Disquiet Junto Project 0739: Deepest Sympathies

The Assignment: Make music focused on sympathetic strings, or something akin to them.

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.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0739: Deepest Sympathies
The Assignment: Make music focused on sympathetic strings, or something akin to them.

Step 1: Consider this concept: When you play a single string on a guitar, or a harp, or another stringed instrument, other strings vibrate in harmony with it. Some instruments, such as the sitar, sarod, and the Hardanger fiddle, have sympathetic strings inherent in their design. This sort of sympathetic vibration is also the case with tuning forks.

Step 2: Record a piece of music exploring, as much as possible, the sound of sympathetic strings unto themselves. This might be a practical experiment, trying to isolate the sounds, or a conceptual approach, using the idea as inspiration.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0739” (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.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0739-deepest-sympathies/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, March 2, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

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 739th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Deepest Sympathies — The Assignment: Make music focused on sympathetic strings, or something akin to them — at https://disquiet.com/0739/

Command + M

Or, Why I Live in My Inbox

For whatever reason, I peeked at an old manual for Eudora, and remembered regularly hitting Command + M to see if there was any new email, back when there wasn’t much email. Remember when there wasn’t much email? When spam email essentially didn’t exist? A golden era of untrammeled possibilities. What glorious fools and dreamers we were.

And just a reminder that Eudora was named for Eudora Welty, which is about as far from the Torment Nexus as a naming exercise might lead. On the other hand, you could argue that as in Welty’s short story, “Why I Live at the P.O.,” we all live at the post office these days.

Don’t Touch

Truer words

Maybe a book about communicable diseases isn’t the thing to pick up from the local free little library. And as someone pointed out after I first posted this, right next to that book is a book titled Never Touch a Panda!

F Ching

The Facebook of changes

Shows top navigation from Facebook

I will never not love that if Facebook is loading very slowly on a cell phone’s browser, the top navigation briefly resembles the I Ching in the ambiguous state before the hexagrams have been determined — or, in quantum terms, have collapsed.​

17 x 7″

Vinyl life

Been going through my old records, including my 7″ singles, which I keep in these old purpose-made boxes I’ve picked up at thrift stores, used record shops, and garage sales over the years. I love this one in particular. It’s the most nondescript of the set, but it has this fantastic little tag, which has hung there for many decades, since long before I owned it, maybe before I was born.