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.
▰ A haunting new album, Lijnverkenning, from Machinefabriek, aka Rutger Zuydervelt, on the Quiet Details label. This is the SoundCloud upload, but it’s also on Bandcamp. For some reason the latter embed wasn’t working when I posted this.
▰ Beautiful live piece by Andrew Tasselmyer, working with a variety of gentle instrumental loops.
▰ Nice little live set on processed guitar by CJ McGregor for the latest Disquiet Junto project, which involves polychords:
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.
▰ Paused the dystopian audiobook I was listening to so I could hear the audio cues from the self-checkout at the grocery store, and it’s like the dystopian audiobook never really stopped.
▰ Looking over this year’s Big Ears lineup (March 26–29, Knoxville, TN) and pondering the deep direct and indirect links to the old Knitting Factory
▰ This week in barbershop music: two of the five adult males present wore black Wu-Tang Clan T-shirts, and they didn’t know each other (I had to ask). Also, no music was playing.
▰ And … 10 weeks until the 750th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto music community project
▰ You wanna draw? You wanna talk art supplies? You wanna learn from someone who knows what the heck they’re talking about? My old friend Brian Biggs, the talented illustrator and storyteller, has started a YouTube series about his favorite pencils, pens, paper, and on and on. Geeking out at its finest. As the kids say, “like and subscribe.”
▰ Me: Hey, I got my email inbox down substantially this week.
Bandcamp: It’s Friday!
▰ Didn’t finish reading any books this week, but did make solid progress on Cees Nooteboom’s Rituals (1980) and Helen Phillips’ Hum (2024), among others.
I’ve been talking about useful apps of late with friends, and I figured I’d have a page I can direct them to. These are some essential (to me) MacOS and iOS (and in some cases OS-agnostic) apps. I’m probably forgetting some, but I half think I could do 90% of my work with just these. Not included in the list are the more default options, like iOS apps Reminders (from Apple) and Gmail (from Google).
I pretty much live in Obsidian and Vivaldi. I do some work in Chrome, if it’s Google-specific. Bebop is on my phone to sync with my laptop, one of the few shortcuts on my lock screen. Whisper is on my phone, and since it doesn’t sync, I access via iPhone Mirroring from my laptop (also a shortcut on my lock screen). Plex is mostly a video thing these days, but I only use it for audio. ImageOptim and Permute probably have stronger competition, but they do the job for me. (This list doesn’t include music-making software, which is a distant corner of the universe.)
The Assignment: Write a piece of music based on a chord progression of polychords.
/ 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.
Step 2: Record a piece of music that is based on a progression of polychords. Don’t make it too complicated.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0740” (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 740th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Polychord Amorous — The Assignment: Write a piece of music based on a chord progression of polychords — at https://disquiet.com/0740/
