- Nexus 7 has USB host support. Hopeful for good cabled keyboard. Nice for plane use where Bluetooth remains largely (to my knowledge) banned. #
- “AWS went down” is the new “Dog ate my homework.” #
- First two unconsumed/upcycled/recycled tracks are up in @djunto project #26 http://t.co/cCgetfBD #
- Grand. MT @DETXL: Rain falls like standing ovation for thunderstorm playing itself out above my head. The week bests itself at the 11th hour #
- Spent evening in a home only to learn the development had decades ago been a field. Down the block had been a great music venue, now gone. #
- [email protected] Re-upload is the new reissue. in reply to Moldilox #
- One of the two radio stations where I have DJ’d. http://t.co/3ZIHhW86 #
- Nothing says “quiet” like an exclamation point! http://t.co/6KkBjQvU #
- UC Davis is so White Noise. #
- Life is a DJ. MT @markrushtoncom: live drone mix: severe thunderstorm warning sirens, central air, cicada, home construction backup beep #
- Mobile Internet video proves its value when I pull up the CHiPS theme song after a motorcycle cop passes us on I-80. #
- Excellent @djunto news. Aug 19 concert. MT @DaveSeidel: Oh boy, going to Denver in August to play music! Details in the fullness of time. #
- Passing giant, stacked bales of hay in Marin. Against the hazy blue sky, they’re like nothing so much as a Minecraft landscape. #
- Ryuichi Sakamoto is among the 176 new invitees to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Full list here: http://t.co/xPsohYD9 #
- One thing the Nexus 7 has that the Kindle Fire doesn’t: a microphone. #
- Library sounds: rattling keys of passing handyman, pervasive HVAC, distant hushed and less-than-hushed voices. #
- “My life is in a hurry.” “You don’t have a life.” Teenagers running and talking in library. #
- Urban scale. Building scale. Gallery scale. A night at Arup in San Francisco. #
- Detail of magnetic drone sculpture by Oliver DiCicco on display at Arup. http://t.co/NkTWLYSC #
- MUNI FM http://t.co/fb6QI5Wc #
- “Listen to a building before it is built.” Spending the evening at Arup. #
- The 26th weekly Disquiet Junto is about making music from the stuff in your garbage pail. Instructions at http://t.co/XdREURGZ #
- Disquiet Junto project 26 instructions available in 7 (!) languages. Going out to the email list and the @SoundCloud group shortly. #
- Google Glasses are neat. All I want, though, is my regular glasses to ping me with a tiny light for priority emails/calls/events/etc. #
- Increasingly believe Count Zero is @GreatDismal‘s most crystalline book. Been re-reading it. Keep getting in, then starting again to savor. #
- I’m teaching a course on sounds of brands / brands of sounds at Academy of Art in San Francisco this fall. Will share details/syllabus soon. #
- Font query: looking for a Consolas/Menlo-style (fixed-width) typeface that is slightly worn/abraded. #
- Finished Dyer’s book on Stalker. Very enjoyable. Old-school cinephile post-Internet somewhat like the Stalinist after the fall of the wall. #
- An iPad isn’t necessarily a cultural impediment to consuming a physical book. Last night it was a makeshift light when my lamp blew a bulb. #
- I interviewed classical composer Liza White about absorbing electronic music and hip-hop into her music: http://t.co/cjqituSU #
- Dear Gadget Hive: Does Nexus 7 have “traditional” homescreen widgets/icons or is it an always-on storefront like Kindle Fire? #
- Listening to the Colorist album again, The Fastest Way to Become the Ocean. #
- Confessions of a Neal Stephenson semi-completist: Didn’t like Reamde, will still read Some Remarks. #
- A cellphone isn’t necessarily a cultural impediment to consuming a physical book. It provides illumination in a dark café, for example. #
- Disquiet Junto this week, focused on compos(t)ing/unconsumption, will include a Croatian translation (courtesy of Darko Macan). #
- The theme for the 26th weekly Disquiet Junto project will be recycling/unconsuming/upcycling. #
- This week’s Disquiet Junto project will be its 26th, marking the year’s midway point. #
- Occasional reminder. If you do the Facebook, there’s a http://t.co/Yh8y3liM page for that: http://t.co/RaNpMcQc. #
- Wondering why of the 2 USB ports on my Macbook Air (mid-2011 edition) only the right one is recognized as charging my iPad 2. #
- Up in Sonoma for the day, way too far from San Francisco to hear the Tuesday noon alert. #
- 12 composers made 42 minutes of music based on a shared set of ringtones and other sonic alerts: http://t.co/lyYXBCjv #
- Less intrigued by the retina screen than I would have been by a lighter power cord. #
- So far I am majorly majorly digging Geoff Dyer’s Zona. Majorly. It’s one of those books that the further I read it, the more I slow my pace. #
- A cellphone isn’t necessarily a cultural impediment to consuming a physical book. It makes a good paperweight, for example. #
- A bad cut on one’s index finger is a far more debilitating thing than it had been in our pre-touchscreen, pre-mousepad era. #
- I have 5 invites to art.sy that I can share, if anyone’s interested. #
- It’s fitting that Reamde’s penultimate sequence focuses on two individuals walking a long distance: one wounded, the other on autopilot. #
- RIP, Anthony Schulte (b. 1930), “early proponent of audiobooks”: http://t.co/6ALSAmGD #
- RIP, Frances W. Preston (b. 1928), former president and chief executive of BMI: http://t.co/wrDo0WAu #
- Piano rolls 2/2. http://t.co/RMdWmJD6 #
- Piano rolls 1/2. http://t.co/HnZCal9i #
- Every time an “RPG” is mentioned in Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, I imagine someone is throwing the Dungeon Master’s Handbook at someone else. #
- Making chili. Drone of stove’s fan pairs with that of washing machine, the latter muted by wall. #
- Not a speaker. (Hole in concrete at Academy of Science.) http://t.co/XGbZ1pji #
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about
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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
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Upcoming
• December 13, 2022: This day marks the 26th anniversary of the founding of Disquiet.com.
• January 6, 2023: This day marked the 11th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community. -
Recent
• April 16, 2022: I participated in an online "talk show" by The Big Conversation Space (Niki Korth and Clémence de Montgolfier).
• March 11, 2022: I hosted a panel discussion between Mark Fell, Rian Treanor and James Bradbury in San Francisco as part of the Algorithmic Art Assembly (aaassembly.org) at Gray Area (grayarea.org).
• December 28, 2021: This day marked the 10th (!) anniversary of the Instagr/am/bient compilation.
• January 6, 2021: This day marked the 10th (!) anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.
• December 13, 2021: This day marked the 25th (!) anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.
• There are entries on the Disquiet Junto in the 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.) -
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• 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
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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 -
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• 0551 / The Bends / The Assignment: Get less strict about something you're strict about.
• 0550 / Abrupt Probability / Make music based on a chance graphic score.
• 0549 / Sidelines / The Assignment: Get intentional with stereo.
• 0548 / Drone Vox / The Assignment: Make a drone using just your voice.
• 0547 / Genre Melee / Combine two seemingly different genres. -
Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 551 consecutive weeks to date. Archives
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