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 tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online 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.
▰ It’s a good sign when you arrive at a jazz club for a concert and the pre-show music playing on the house stereo is un-Shazam-able.
▰ I think there was a break of about two years between when I stopped capitalizing the internet and started occasionally capitalizing the Algorithm.
▰ Not a single “Avril 14th” video was uploaded to Vimeo in the seven days leading up to and including (as of 5:45pm Pacific) April 14th?
▰ Read a bunch, finished nothing, but wrote a lot, and so that’s OK.
LJ Holoman (organ), Joe Warner (piano), Michael “Tiny” Lindsey (bass), and Dante Robertson (drums) killed it on April 15th at the Black Cat basement club in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. It was a packed house for a jazz/r&b session on a Wednesday at 7pm, a two-hour set. Holoman, who was sitting in as part of a residency called the Soul Sessions (presented by the JaZzLine Institute), is a marvel, and the band was tight as heck.
The Assignment: Help airplane passengers get off the ground.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0746: Music for Takeoff The Assignment: Help airplane passengers get off the ground.
Record a piece of music intended to be listened to in preparation for and as a plane begins its takeoff and initial ascent.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0746” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
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 746th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music for Takeoff — The Assignment: Help airplane passengers get off the ground — disquiet.com/0746.
Just a quick note that talks and performances from the 2026 edition of the multi-day Algorithmic Art Assembly event have begun popping up on YouTube thanks to the tireless efforts of its founder, my friend Thorsten Sideboard. I had the pleasure of giving a talk (“The Woodshed Is a Black Box”) at the first AAA and interviewing Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, and James Bradbury during the second AAA. As with those years, the 2026 AAA was held at Gray Area in the Mission District, here in San Francisco. I sadly couldn’t attend this year because as timing worked out, I was across the country in New York City when it happened (March 26 – 28), so I’m especially happy the material is getting a second life online. There’s — among many other videos — a performance and separate talk by Keith Fullerton Whitman, a live set by Kara-Lis Coverdale, and a lecture by Daniel Temkin, author of the excellent book Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, which I’m currently reading. Can’t wait to spend time checking out everything I missed.
April 14th is up there with August 8th (aka 808 Day, after the classic Roland drum machine) as the best electronic music holiday of the year. And you can fold in July 18, World Listening Day, timed to the birthday of Canadian acoustic ecologist and composer R. Murray Schafer.
Each year, musicians around the world record versions of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” and share them on YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp, and elsewhere. Collected here are some of the covers to appear this year in the week leading up, and on the day itself. I kept some threads of these rolling throughout the day on social media, collating ones I located, or that I had recommended to me, like the Shane Parish one (via Curtis Burns on Threads). The first four here are particularly solid. I may add some more to 2026’s list before winding down from the festivities.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the song, which first appeared on Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs. When something cultural like this takes root, as enough time passes that you can think of it as an annual tradition, you start to wonder if and why the communal activity might ever stop — which is to say, in 25 years we will likely still be celebrating “Avril 14th” Day, and doing so on instruments and technologies that don’t yet exist, as well as on ones that predated the late-1980s technology, the Disklavier, on which it was first recorded. In that way, the song moves both forward and backward in time as it nestles deeper into the collective culture.
