- From advance warning anxious that Dyer’s Zona will send me back to my decades-long no-1st-person approach to writing, just as I was warming. #
- Picked up Geoff Dyer’s Zona at the library. It has a sticker on it that says “POPULAR READING.” #
- Thanks! MT @Nonwrestler: @disquiet 30s photos converted to sound, presented as videos tracking through the results http://t.co/wPJzfPhQ #
- Made banner image for my site: white backdrop + black text atop image. Massive Kinko’s flashback to circa-1987 college flyer/zine-making. #
- Brief post on my occasional http://t.co/uScGMHh3 site about the Air Display app: http://t.co/LrLX3Xhk #
- Excellent customer support this week from @ninjatunehq and @tinyletter. #
- The next Disquiet email newsletter includes chance to win a @johnkannenberg exhibit catalog. Subscribe here: http://t.co/zOp3jD7v. #
- Sent an email out to the Disquiet email list (1200+ subscribers). It may end up in your spam folder, so take a peek there. #
- Thinking about adding discussion forum to the Disquiet site. #
- Instructions to the 25th Disquiet Junto, in which we rework the 24th, have gone to the email list & at http://t.co/f4o5d0ZJ in 5 languages. #
- The Disquiet site will have a more responsive design in near future: laptop/tablet/7″/phone. Been an interesting process. #
- What would an alien signal sound like? Reminder about the call-for-submissions I’m helping @primusluta with: http://t.co/gtlbbZ0E. #
- Finished watching the first season of The Killing on AMC. **spoiler** The villain is the screenwriting staff. #
- Late-morning sounds: refrigerator, passing traffic, faraway barking, occasional digital alerts. #
- The 25th weekly Disquiet Junto project starts tomorrow. Over 200 musicians around the world making music based on creative restraints. #
- How to find music on @pinterest. RT @WonderlandK: @disquiet Try “music about cupcakes” or “sounds shoes make” for better results? in reply to WonderlandK #
- “Music” wasn’t among the 21 topics suggested to me when I joined Pinterest. #
- The new Macbook Air flips the Thunderbolt and USB icons from right of port to left. Just sayin’. #
- Joined art.sy, which appears to have just one artist filed under “sound art.” Zimoun. #
- Thanks. Good examples. Brain feels better now. RT @paul_donald: @disquiet How about Louis Armstrong? Or Tom Waits, for that matter? in reply to paul_donald #
- Can’t think of a musician whose singing so resembled how he played his instrument as Chet Baker. #
- Kind of addicted to listening to two copies of “Voice Poetry” off Ornette Coleman’s Body Meta slightly out of sync. #
- RIP, film critic Andrew Sarris (b. 1928), auteur of auteur theory. #
- The Tate lecture MP3 wasn’t in my SanDisk MP3 player’s music menu because it was tagged as genre = podcast? Could that be so? #
- The Tuesday noon siren today should be drowned out by the rattle of a Chinese restaurant, if plans proceed correctly. #
- RIP, British actor Brian Hibbard (b. 1946) of vocal group Flying Pickets, who had British hit with cover of Yazoo’s “Only You” #
- And this week we’ll be doing the 25th weekly Disquiet Junto project. Just amazing. Passed the 1,000-track and 200-participant milestones. #
- Nice to have gotten to meet @falsereactions + @andrewweathers this past week. Missed their show, but did get in a drink and some talk. #
- Anyone out there have good (or less than good) stories about implementing bbPress? Would like to see some examples. #
- RIP, actor Victor Spinetti (b. 1929), of the Beatle’s A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Magical Mystery Tour, and Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon. #
- Pretty sweet that Divvy works within Air Display on the iPad. #
- Psyched to hear the Drumcorps and Photek remixes on the forthcoming Rob Zombie collection. #
- Regarding SoundCloud’s new sets: “These are my jams” feels, by way of comparison, much more interesting than This Is My Jam. #
- Man, I’ve been on Twitter for five years as of today. #
- Bonus to Amon Tobin box set: picking it up at DHL in San Francisco, on crazy beautiful industrial waterfront. #
- Midway through its 24th week/project, Disquiet Junto hits its 1,000th track: http://t.co/r77LLvGJ. Thanks to all 206 participating… #
- Dreamed I met people who work at GoodReads. They were confused I wrote about books on the site yet refrained from assigning star ratings. #
- Disquiet Junto, now deep in its 24th weekly project, is 5 tracks shy of its 1,000th: http://t.co/iNaicE16 #
- RIP, American Music Club and Sun Kill Moon drummer Tim Mooney: http://t.co/asWDBb6p #
- Exited eye doctor’s office to hear funk song of Fillmore street fair DJ and beep of backing-up delivery van play at same tempo. #
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.