Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto Project 0709: Overclocked

The Assignment: Speed up a machine (or process) until it falters.

/ 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 0709: Overclocked
The Assignment: Speed up a machine (or process) until it falters.

Step 1: Think of a machine (or process) you use frequently.

Step 2: Push that machine (or process) by speeding it up, until it begins to break down.

Step 3: Record something making use of the sounds resulting from Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0709” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0709-overclocked/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How fast can you go?

Deadline: Monday, August 4, 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 709th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Overclocked — The Assignment: Speed up a machine (or process) until it falters — at https://disquiet.com/0709/.

2/3rds of Yo La Tengo

Live at Duck Creek

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I first heard about the Arts Center at Duck Creek when guitarist Bill Frisell played there with his trio two years back, in June 2023. Duck Creek is way out on Long Island, in East Hampton. I grew up further west on the island, toward the north shore. I mentioned the Frisell gig, which the venue uploaded to its YouTube channel, at the time, and have kept an eye on the place ever since, hoping that the concert schedule might coincide with my occasional visits back home.

All of which is how I learned about a newly uploaded, fantastic live ambient performance from June 21, 2025, by two thirds of the band Yo La Tengo, Georgia Hubley on electric guitar and Ira Kaplan on keyboards. With echoes of Robert Fripp and Laraaji, they played a quietly psychedelic set, initially gentle and then more abrasive and out there as it proceeded, with lots of warbling noises, backwards effects, and held notes on the eBow transformed through effects pedals.

While Yo La Tengo are rightfully thought of as indie rock, they venture into ambient zones on occasion, as on the track “James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds (Monday),” which appeared when the band first launched its Bandcamp page (it was part of the album We Have Amnesia Sometimes), and the instrumentals collection The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, which was all composed to accompany short aquatic documentary films by the late Jean Painlevé (1902-1989).

Side note: ambient, contemporary classical, new age, and guitar pedal fans will want to check out an Emily Hopkins harp performance at Duck Creek from last November:

Teensy 4.1

Making plans

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I picked up a teeny tiny little Teensy 4.1, and I’m looking forward to toying with it. I think my first project with it will be the “headless” Dirtywave M8 Tracker (which isn’t really headless because I’ll be using the laptop as the screen, and as the controller).

Beatles Forensics

"I, I could see"

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Yes, when John Lennon and Paul McCartney appeared — in one of the photos in the latter’s current exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco — to be contemplating handwritten notes that were blurry, which is to say, not the focal point of the image, I sure did take a close-up shot and flip the detail upside down so I could ascertain what song they were in the process of writing. It was “I Saw Her Standing There.” The exhibit is Paul McCartney Photographs 1964: Eyes of the Storm, which runs from March 1, 2025, through October 5, 2025.

When I first entered the exhibit, I found I immediately had an early Beatles song running through my head. Then it occurred to me that what might be neat would be to wander around the galleries and ask visitors what they were hearing in their heads. But then I realized that in some room several rooms away, audio from an ancient live performance was playing, and thus seeping into all the other galleries, and that the song in my head was, in fact, the song that the playback had ever so quietly placed there.

Font Generation

Or: Things fall apart

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Whatever new generation of cash register printers kicked in some years back is now, in turn, old enough that it’s begun to show signs of idiosyncratic deterioration, and the resulting glitch of mechanical shortcomings is coming into its own. I am here for these unintended fonts.