Looks like someone was voted off the island
Looking Out for No. 1
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
On Repeat: Aarset, Kowalczyk, Fennesz
Home/office playlist
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.
▰ This 9-minute jam is pretty heavy, even by guitarist Eivind Aarset’s standards, like hearing Dark Magus emerge from Black Sabbath. It’s a new trio, teaming Aarset with drummer Audun Kleive and keyboardist Ståle Storløkken. According to Kleive: “We are currently building our repertoire further.” Eric Furst replied on Mastodon: “It’s a bit like a black hole posting that they are ‘currently in the process of becoming more massive.’”
▰ Some deep interstellar drones from Kamil Kowalczyk, born in Poland and based in Scotland:
[bandcamp width=641 height=241 album=2346934746 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]
▰ There’s a new album, Mosaic, due out in December from Fennesz, and its excellent opening track, “Heliconia,” is a shoegaze expanse you can really get lost in over the course of its 9+ minutes.
[bandcamp width=641 height=340 album=2055523443 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]
Scratch Pad: Lore Was Always Ahead of Mythos
From the past week
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will 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.
▰ gluten-free breadboarding
▰ Still not sure why audiobook players don’t let you also listen to music
▰ Been doing this thing with TV ads lately where I unmute for the last second or, at most, two seconds (the now normalized ad countdown makes this easy), and seeing — that is, hearing — what makes the final sonic impression, and then trying gauge the extent to which advertisers are doing anything in that final moment to catch the ear of and appeal to vigilant ad-muters
▰ Friday morning hold-music dancing-in-place
▰ In the middle of reading too many books. As matters of gluttony go, it’s a lesser of numerous evils. I did finish reading a short graphic novel, Old Dog: Operations, an anthology by various writers and artists building out the world and lore introduced a year ago in Declan Shalvey’s Old Dog [Redact One]. I was going to type “mythos,” and then sorted “lore” as the more common word these days, and then wondered when lore overtook mythos, but according to the data in Google Books Ngram, lore was always ahead of mythos.
TWiS Listening Post (0024)
Back in the saddle
This went out to paid This Week in Sound subscribers as a thank you
The Science of Oz
And fun with time zones
Every week, when I send out the Disquiet Junto project, I don’t actually send it out directly. I set it up in various digital publishing tools, primarily my disquiet.com website and an email list service, and then I set them both on timers. I am almost always deep asleep when they actually go out, shortly after midnight. I do all this knowing that some of the first Junto members to see each week’s project instructions are in Australia, and in fact it’s not uncommon for an Australian track to pop up on the llllllll.co discussion thread before I wake up. (I’m looking at you, Bassling* — aka Jason Richardson.) So it seems particularly appropriate that this week’s project has as its basis the research of four scientists from an Australian University. I first became aware of it as part of the process of putting together my This Week in Sound email newsletter.
*And indeed, he had recorded and posted before I was up.
Slightly adapted from the note that appeared in the October 24, 2024, issue of the Disquiet Junto project announcement newsletter.