My favorite — or at least my most utilized — synthesizer module is probably the low-pass filter. I like trimming the upper end off a signal. I like how doing so can make a sound feel distant, not just physically but emotionally. There is no active filtering on this recording, however. This is simply a very loud noise, continuously registering at nearly 100 decibels, as heard from roughly two blocks away. Distance, in other words, provides the filter. Massive portable electric generators, running on diesel and each the size of a dry freight trailer, had been placed outside a local substation when power outages hit much of the city. Up close, the sound was painful. Blocks away, it could still disturb your sleep. Out on the street, the drone — present but, of course, invisible — felt alien: unwanted, unexpected, and, foremost, uncanny. As the days went on, the sound became more familiar, but never any more welcome. After power was restored and the machines were turned off, however, I could appreciate the tonality by listening back to a short clip. I could luxuriate in the slow waveforms, and enjoy the way the drone collaborated with the sound of passing vehicles. Recording is a form of capture. I had captured the alien presence with my recording device, and now it was under my control, rather than the other way around.
Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on December 24, 2025. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of an ongoing series of field recordings that generally last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.
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.
▰ This video (and the album it promotes), by flugelhorn player Andris Mattson, exemplifies the reason I do these On Repeat segments. It’s music I listen to a lot, and keep thinking, “Oh, I’ll hold off on mentioning this, because I want to say more,” and then time passes. The album, simply titled Flugel, came out at the start of December, and the video shows how Mattson transforms the sound of his horn live. Beautiful, richly harmonic work.
▰ This is a little hyper-specific, but I have found myself going back to this single-video collection for one specific note. Ólafur Arnalds, on piano, had some musicians over for the shortest day of the year to play together, and this was the result. At 5:58 — in a video that lasts just over 14 minutes — he lets a motif resolve, and then it just lingers in the air for about nine seconds. Even before it fades, other sounds occur, as the the video shifts from one vignette to another.
▰ Very pleasing dub techno from Pittsburgh-based bytecas, aka Rui Peixoto, all the better because it’s 10 minutes long, so it really becomes encompassing.
▰ Stellar little ambient modular synth sketch by he_nu_ri, who’s based in California.
The main dining room of the restaurant drew little attention to itself. The terrazzo tables were functional: smooth surfaces and a complicated enough design to hide dropped morsels and small spills. The lighting came from massive, fabric-covered globes. The main nod to any sort of motif was a series of paintings high on the walls, images of birds so plainly figurative they seemed to have been sourced from encyclopedias rather than from the natural world. The bathroom was small, functional, and nearly as clean as the dining room, despite constant use by diners. What at first sounded inside the bathroom like an echo of voices from outside (though there is some of that, too) turned out to be piped-in bird chatter set to loop endlessly. There were no bird paintings on the bathroom walls, but the ear and eye connected the intention in the dots. This is, in effect, a field recording of a field recording, the real inside the real. (The bathroom photographed here is not the same as the one where the recording was made.)
Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Friday, January 2, 2026, in San Francisco. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of an ongoing series of field recordings that generally last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.
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 — and 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.
Right now, though, I’m on a more extended social media (and adjacent) break, through the start of January 2026. (This marks my last weekend before I get back on that horse.) Which raises the question: when I’m on such a hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since this Saturday habit is, by definition, a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week? Apparently it’s random notes I make to myself that I would have posted online, plus bits I’ve sent to friends via email and other means. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts. Anyhow, here’s this past week’s roundup:
▰ The last time I had social media posts to share was mid-November. I’ve gotten deep enough into the annual hiatus to not fully remember. I actually had to look back to confirm when it started, and I’m taking my lack of certainty as a good sign: the hiatus has been successful. I’ve found I’m making fewer than ever cursory notes as the given day goes by. Just have a few this week. I have some other thoughts on the digital break, and I may flesh them out later.
▰ On the second floor of the San Jose Art Museum right now, if you stand in the right place, you can hear two art installations overlap: a recording by Futurefarmers, as part of the Young Bay Mud exhibit, featuring the San Jose State University marching band, and solo female Hmong vocalists, in a work devised by the artist Pao Houa Her. The combination of the pair is (semi?) unintentionally fantastic.
▰ I’ve mentioned the little waveforms on my iPhone that appear when I’m speaking with someone. This is on an iPhone 17 Pro, with the “dynamic island,” running iOS 26. I hadn’t shown previously what they look like: the green is me, and the orange is someone else. This is when we were both speaking at the same time. Note this is a still image, while the waveforms vibrate and grow larger and smaller, depending on the individual speaking.
▰ As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is one of many books entering the public domain this year. It especially lends itself to the zombie treatment, say As I Lay Undying?
▰ Why doesn’t Audacity have the ability to save a single clip to an audio file?
▰ I finished reading one book this past week, just before the year ended: Jinwoo Park’s cross-cultural thriller Oxford Soju Club, which features North Koreans, South Koreans, and a Korean-American, all fish out of water in Oxford, England. It was the 27th and final novel I read in 2025. I posted the full list earlier this week. I’m now well into Flesh, by David Szalay, and that’ll likely be the first novel I finish reading in 2026.
There are various forms of distance, key among them spatial and temporal. A week or so ago, the rain had colluded with fires at key infrastructure outposts to turn off power across the city, especially in our immediate neighborhood, where outages planned and “unplanned” took a wrecking ball to holiday plans. The wind masked the rain, but nature couldn’t entirely overpower the sound of the generators put in place to temporarily serve the area while the nearest substation was out of order. Several of these massive portable machines appeared quite suddenly, and my phone’s meter registered the noise at close to 100 decibels when we walked by to investigate. That was what it was like at the time. Now that the time is at a distance, the generators, while still in place, have been turned off, and the neighborhood is back to quiet, or what passes for quiet in a city. I can summon up memory of the physical discomfort, while the recording manages to retain the sense of shock at what was unfolding.
Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Wednesday, December 24, 2025, in San Francisco’s Richmond District near the corner of 24th Avenue and Balboa. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of a collection of field recordings that last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.
