great list. The Yogurt and the Drive are great. RT @emarg0ed: New post: Music, twenty-eleven http://t.co/Y9vqaJBI #2011faves #
- RIP, Warren Hellman (b. 1934). Thank you for having Nick Lowe play for free blocks from my house years after year. #
- Tracks thus far are great RT @earsmack Submitted my Instagr/am/bient composition to @disquiet. Can’t wait to listen to the final compilation #
- Ever since “Dear Leader” passed, all I can think of is the depiction in World War Z of North Korea going dark. #
- Originally felt like Blade Runner. Now fully existential. RT @colinholter: @disquiet Directly related to fear you may be a computer program. #
- The persistent fear that you will fail to accurately enter captchas. #
- Noon: vintage church bells and carburetors. #
- At the risk of sounding polemical, it is safe to say that all bands now are post-rock bands, even rock bands. #
- As I ponder my favorites of the year in various categories, this is easily the record I have listened to most often: http://t.co/FgBIzr9y #
- Totally! We need a 40-Part Motet version of Unsilent Night with 4 Jamboxes atop circulating Roombas. RT @qDot Roombas! #
- Need to set up “40 Part Motet” version of Unsilent Night: a room with 4 Jamboxes, each playing 1 of the 4 parts. Maybe on a trolley system. #
- RIP, Vaclav Havel (b. 1936). It’s said that everyone who bought the first Velvet Underground album upon release later started a revolution. #
- “Certificate of destruction.” Language from the competitive realm of per-pound paper-shredding services. And the next Guns & Roses album. #
- “Smallest cross-cut shred in the city.” Language from the competitive realm of per-pound paper-shredding services. #
- Been expecting this. RT @cocoalabs: Ack! iTunes match replaced some of my parental advisory rap w/ clean versions. Terrible! Tx @lucas_gonze #
- From Unsilent Night, up Mission to Tikva Records. A good Saturday night. #
- Best Unsilent Night I have attended: great crowd, no rain, strong sound, and curious bystanders. #
- Thanks to @pheezy for hooking his Jambox to my iPad for the Unsilent Night march. #
- Beautiful jellyfish stop traffic as Unsilenters head down 19th St. http://t.co/hRDaGezH #
- Unsilent Night miracle: 7:25pm parking a block and a half from starting point. #
- Check out @dpnem list of his 100 favorite #netlabel music of the year: http://t.co/JDHndwmT. I’ll have my list up by year’s end, #
- For those not about to rock Unsilent Night, maybe my stationary recording of 2010’s San Francisco event will suffice: http://t.co/vJ32jXMv #
- Dear Hive, Film-Score Unit: Is Nathan Larson’s music for Margin Call or Jon Brion’s for The Future available commercially? #
- For tweets focused on sound art, follow @liminallistener, a subsidiary of @Vuzhmusic Enterprises. #
- RIP, Cesária Évora (b. 1941), legendary Cape Verde singer. #
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about
Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996 at the intersection of sound, art, and technology, and since 2012 has moderated the Disquiet Junto, an active online community of weekly music/sonic projects. He has written for Nature, Boing Boing, The Wire, Pitchfork, and NewMusicBox, among other periodicals. He is the author of the 33 1⁄3 book on Aphex Twin’s classic album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Read more about his sonic consultancy, teaching, sound art, and work in film, comics, and other media
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Current Activities
Upcoming
• July 28, 2021: This day marks the start of the 500th consecutive weekly project in the Disquiet Junto music community.
• December 13, 2021: This day marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of Disquiet.com.
• January 6, 2021: This day marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.Recent
• 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.
• A chapter on the Disquiet Junto ("The Disquiet Junto as an Online Community of Practice," by Ethan Hein) appears in the 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.)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).
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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
• 0485 / Strange Weather / The Assignment: Remix the pure sounds of Chris Kallmyer's traveling wind chimes to your own musical purposes.
• 0484 / A Movable Heart / The Assignment: Transplant the sounds of Chris Kallmyer's wind chimes to a new location.
• 0483 / Type Set / The Assignment: Use a recording of yourself typing something as the underlying rhythmic track for a piece of music.
• 0482 / Exactly That Gap / The Assignment: Make a musical haiku following instructions from Marcus Fischer.
• 0481 / Capsule Time / The Assignment: Record a time capsule for yourself in the future.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 485 consecutive weeks to date.Tags
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- Jochen on 9 Ds: “Marc, the comments are busted, homey. Not to badger you with my tribulations, but you may be missing other comments… ”
- Marc Weidenbaum on Q: Why Blog? A: Blogs Are Great.: “First, thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed it. And that’s so cool about having gone to school with him. ”
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