Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto Project 0730: Calendar Advent

The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.

/ 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.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0730: Calendar Advent
The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.

As has become the tradition at the end of each calendar year, this week’s Junto project is a sound journal: a selective audio history of your past 12 months.

Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2025 — or you might opt for even more elements, choosing a segment for each week, or each day, for example. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, your own devising, and not drawn from third-party sources.

Step 2: You will then select one segment from each of these (most likely) dozen audio elements. If you’re doing a dozen items, one for each month, then five-second segments are recommended, for a total of one minute. Ultimately, though, the length of the segments and of the overall finished track are up to you.

Step 3: Then you will stitch these segments together, equally weighted, in chronological order to form one single track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.

Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0730” (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-0730-calendar-advent/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long did your year feel?

Deadline: Monday, December 29, 2025, 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 730th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Calendar Advent — The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments — at https://disquiet.com/0730/.

#30s Storm Breakers

With a dash of siren

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There was a break in the storm, a break between storms. A few days earlier, fire had taken out the city’s power, and now water threatened to do the same. The “atmospheric river,” the “Pineapple Express,” the potential “bomb cyclone” — so many colorful names for what amounted to endlessly grey days. An urban hike to the bay served as an unintentionally ironic way to spend the time when rain wasn’t prohibitively pouring — a walk between the raindrops, as the song goes. Being outside felt good, even as the gathering clouds encouraged a near-term retreat. At the water, the waves seemed more powerful than usual, a microcosm of the week’s weather: fierce pounding, followed by relative quiet, then more water-on-land violence. They’re called “breakers” for a reason. I raised my phone and hit the red record button, and almost instantly a distant emergency vehicle’s siren inserted itself, underlining the severity of current circumstances. Listening back to the recording, after I got home, I knew to expect that siren, and still I had to restart the track a few times, because I wasn’t certain if the siren I heard was coming out of my speakers or leaking in from outside, where clouds grew darker by the minute.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro at 3:56pm on Wednesday, December 24, 2025, at Baker Beach in San Francisco. 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.

#30s Start Stop

Back to the fridge

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Most of the field recordings that I post are almost exactly as I receive them at the end of the recording process: I hit record, I hit stop, and most of what happens in between is what I share. Which isn’t to say the audio is “pure” by any means. The device I elect to use for the recording, the time and circumstances when I choose to record, the (usually) continuous clip of 30 seconds I select from within the longer recording — all of these elements, among others, are beyond the bounds of anything that might be self-described as purism. The editing process in particular lends an aspect of self-reflection (even, at times, of what George Eliot taught me to term self-rebuke). When recording the sound emitted inside my refrigerator, for example, I immediately chopped off both ends of the process: first, when I closed the door after placing my phone inside the fridge, and second, when I opened the door to extract my phone. In between those mirror-image poles was a minute or so of sound, from which I then extracted what seemed, to me, like prime climate-controlled droning. Later, however, I kept thinking about the recording process, and I returned to what hadn’t made the initial cut. I combined the two ends into one half-minute whole. The clunky percussion of the fridge drawer and door being shut and, then, opened has a industrial-grade vibrancy. While its jittery, stuttering aspect places it in stark contrast to the monotone of the internal hum of the fridge, these two sets of sounds share a welcome practical simplicity, the beauty of an everyday mechanism at various stages of its utilization.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro at 7:57am on Friday, December 19, 2025, in San Francisco’s Richmond District. 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.

#30s Sound Bath(room)

On a mission in the Mission

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I go through these occasional spells of making frequent little field recordings of everyday sound. The word “spell” is appropriate, because the making of field recordings opens up the experience of listening in a way that is spellbinding. The more you record, the more you pay attention for things to record, and in turn the more sounds register with you, whether you elect to record them or not. Such was the case when I used the bathroom at a favorite Mexican restaurant after a fine meal of enchiladas, during which we were entertained by a fantastic mariachi trio performing on worn old instruments: an acoustic guitar, a massive guitarron (the six-string acoustic bass), and a trumpet. Each was battered from years of use, and the music sounded all the better for it — and so my ears were tuned to the opportunity afforded by beat-up machines when I locked the bathroom door behind me. The tiny, clean space was irradiated by this pummeling churn, the mix of hum and rattle that is the industrial-strength fan running at high speed. Only later, when listening back, did I even notice the clatter of dishes from the nearby kitchen, so lost was I in the hypnotic whir.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro at 7:57am on Sunday, December 21, 2025, in San Francisco’s Mission District. 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.

Blackout

New meaning to this tag

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

No post on Sunday, due to the blackout that swamped a lot of San Francisco, including the neighborhood where I live. Definitely gives new meaning to this site’s “current activities” tag.