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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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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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• 0541 / 10BPM Techno / The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats.
• 0540 / 5ive 4our / The Assignment: Take back 5/4 for Jedi time masters Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond.
• 0539 / Control Breath / The Assignment: Let your slow breathing guide a piece of music.
• 0538 / Guided Decompression / The Assignment: Get someone from tense to chill.
• 0537 / Penitent Honk / The Assignment: Do sound design for "a missing gesture" of vehicular life. -
Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 541 consecutive weeks to date. Archives
[email protected]
Downstream
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Recent Posts
Monthly Archives: October 2021
Reorganized Some Shelves
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
twitter.com/disquiet: Robot Sandwalk, Gary Chang
From the past week
I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.
▰ The lingering question is can the Norsonic Nor277 mimic the “sandwalk”* of the Fremen in Dune.
*”a dance-like rhythm which emulates the natural sounds of the desert”
(via Nathan Moody)
▰ Ring my bell
▰ Perhaps this is a language, but for the time being I’m enjoying imagining it as otherworldly graffiti à la Alien Nation.
▰ The main thing I’ll say about the recent rain here in S.F. is I seem to no longer have the hurricane PTSD I had after leaving New Orleans in 2003. But, I’m now so utterly not used to rain that I exhaustedly realized halfway through Sunday that I’d barely slept Saturday night.
▰ Re-watched Breakfast Club this weekend. Realized that it was Gary Chang who composed the few elements of non-pop music that appear, definitely (in 1985) some of the earlier ambient music I was semi-consciously exposed to, especially in the context of film. (Chang later composed one of my favorite scores of all time, A Shock to the System, 1990, which he performed with Turtle Island String Quartet.)
▰ Phone app that, when the phone is laying on the table, registers the angle at which you might glance at it and also whatever might be reflected in it, and then cancels out the reflected material so the screen always appears totally blank
▰ This weekend’s cognitive dissonance was watching the sands of Dune flow on TV in the living room while the atmospheric river roared just outside the window.
▰ Today’s pressing question: who chooses music for when the FDA panel pauses on its YouTube channel? (Today it was “Samurai Japon” and “A l’encre de mes voeux,” if Shazam and my still waking short-term memory are to be trusted.)
▰ 1: The ever-changing mood of the ever-changing sounds of the ever-changing city.
2: The sfchronicle.com “Restaurants Playing Music Outside, and the Neighbors Who Hate It” sounds like a collection of Raymond Carver short stories.
(via Sara Gaiser)
▰ Say what one might about Zoom-era education, it’s really (like, really) nice at the end of guitar class to just continue to sit here in front of my screen and quickly record, while it’s still fresh, what I’ve been instructed to play so I can refer back to it later.
▰ End of day
▰ “And of course the most important spec is … how bad is the fan noise?”
▰ To borrow a formulation from Yogi Berra: Always buy other people’s albums, otherwise they won’t buy yours.
(Berra was, truth be told, talking about funerals. So, kind of an awkward, if contextually aware, reference in regard to the recording industry, I admit.)
▰ Stumbled on the X-Men’s semi-secret headquarters in my neighborhood:
I mean, seriously, when I look at this photo all I can think is, “Who hired Frank Quitely to design their house?”
▰ Something messed up the endless stream of academia.edu alerts I receive (I’m not a paid subscriber),and it now tells me every day about people’s work on Ernest Hemingway, and (1) I have no idea why and (2) I realize this tweet will just seal the deal for the Algorithm.
▰ Halloween is pretty close to the end of the standard 4-day #DisquietJunto project cycle, so this week’s assignment won’t be much a surprise when it goes out shortly via http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto. Time to get spooky.
I took this photo of graffiti in my hometown of Huntington, New York, last month during a visit to see my family, and it didn’t even occur to me at the time it’d work perfectly come Halloween.
▰ Or should I say: play that spooky music, white caricature of a disembodied soul.
▰ Really looking forward to Outside Lands
being over.
▰ My main Outside Lands memory is the year I finished writing my Aphex Twin book, coming up the hill from a cafe where I was the twitchy guy in corner typing madly. As I made my way home, Paul McCartney was screaming “Helter Skelter” from Golden Gate Park.
I pretty much know exactly where I was standing at 3:02 in this video.
▰ Drone sandwich: microwave from the kitchen, street-cleaning vehicle outside.
▰ Barely a month until the 25th anniversary of http://Disquiet.com. Nothing big planned. Just reflecting.
▰ I love the shots the local record shop (Noise, here in San Francisco) does of people buying used LPs.
▰ I only just last night realized that folks #tag their #DisquietJunto projects sometimes with the project tag of the week, such as #disquiet0513 this week for the Halloween project. I’ll do a better job keeping an eye on them.
▰ And on that note, have a good night, and a good weekend. It’s Outside Lands here in San Francisco, so home is gonna be vibrating with not-so-distant Golden Gate Park beats through Sunday night.
Ring All Bells
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
Disquiet Junto Project 0513: Ghost OST
The Assignment: Play that spooky music.
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, November 1, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 28, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0513: Ghost OST The Assignment: Play that spooky music.
There is just one step for this project. It is Halloween. Make some holiday-specific background music.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0513” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0513” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0513-ghost-ost/
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.
Additional Details:
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, November 1, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 28, 2021.
Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0513” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.
Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.
Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).
For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 513th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Ghost OST (The Assignment: Play that spooky music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0513/
More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0513-ghost-ost/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.
Before a Drama Unfolds
An outtake from Nathan Moody
Nathan Moody has shared this outtake from his 2020 De/Still album, for which I wrote the liner notes, ““Palimpsests All the Way Down.” The track opens with field recordings of everyday noises and equally quotidian conversation, and a guitar line that feels less like part of the whole and more like an introduction. At first, the guitar feels almost like a brief opening cue before a drama unfolds. Then the guitar doesn’t so much fade in as come into focus, like it was always there but has deigned to make its presence truly felt, to become part of the production, to become the production. There’s something in Moody’s mix that, at least through my speakers, sends some of the voices off into the distance, so it’s as if they’re commenting from the fringes rather than appearing center stage. He’s right that the piece doesn’t entirely make sense in the context of De/Still, which is a series of sonic reactions to the work of photographer TJ Norris. This track is its own thing, and it’s great it’s out in the world.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/noisejockey. Check out the album a flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com.