This following guidance regarding Disquiet Junto projects was included in the email announcement newsletter that went out on Thursday, January 1, 2026:
The instructions for this week’s project are the same as those for the very first Disquiet Junto, way back in January 2012, exactly 14 years ago this week. It’s a fresh start to a new year.
Since this is a ripe time for resolutions, I want to clarify that there is no intention inherent in the Disquiet Junto that people should do every project every week. Certainly feel free, but don’t take on any unnecessary pressure. The Junto projects go out weekly simply so they are dependable: when you have the time and interest, they are ready for you.
I will mention one other thing, which is that it’s recommended not to concern yourself too much with whether a given project feels like your thing; often people have had the best results and the most rewarding experience by taking on a random project, regardless of their cultural and procedural predilections.
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.
/ 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 0731: Chill In The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.
Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto communal music projects. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one step:
Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.
Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each January ever since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. By now, it qualifies as a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0731” (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 731st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chill In — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0731/.
I finished reading 28 novels this year. There are 27 listed below, because the 28th is an unpublished one by someone who asked me to help edit it. In addition, I started to read and then stopped reading several novels, notably George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which I got 25% of the way through, then waited six-plus months, and then started over from the beginning, and I’m now about 13% of the way through. It’s funny to come across highlighted passages and be like, “What did this mean to me?” In any case, I’ve found a through line of interest, and even if Eliot’s attention to courtship gets monotonous, I trust I’ll finish it in 2026. Moby Dick and Blood Meridian, both of which I did complete, were part of an ongoing attempt to tackle classics I haven’t dug much in the past, the same process that got me into Middlemarch. I got through those two, but I can’t say they particularly registered with me. Two of the novels listed here are re-reads: Cryptonomicon (my fourth time through) and The Good Soldier (for the first time since my teens). I may have read The Talented Mr. Ripley previously, decades back, but even if so I had zero particular memory of it this time around. I read the first of the two Elmer Kelton books because I read True Grit, by Charles Portis, last year and then was making my way through the absurdly nihilistic Blood Meridian this year, and recognized I had never read a “real” western, and asked a friend to recommend several. After reading, and really digging, one Kelton, I immediately read a second. I’ve put + signs next to a selection of books I particularly recommend, though take those with a grain of salt. If you ask me in a few months, the recommendations will likely shift.
C.S. Lewis — The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Jakob Kerr — Dead Money
+ Neal Stephenson — Cryptonomicon
Ford Madox Ford — The Good Soldier
Cory Doctorow — Walkaway
Ali Smith — Autumn
+ Joan Didion — Play It as It Lays
+ Adrian Tchaikovsky — Children of Time
Michael Connelly — The Black Echo (Bosch Vol. 1)
Stephen King — The Long Walk
Patricia Highsmith — The Talented Mr. Ripley
Michael Connelly — The Black Ice (Bosch, Vol. 2)
Sandro Veronesi — The Hummingbird
Marie-Helene Bertino — Beautyland
C. A. Higgins — Lightness
Ray Nayler — The Mountain in the Sea
Elmer Kelton — The Day the Cowboys Quit
+ Elmer Kelton — The Good Old Boys
+ Rudy Rucker — Software
+ Mick Herron — Clown Town
+ Laurie Colwin — Goodbye Without Leaving
Herman Melville — Moby Dick
Cormac McCarthy — Blood Meridian
Ian McEwan — What We Can Know
Sarah Gailey — Spread Me
Jon Fosse — Morning and Evening
Jinwoo Park — Oxford Soju Club
The above doesn’t include non-fiction or graphic novels, which I track less closely. Maybe I’ll be more attentive to documenting those reads in 2026.
Likely the last hike of the year, given the imminent rain. Up and down Mori Point, where it’s unclear when the rock ends and the dirt begins. Then some fine ramen for dinner, followed by an old Agnès Varda movie, Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), I’d never seen before. Watched at home on the TV, yeah, but start to finish, never hit pause once. Absolutely fantastic sound. There’s a scene early on when the title protagonist enters a cafe, and between the street noise and the interior cacophony, a vehicle is heard passing by, and it’s like a strip of ribbon covers the seam of the transition. Later, she exits a building and there’s a little boy banging at the curb on a tiny toy piano. The score then fades in, and its rattling arrangement clearly adopts the child’s playing. Those are just two moments among myriad in a remarkable film.
I only just made the connection that the artist Pae White whose 12,000-disc sculpture currently hovers above the entrance just inside the San Jose Museum of Art is the Pae White of the “Pae White’s non-blank graphic metacard” from the Oblique Strategies deck created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. The museum piece is titled Noisy Blushes and was made between 2019 and 2020.
