The illustrator Hannes Pasqualini and I revived our 2020 comics series in late December of 2024. We have posted two more comics since that one (“Audiobook” and “Stroll”), and today’s, “Megaphone Redux,” continues the run, revisiting both the cultural context and a specific comic from when we initiated the series. See a full index of Frame by Frame comics at disquiet.com/fxf, which features a special index page just for the episodes. And check out more from Hannes at hannes.papernoise.net.
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ With track titles like “a concrete corridor,” “jagged branches,” and “tungsten bulbs,” the excellent new score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, for The Gorge, could be easily mistaken for a Nine Inch Nails album. (The Gorge is the one with the woman from the chess movie and the guy from the drumming movie. The best thing about it, besides the score and it having a very small cast in a very large landscape, is that Netflix positioned it as a Valentine’s Day movie.)
▰ Lawrence English’s new album, Even the Horizon Knows Its Bounds, is like an orchestra of pianos tuning up forever. Includes source material from Amby Downs, Chris Abrahams, Chuck Johnson, Claire Rousay, Dean Hurley, Jim O’Rourke, JW Paton, Madeleine Cocolas, Norman Westberg, Stephen Vitiello, and Vanessa Tomlinson.
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▰ Archival Entry: Look out. Old man Weidenbaum is listening to James Newton Howard’s Michael Clayton (2007) score on repeat again.
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Yes, I was standing near three people and near-ish to a half dozen other people when an elder alert went out to phones this afternoon. Quite the readymade spatial sound installation.
▰ Two new Steven Soderbergh movies and a new Luc Besson movie? I appreciate this cumulative opportunity to convince myself not only that it isn’t 2025, but that the previous millennium hasn’t yet ended.
▰ The rain in San Francisco falls mainly everywhere
▰ I thought the printer had decided to just print out something on its own initiative, but that sound turned out to be a street cleaning machine coming up the block slowly in the pouring rain
▰ An earthquake during a rainstorm (which we just experienced) is like an elevator pitch by a Hollywood executive who already knows he’s being put out to pasture
▰ I finished reading my second novel of the year, that number masking the substantial amount of pages I’ve actually read, ’cause I’m nearly done with Neal Stephenson’s massive Cryptonomicon (I’d give it two more weeks), and continuing apace, if more slowly, with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The novel I finished reading — which, like the first one I read this year, I read to attain a little desired closure amid the open-endedness of reading two roughly 900-page books — was Dead Money by my old friend Jakob Kerr. It’s a fun corporate thriller that takes place mostly right here in San Francisco, and it is twisty. And this week I finished reading one graphic novel, Superman: Year One by Frank Miller (writer) and John Romita Jr. (illustrator). And I just realized that at some point I stopped being one of those people who puts commas before and after the “Jr.” in names that have a Jr. in them. I don’t know when that happened.
And it’s been a week
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.
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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.
Disquiet Junto Project 0685: Pick-Me-Up
The Assignment: Treat a set of sounds like a game of pick up sticks.
Step 1: Think about pick up sticks, the children’s game.
Step 2: Assemble a small collection of sounds.
Step 3: Record a piece of music in which you employ the sounds from Step 2 as if in a game of pick up sticks.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0685” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.
Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0685-pick-me-up/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. How long of a game is it?
Deadline: Monday, February 17, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.
About: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/
License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 685th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Pick-Me-Up — The Assignment: Treat a set of sounds like a game of pick up sticks — at https://disquiet.com/0685/
The photo, by Heurtelions, associated with this project is used thanks to a CC BY-SA 4.0 Creative Commons license (photo repeated in a grid with text superimposed).
