Broadcasting from Nowhere originates, in fact, somewhere, a virtual place where musicians collaborate without ever entering the same physical space. More specifically, Tokyo and Italy align in an elegant Venn diagram of lowercase music and post-classical, of strings and electronics, of everyday sound and expert musicianship, of five musicians heard to varying degrees of prominence. This is Ondelunghe, the name for the collaboration between Hiromu Yamaguchi (”piano, field recordings,” per the brief liner notes) and Guido Lusetti (”free electrons, found voices”). On the title — and first available — track from their forthcoming album, due out December 16 on the Bristol-based Facture label, graceful cello pushes up against what sounds like the granular pause of glass breaking. That is likely Henrik Meierkord on cello, as he is listed as a guest, as are Ed van der Berkel (trumpet) and Daniele Varelli (shakuhachi). What opens with a dreamy, spring-loaded alarm clock lets piano occasionally gather on the surface of the multi-faceted drone.
Orchid is an album by Magnetic Loops, a musician based in Bristol, UK. The title takes its name from an instrument, the Orchid, developed by Telepathic Instruments, a project from Kevin Parker, founder and core member of the group Tame Impala. Magnetic Loops reports, of the Orchid: “it enabled me to pull together these tracks quickly and seamlessly.” The five tracks that comprise Orchid are an appealing set of assemblages, mixes of held chords, gentle melodies, and what appear to be processed field recordings. “Fire” is a syrupy bit of shoegaze with dream echoes of Angelo Badalamenti. “Flower” feels at times more like an installation soundtrack than foregrounded music, all sonic gleams, distant drones, and natural textures. More on the instrument at telepathicinstruments.com.
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 video of textural synthesis, as a preview of a forthcoming “Procedural Ecosystem” for algorithmic composition, courtesy of Emiliano Pennisi.
▰ Aphex Twin posted a pair of versions of a new track, “Zahl am1,” to his SoundCloud account. Longtime listeners will appreciate familiar sounds.
▰ An album from Steve Hamman of EMF (electromagnetic field) sonic explorations, We Are Bodies of Light, walks cautiously between the poles of gentle and caustic.
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 find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media 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. Which raises the question: when I’m on such a hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since it is by definition a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week. Apparently it’s random notes I made to myself that I would have posted online. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts. I’m nearly done with a full week off work, but my time off social media — my time with fewer threads of conversations to track — has a full month to go.
▰ At a concert recently, the music was deep and sinuous, and the interplay of the musicians was exactly what one might hope for. I closed my eyes and I didn’t drift off, not in the slightest; if anything, I was more present. And something occurred to me in my presentness, which was: You know, at some point we all have to go, and there would be worse ways to go. (I mean I hope way down the road, of course.)
▰ I’ve found that the Safari browser and the Zen browser have been working very slowly on my M1 MacBook Pro (I know the M5s are coming out, but I’m trying to hold out until the M6), so I’m testing the Vivaldi browser, which has been working well on my laptop and my iPhone, but when I pull up the settings on my iPad (M5 iPad Pro, running current iPadOS) to sync, I get … a blank screen. There is never a day when nothing doesn’t work.
▰ I’m playing the video game Split Fiction currently (on PS5), and it’s split between fantasy mode and science fiction mode. A pair of characters represent the two storytelling types, and they have to learn to work together (as in It Takes Two — from the same company, Hazelight Studios — which I’ve also played). It’s a lot of fun, and tropes have reinforced for me that I’m very much a science fiction mode person, though I do have plans to try to re-read The Lord of the Rings this coming year.
▰ There is a certain type of movie that brings out people who go to the movies so infrequently that they can’t navigate movie theaters, and I can confirm from recent personal experience that Hamnet is just such a movie. And it differs from the novel on which it is based — and which I did enjoy quite a bit — in various ways, including the absence of the great flea/plague chapter, on screen tidily summarized with shadow puppets. It may fit into the category of films in which “screaming is acting.” There is a powerful depiction of how Hamlet expresses Shakespeare’s grief at the loss of a child, and how by having to be a ghost visiting the still alive Hamlet, Shakespeare-the-actor can address his own personal trauma and make it something that his audience can, in turn, experience — which, to bring things full circle, keeps his son present, if not alive; not a ghost, but a memory. There’s a moment at the end, when the play is staged, that is clearly intended to evoke something that happens early in the movie, and I kept thinking, “Please don’t show us a flashback. We remember. It’s only been two hours.” And I’m relieved to say, there was no flashback to this particular thing. There are other flashbacks, but at least not that one. And Max Richter’s score is quite beautiful, even if they do reuse an old piece of his music.
▰ You can tell it’s a long holiday weekend because there are far fewer than usual software updates.
▰ Perhaps the iPad has been this way for a while, but I noticed that now the up/down volume functions differently in profile and landscape modes. In portfolio mode, the “top” button (aka “left” in landscape) raises the volume, and likewise in landscape mode the “right” button (aka “bottom” in profile) lowers the volume. This is as it should be.
▰ Word I learned from Moby Dick this week: “hist.” And now I’m wondering if the shushers in the final scene in (the film version of) Hamnet are saying “hist.” And whether this bled into the “ssst” that people now say when shushing people.
▰ Finished reading one book this week, Mick Herron’s Clown Town. It’s quite good. Almost done with several others, among them Blood Meridian, Moby Dick, and Laurie Colwin’s excellent Goodbye Without Leaving (which was recommended to me by N+1’s annual bookmatch).
I have a few pieces in the works for the awesome hilobrow.com website. The latest to see publication is for Skank Your Enthusiasm, a collection of 25 people writing about our favorite ska records. Contributors include Lucy Sante, Douglas Wolk, Carl Wilson, Annie Zaleski, Heather Quinlan, and the series’ editor, Josh Glenn — and me. I wrote about “Rudy, a Message to You” originally by Dandy Livingstone (aka Robert Livingstone Thompson). The first section appears below. The full piece is at hilobrow.com.
