There is already a lot of quotidian footage available of the video game Cyberpunk 2077, and more is being uploaded of late, thanks to the recent version 2.3 upgrade of the game, which appears to be tied to the official macOS version finally being released. I don’t know, yet, if there are any particularly interesting new sonic aspects to these updates (aside from “built-in Spatial Audio with head-tracking for AirPods,” per 9to5mac.com). Still, it’s a good time to ride along at night, and enjoy city noises and those of engines idling:
And you can take an extended walk (over an hour and a half) through various neighborhoods, and listen to all manner of industrial and NPC activity. The sheer depth of immersive environmental sound in Cyberpunk 2077 remains highly impressive. In a given moment, you can hear footsteps, and HVAC drones, and various vehicles, and conversations, and gunfire, and on and all, all shaped by the space you’re in and specific to the given neighborhood and the state of the gameplay.
A lot of videos purporting to share in-game ambience are actually marred by inclusion of the music, but if you hunt around, you’ll find pure diegetic recordings such as these.
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 duet between guitarist Eivind Aarset and electronic musician Jan Bang was recorded early in the pandemic, but I believe has only just now appeared online. A lot of the music Aarset makes is deeply indebted to Miles Davis’ electric era, and to the subsequent work of Jon Hassell; this track is a reminder that Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which bears the influence of Hassell, also looms large. The piece, “Witness,” originally appeared on the duo’s fantastic 2020 album Snow Catches On Her Eyelashes.
▰ A very tight saxophone quartet performance, by the Amstel Quartet, based in Amsterdam, of a segment of Philip Glass’ score to Mishima. This is Vitaly Vatulya, soprano; Olivier Sliepen, alto; Bas Apswoude, tenor; and Harry Cherrin, baritone. There are moments when the highest part, which I assume is Vatulya’s soprano, chiming away, puts this over the top. Just tremendous.
▰ Ted Laderas, aka the OO-Ray, is back — or will be soon — with the forthcoming solo album Marginals, on the great Beacon Sound label. It’s due out August 15, 2025. Laderas plays solo cello with an array of electronic accompaniment and processing. Two tracks are up for pre-release listening. Especially recommended is “Harrow,” which has a quiet pulse and thick layers of playing.
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.
▰ I’m not saying the fog isn’t thick today. Thick it is: no bridge, no Headlands. But when it’s this thick and there’s no fog horns, I wonder if I’m overestimating its thickness, like it’s so thick that it’s muffled the sound. A tugboat drones along China Beach, simply to confirm my ears haven’t gone.
▰ I’m reading Moby Dick, which is way funnier than I expected: “cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical” (actual quote). I’m 18 (short) chapters in, and there is much comedy gold. I love how Ahab’s cartoonish henchmen are like “No cannibals!” Then the cannibal, Queequeg, throws a touchdown. And they’re all: “We want the cannibal!” (Those last two are paraphrases.) Also, how they call Queequeg “Hedgehog.” OMG.
▰ MP3s, FLACs, and WAVs: “Music metadata is a mess”
ebooks: “Hold my beer”
▰ I’m prone to earaches when it’s windy, and I’ve been amazed by how earbuds essentially solved this problem: I set the earbuds to ambient* mode and then go for a walk.
*that is, enhancing the environmental sounds, not listening to ambient music at a high volume
▰ I often read a novel over breakfast, but there are better ways to start the day than a protagonist’s dog and (human) oldest friend both dying within a few paragraphs of each other.
▰ I’ve switched browsers on a test basis (Zen, a streamlined take on Firefox). With a heavily used tool like a browser, such a switch means a lot of muscle-memory revisions and habit shifts. Emerging from a week of UX decompression, I find myself still not recognizing the new browser’s logo as my browser when I tab through the open software on my laptop. Otherwise, I feel at home.
▰ I finished reading one novel this week, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I enjoyed it, even though I ventured in due to the suggestion of science fiction, which then becomes an either-or decision on the part of the individual reader, and I found myself erring on the side of it not being science fiction, which meant the book’s end proved quite dark, which is an interesting effect, amounting to an encouragement, after the fact, for the non-believing reader to retroactively believe the protagonist, in order for the end to be recast as a positive one.
The Assignment: Make music from how you make music
/ 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 0707: Chain of Practice The Assignment: Make music from how you make music.
This project is the third of three that are being done by the Disquiet Junto in collaboration with the 2025 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 3 through 7. The festival topic this year is « Kette » — which translates, as the organization explains, to “Chain”: “Chains connect but they also bind. They create relationships but also restrictions. As a gift they look nice, feared when used in vice, and yet they can span bridges across fire and ice.” All three Junto projects this year engage with the work of Svetlana Maraš, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 festival.
We are working again at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the seventh year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern. Tobias helped prepare this week’s compositional concept.
Step 1: Think about your artistic practice.
Step 2: Write down one sentence that in some manner describes your artistic practice.
Step 3: Record yourself, or someone else, reading the sentence that resulted from Step 2.
Step 4: Use the recording made in Step 3 as the sole source material for a new musical/sonic composition.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0707” (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.
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 707th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Practice — The Assignment: Make music from how you make music — at https://disquiet.com/0707/.
