Just as the car pulled into the low-rent automatic wash attached to the gas station and wrapping around and behind the snack shop, I pulled my cellphone out of my jacket pocket and hit the big red record button. Not documented here are the interior’s colorful flashing lights, which seemed to exist solely to heighten the mechanized entertainment factor, but the sounds tell enough of the story, beginning with the high-pressure drone of the commercial cavern, proceeding through foam and the thick Lovecraftian tongues that lapped at the windshield, past the oversized brushes, and through the final rinse and drying cycles, followed by the fade-out as the car emerged back into society, just at the start of end-of-day rush hour. This was my first time through a car wash in an electric vehicle — meaning there were no particular sounds emitted by the car itself throughout — and my first time in a car wash in a very long time. A decade, maybe two? The denouement at the end was almost complete when I hit the stop — actually, “Done” — button. (Recorded November 19, 2024, on an iPhone 13 Pro.)
Fizzy, twitchy little sonic trinkets, the longest just a couple seconds over four minutes, the shortest a little over two and a half. Lulling bits of room tone split into fragments and scanned through as if with a radio dial. Beats made of considerably less than the sound of dust brushing against a vinyl player’s needle, other times — in classic glitch fashion, here rendered all in lowercase — like a questionable, all-plastic CD player well past its return date. Beats like windshield wipers made of eyelashes. Beats like stray thoughts caught in a spider web on a rickety wooden metronome. A hushed voice struggling to be heard, and yet cagey about what it might want to say. These are the components that comprise New Old Loops, a set as compact as it is delicate, at once intimate and private, and yet vibrating with decisive purpose. The musician is Oleg Malov of Tuapse, Russia. Malov, who goes by Okmiracle, knows exactly what he is doing, and it’s low-key glorious.
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ Really digging this mix of light synth tones, nature field recordings, and slow singing from Manja Ristić and Tomáš Šenkyřík, from the Czech record label Skupina. There are moments on Vstal when the artificial tones fit in more like background sound than prominent additions.
▰ I don’t have an embed or a link for this, because the music isn’t available — yet? — as an album, but I’ve ben enjoying the scene-setting score that Volker Bertelmann (aka Hauschka; All Quiet on the Western Front, The Old Guard) composed for the new The Day of the Jackal, the one starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch. Spy thriller scores, especially those serving stories that don’t veer too much into science fiction, are a steady source of rhythmic and moody background listening, and this one doesn’t disappoint. (He’s been very busy. He also scored the new Dune TV series, Dune: Prophecy, and Conclave, both of which have album releases.)
▰ I’m still working my way through Samuel Rohrer’s new album, Music for Lovers, which I discovered due to a guest appearance by characteristically ethereal trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer on one dubby track, “The Gift.”
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating 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.
▰ Does the conductor perspiring while the orchestra plays Brahms count as Sweatin’ to the Oldies?
▰ One odd downside to being off social media from Friday night to Monday morning is may you receive Instagram alerts about stories you’ve been mentioned in that have since disappeared, as have stories those stories might have responded to. It’s like showing up to a party after it ended, but I’m happy for my low-digital weekends.
▰ Whew, a month and a couple days from the 28th anniversary of Disquiet.com. Getting that URL and getting the site going was one of the best decisions I ever made. I resisted the word “blog” for a long time, but I’ve long since embraced it.
▰ A British novel introduced me to the term “crosspatch,” apparently a derogatory word for a “bad-tempered person” (versus, I suppose, a laudatory term for a bad-tempered person?). Now I wanna hear bad-tempered synth patches. And I realize as I type this that “tempered” also has a musical meaning. And there is a synth company called Crosspatch, but I don’t think the name choice had anything to do with the slang term. They make one Eurorack module, called the Triggerpad, which serves as an interface for grids, such as the Launchpad.
Ah, as the Further Records account (on Bluesky) subsequently pointed out to me, “curmudgeon” arguably counts as a laudatory term for a bad-tempered person.
▰ Best autocorrect yet: while I was typing the word “are” my laptop decided to unfold those three letters into “aesthetically pleasing.” We’re going to wake up one morning and computers will simply have gone insane and there will be no walking it back.
▰ Remarkable how much better a laptop seems to run when you simply clean the grime off its screen
▰ It’s funny to think I might want my streaming music service to learn from my Shazam usage, like I can’t be interested in the identity of a song yet never ever want to hear it or anything like it again
▰ This elevator would make an even better synthesizer sequencer:
▰ 1999: Begin to download new email in the morning, and by the time it’s all downloaded, there’s more email to download.
2024: Begin to download new app updates on your phone in the morning, and by the time they’re downloaded and installed, there are new app updates.
▰ Let’s get liminal, liminal:
▰ “noise sewer” — Say what you will about the blight that is noise pollution, it sure does reap linguistic rewards. This phrase is from concerns in Kent about the impact of changes at Gatwick, already one of Britain’s busiest airports (telegraph.co.uk).
▰ Finished reading one novel this week, on top of the two I finished last week — and of course, immediately started reading three more. I finished Lawrence Robbins’ The President’s Lawyer, based on a positive mention by Sarah Lyall in the New York Times.
This whole series of Disquiet Junto projects got started, to a good degree, on Twitter, back when it was actually called that — and to a lesser degree on Instagram, back when it seemed like it was mostly fuzzy photos of nature and street scenes — as a result of discussions there toward the end of 2011. I’m still on social media, mostly Mastodon, but as Bluesky has been having a bit of a moment lately, I figured I’d mention: if you’re on Bluesky, please let me know your account name (email me: [email protected]). I’ve begun a “Starter Pack” — which is, in part, a way to collect Bluesky users with some shared characteristic — of Disquiet Junto participants. You can find it at https://go.bsky.app/EaKoSoS.
