100: Number of McDonald’s locations that had a (now canceled) AI ordering system for drive-through customers.
6: Hours per weekday when take-out orders are prohibited in parts of Milan to decrease noise pollution.
200,000: Estimated average cost of production, in $U.S, for an eight-to-ten–episode podcast.
Sources: McDonald’s: qz.com; Milan: msn.com; podcast: bloomberg.com.
It looks like you can listen to the two newly announced Aphex Twin songs right now. In fact, they appear to have been available for almost a decade. Warp Records has announced a set of new pressings of Aphex Twin’s classic Selected Ambient Works Volume II, originally released 30 years ago, in 1994 (my 33 1/3 book on it came out 10 years ago, in 2014).
The new Warp editions contain 27 tracks each, including the original 24 tracks, and the formerly vinyl-only “Stone in Focus,” and two that appear at the end of the new release: “th1 [evnslower],” which is glacially slow, and “Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev,” which features operatic vocal elements and qualities that suggest parts of it, if not the entirety of it, are being played in reverse (hence the “Rev” in the title). By the way, “Stone in Focus” wasn’t vinyl only, per se, as it was also on the 1994 Astralwerks CD compilation Excursions in Ambience (The Third Dimension), which also had tracks from Seefeel, Spacetime Continuum, Future Sound of London, and Air, among others.
Both of those tracks appeared previously on Aphex Twin’s own SoundCloud accounts. The first is on his famed @user18081971, on which he posted heaps of tracks when he reemerged (culminating in the album Syro) from a long period of relative silence, and the other at his eponymous @aphextwin/@richarddjames account. Judging by the time codes for those tracks on Warp website and on the individual track pages (11:07/11:08 for “th1 [evnslower]” and 6:41 for “Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev”), these are the same pieces of music.
And several enterprising people have, of course, reversed the “Rev” track so we can hear it before it was flipped. Here it is:
I’ve been enjoying the book The Art of the Straight Line: My Tai Chi, which is credited on its cover to Lou Red, but is more accurately a posthumous book, assembled by Laurie Anderson, from materials he wrote, interview materials with Reed, and the reminiscences of numerous people in his orbit. Here he talks about the 2007 album, produced by Reed and Hal Willner, he released of music he recorded for use during his tai chi sessions. I love that he, in essence, re-created ambient music, and came to understand it deeply, in the process.
I updated the Disquiet Junto F.A.Q with for the first time since late last year. There’s a new item about how to pronounce “junto.” For the Disquiet Junto, the use of the word in the first place relates to Benjamin Franklin’s Junto club, which he started in 1727. Let’s work from the assumption that Franklin’s use of “junto” was based on the Spanish word “junta,” and so pronounce “junto” the same way, with “jun” like “hoon.”
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ Blue sky and fog horns means there’s a thick marine layer in the bay. I marvel at it every time.
▰ I got back into tai chi earlier this year and I look forward to having enough memory of the forms that I can listen to Lou Reed’s Hudson River Wind Meditations while doing it, but for now all I’m listening to (and watching) is tai chi tutorial videos.
▰ I’ve recently taken to, once a day, looking in my email sent folder, ’cause sometimes — in an age of heavily filtered email, due to general email overload (PR, spam, newsletters, ads) — replies end up bypassing my inbox, and I otherwise might not know someone had replied
▰ Somehow guitar practice means guitar and headphone amp and headphones and iPad* for noting down chords and laptop for displaying sheet* music.
And this excludes the step where I swap the amp for an audio interface so I can feed the sound through my computer and, thus, more easily record myself (on occasion).
And yes, I’m considering an acoustic guitar.
And yes, that wouldn’t remove many steps.
And yes, I’d annoy people with my playing.
*Goodnotes, which is quite excellent, in both cases
▰ The most important day for guitar practice is the day after guitar class
▰ DJ Krust poster in the first (2000) episode of the Rebus TV series, as the detective interviews a club owner backstage
▰ Very odd when you get a bunch of alerts of people all signing up for your newsletter from the same source, but there’s no record of that source. I guess it’s paywalled or something.
▰ I’ve been typing since before I could read
▰ Overheard during my lunch walk: tourists disappointed to see a driver behind the wheel of a passing Waymo
