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.
▰ Chicago Underground Duo is Chad Taylor and Rob Mazurek, and they have their first album in over a decade due out, Hyperglyph. One track, “Click Song,” is already out. To me it sounds like if the children of the Master Musicians of Jajouka had enrolled at Northwestern University or the University of Chicago and hooked up with the local music scene.
▰ The guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Chris Corsano, a nearly 18-minute live recording. On the surface it’s wild, but if you give yourself over to it, it’s quite meditative:
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.
▰ Gonna start a noise band called Din DeLillo.
(I got some fun responses to this, most mentioning White Noise. My favorite suggested a producer: Thomas Punch-in.)
▰ I managed to crash the dictionary on my MacBook. That’s a first.
(I was searching for whether we spell it “labeled” or “labelled” in the U.S., and it’s the former.)
▰ Three men sitting silently in a barbershop while Rod Stewart sings “Hot Legs” on the stereo
▰ I had a dream, before Bill Viola died, that he’d film an Earth music video focused just on drummer Adrienne Davies
▰ Ah, summer in San Francisco.
In case it’s unclear, the temperature is 60º Fahrenheit. And it felt a lot colder.
▰ I now recognize my best use of a large second screen (that is, when I’m at my desk) is not as a larger version of my laptop screen, but as a digital cork board for various smaller windows: notes, audio player, messages apps, browser windows, etc. I just keep working on my laptop as usual, and the large screen plays a supporting role.
▰ Either a funny choice or a modern absurdity, this is a captcha I had to do when trying to fill out some forms on the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) website to renew my driver’s license:
▰ It occurs to me there isn’t a day of the week I don’t spend with the Disquiet Junto. From Thursday to Monday there are new tracks arriving. Tuesday is for listening to the final tracks that appeared overnight. Wednesday is prepping the next project. And then it begins all over again.
▰ I finished reading one novel this week, Sandro Veronesi’s The Hummingbird. I enjoyed how it jumped around in time and employed lots of different formats, including email and letters. I posted, earlier this week, a list of the dozen novels I finished reading during the first half of 2025.
▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Woshibai, based in Shanghai, China, is one of my favorite comics artists working today. Check out this piece, posted on Threads, about tinnitus. You can easily translate the brief captions using Google Translate or a similar service. I’d reproduce the rough English translations here, but I’d say part of the pleasure for me of reading Woshibai’s comics is the time that it takes for me to copy and paste. In an age of constant and immediate media, I’ve come to appreciate the pace required to select an individual caption at a time, paste it into a browser window, and wait to see what is revealed. Much of Woshibai’s work feels fractured and elliptical. This one, titled “Tinnitus” (“耳鸣”), is especially tight, and it closes expertly. ▰ Mode Exchange is new to me. It’s a venue (or maybe a promoter?) of sound work in Tokyo. The aesthetic and line-up are aces. Check it at instagram.com/mode.exchange. ▰ I love how a local used record store, Noise, one of two that are walking distance from where I live, fills its Instagram with photos of people and the vinyl albums they’ve purchased. This occurs on Instagram. Here’s a recent set of 10 such images.
This week I asked the following question on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Mastodon: Who are your favorite science fiction novelists under the age of 40 who have had at least two novels published? For future reference, this would be as of July 2, 2025.
As a kid I naturally read mostly people who were considerably older than myself. However, many of their best books were published when they were under 40. Isaac Asimov had numerous novels out before he turned 40, including The Caves of Steel, Pebble in the Sky, and Foundation. Ursula K. Le Guin, born 1929, saw A Wizard of Earthsea published the year before she turned 40. Robert Heinlein would not have made it onto a list such as this at any point, or maybe just for a few months, because his first novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, came out the year he turned 40, 1947. (I had forgotten how much older he was than Asimov. When I was a kid, they seemed like peers.)
In the years after I graduated from college, I was reading novelists who were closer to me in age. Many remain favorites to this day who were well under 40 when I was getting into them (Neal Stephenson: Zodiac, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age; William Gibson: Neuromancer, Count Zero; Jonathan Lethem: Gun, with Occasional Music; Amnesia Moon; As She Climbed Across the Table; Girl in Landscape; Motherless Brooklyn; The Fortress of Solitude — jeepers).
Earlier this year, I re-read Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, which was published in 1999, the year he turned 40. For dessert, as it were, I re-read “Mother Earth Mother Board,” the fantastic non-fiction article he wrote for the magazine Wired in 1996. That got me wondering: if Wired were to assign an author under 40 years of age an article like that — a globe-trotting endeavor in hacker journalism amounting to well over 40,000 words — who would write it, and what would the topic be?
And that thinking helped me recognize that while I’ve read many science fiction authors while they were under 40 but no longer are under 40, as well as many science fiction novels, albeit after the fact, written by authors when they were under 40, I’m not at this moment reading a lot of science fiction authors who are currently under 40 (excluding comics, manga, graphic novels, etc.).
Which is why I asked. And various people helpfully responded with the following:
Marie-Helene Bertino* Gautam Bhatia Pierce Brown S. A. Chakraborty Alix E. Harrow C. A. Higgins S. L. Huang** R. F. Kuang*** Masande Ntshanga Suyi Davies Okungbowa Tochi Onyebuchi**** Eliot Peper***** Grant Price V. E. Schwab Emily Tesh
*I’ve started Beautyland, and I’m digging it. **I’ve read Zero Sum Game. ***I’ve read Babel. ****I read a third of Goliath and should get back to it. *****I’ve got a copy of Breach waiting for me.
The Assignment: Let the beginning of a book help you begin a new piece of 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0705: Book Start The Assignment: Let the beginning of a book help you begin a new piece of music.
This week’s project was proposed by Neil Stringfellow.
Step 1: Choose a favorite book, or simply choose one at random.
Step 2: Read — preferably aloud — the first sentence in the book’s text.
Step 3: Make music that somehow reflects the line you read in Step 2.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0705” (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 705th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Book Start — The Assignment: Let the beginning of a book help you begin a new piece of music — at https://disquiet.com/0705/. This week’s project was proposed by Neil Stringfellow.
