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.
▰ Yeah, I’m digging The Last Tourist by Olen Steinhauer OK.
▰ There’s an alternate universe where Fringe ran for a decade, and a simulation where Person of Interest is still unfolding weekly, and I’d love to visit both places.
▰ RIP, Greg Tate (October 15, 1957 – December 7, 2021). I only spoke with him a few times. He did a bit of writing for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine when I was an editor there. Last time Greg and I spoke, in the early/mid-1990s, he was gonna write for us about Anthony Braxton’s covers of standards. I sent him the vinyl, which I’d found used at Amoeba, but then he never finished the article, which is totally fine. Life happens. I’d hoped to run into him someday and joke about it. Now that’ll never happen. His was a strong, learned voice. Glad so much is on paper and online.
And here, ’cause it’s great and now it’s on my mind, is Anthony Braxton covering John Coltrane’s “Impressions”:
And via The Wire: “By way of tribute to the author and critic we have made a number of articles Greg wrote for the magazine free to read in our online archive for the next month.”
▰ Again, nothing’s happening on the 25th anniversary of Disquiet.com. I’m just enjoying the reflective process of counting down from the start of December until the actual anniversary. I had plans. But then: pandemic. It’s OK. Stay healthy. Do your thing. Rest.
▰ So, the YouTube Music (which if you use it regularly you likely think of as Music YouTube, since the URL is music.youtube.com) soft-boiled approximation of Spotify Wrapped came out, and apparently pretty much all I listened to was the Michael Clayton soundtrack on repeat.
▰ I admit I’m no instinctive list-maker (best this, top that), or one to gauge album against album. My disinclination may relate to my disinterest in competitive sports. But I read what Marc Masters said, and I agree end-of-year lists do serve a purpose, so I’m getting one together. (That may count as whinging, but in the service of getting past it.)
Update: Or at least trying to get one together. It’s not entirely my thing.
▰ I don’t think I recognized until last night that with the gain raised high enough, an electric guitar can be plugged directly into the ER-301.
▰ Inspiring motto on the package from the company that makes little rubberized caps to put over the blunt stiletto that emerges from the bottom of a cello.
▰ Only good thing to come of today’s news is Sly & Robbie’s music will flood the internet in the collective act mourning. Here they are with Nils Petter Molvær, Eivind Aarset, and Vladislav Delay:
“Rhythm Killer,” produced by the inimitable Bill Laswell, plus a Material who’s who (D.S.T., Bernard Fowler, Robert Musso, Nicky Skopelitis, Henry Threadgill, Bernie Worrell)
And with DJ Krush “The Lost Voices,” off The Message at the Depth:
One* more, Grace Jones’ “Nightclubbing”
It’s weird, ’cause just last night I was listening again to the latest Aarset & Molvaer albums, and in the process I was thinking about their work with Sly & Robbie.
*Who am I kidding? More to come.
▰ “AI spokesman, avatars enter election campaigns” is the most William Gibson headline I have read this week.
▰ Occasional PSA to musicians releasing music for download on Bandcamp and elsewhere that metadata is sorta important. It’s, like, floss-your-teeth important. Speaking of which, I just typed “yumload” instead of “download” and that’s alright with me.
▰ One of these makes for a quite different morning than the others.
▰ Today in #FreshMundaneHells, what keyboard sequence did I accidentally hit that flipped my audio to just the left side? (Which took a while to sort out.)
▰ There are four Disquiet Junto projects left in the year.
▰ Honk if you watch guitar tutorials on YouTube at half speed so they’re still in tune, just an octave lower.
▰ The press prerelease copy of the score to the upcoming Matrix movie went straight to my email spam folder, which feels like a truly mundane enactment of Matrix cyber-hijinks.
Spoilers: based on a first listen, this movie will have a lot of action sequences.
▰ There he goes: “Michael Nesmith, Monkees Singer-Songwriter, Dead at 78”.
Quickly rising to top of the playlist:
▰ “This album was mastered in analog utilizing the 20-bit K2 Super Coding system.”
▰ Listening to the background sounds of apps like Calm and Audible Sleep. Making the background sounds present. Paying attention to when sounds of labor, like the threshing of a harvest, or that are threatening, like the soundscape of Dune, become comforting, lulling, transportive.
In the novel Dune, we witness Paul learning to listen by observing his mother listening. As readers, we listen with her:
“She probed the farther darkness with her trained senses.
Noise of small animals.
Birds.
A fall of dislodged sand and faint creature sounds within it.”