The festival will run in Bern, Switzerland, from September 2 – 6, and we’ll be doing four projects in advance, playing in various ways — direct and indirect — with the theme for this year’s events, which is «Blitz» (or “Lightning”), and we’ll be responding, as well, to concepts introduced by various composers and musicians involved this coming season. Some of the music we create over the course of these projects may also end up being part of one of the festival’s many sound installations. The first of these Junto x Bern projects will likely occur next week, for Disquiet Junto project 0752, which will begin on May 28.
Read more about the festival at musikfestivalbern.ch. This will be the eighth year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern. It’s always a pleasure and a privilege, and precisely the sort of creative connection-making I love to happen for the Junto community.
I call this one: The tin wall reflecting light from the stage while one of my favorite bands from the 1990s plays, having magically appeared in my neighborhood movie theater.
Also, it’s probably not tin. It’s probably Lincrusta.
Souled American was one of the first three acts I interviewed professionally, way back in 1989 (maybe late 1988?) — that was in Manhattan, for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine, before I moved to Sacramento to work for Pulse! full time — and tonight, May 18, 2026, I got to see them live at the 4 Star, mere blocks from where I live in San Francisco. I was stoked beyond belief, and the audience was treated to two sets, followed by two encores. They didn’t do “Soldier’s Joy,” and I wasn’t in the mood to call out for it, even the one time they (half-jokingly?) asked for requests; I just wanted to sit back and enjoy musical trip they took us on. The band, once a quartet, at this point is guitarist/singer Chris Grigoroff (center) and bassist/singer Joe Adducci (right), with guest guitarist Brian Smith, whose sonic beds reminded me of original member Scott Tuma. For a night, I was 22 again.
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.
▰ Solo ambient cello, heavy on the texture, from Ukrainian musician Fedir Tkachov:
▰ On July 17, Kate Carr will release Vertical London (New Year’s Day), a collection of field recordings that aim to collate the sounds of London from minus 20 metres below sea level to 240 metres above, hence the album’s title. As of this writing, four of the set’s 22 tracks are online:
“Early birds and planes in Loughborough Junction”
“I am not sure which tube station is the furthest below sea level, but I am visiting quite a few”
“Under the Thames with cyclists, joggers and echoes in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel”
“Popping up at Island Gardens.”
▰ The two-track EP Graceless is driving industrial noise, made with no-input feedback loops, from Chia-Chun Xu, based in Taipei City, Taiwan.
This past week I again visited the Audium, a special sonic space in San Francisco, and one that I have spent much time in over the course of many decades. The Audium has 176 carefully arranged speakers in a small room kept dark during performances, which often are explorations of spatial musique concrète — that is, of sound works made from recordings of sound, rather than using live instrumentation.
My friend Łukasz Langa, who went with me, took this shot of the interior after the performance we attended:
Founded by Stan Shaff and Doug McEachern, the Audium’s first dedicated physical space, with a quarter as many speakers, was in my longtime neighborhood, the Richmond District, in what is now a small office between a day spa and a hair salon. That was back in 1967.
By 1969, the Richmond District space had expanded to 61 speakers. Then in 1975, following an NEA grant and substantial construction work, the Audium moved to its current location, a former donut shop on Bush Street, not far from the major thoroughfare of Van Ness Avenue. Here’s a shot of my hand holding a photograph of the current space when it was still under construction, in the context of the space as it appears today. That’s Shaff’s son, David Shaff, in the baseball hat on the right.
There’s a lot to be said about any Audium show, and in addition to hearing everyday sounds and synthesized fragments move in three dimensions, I’ve had the pleasure of listening to a live jazz band perform, also in the dark. Something new-to-me always is happening at the Audium, and this time what struck me in particular was a thoughtful little design touch.
The lobby of the Audium serves as a gallery for an ever-changing series of sound art installations, and the current one plays through wall-mounted speakers. The exhibit is an audio-visual collaboration between Alex Abalos and Roco Cordova. What I noticed as I walked around wasn’t just the sounds or the projected images. It was how the sounds were being emitted: Each of the speakers is inside a cloth bag, which is pulled tight.
The carefulness of the speaker presence at the Audium reminded me of the snaking cables that caught my eye at a Marina Rosenfeld sound art exhibit back in 2021. In that case, rather than the bulky black cables being casually arranged out of necessity, they were artfully, even playfully, placed, and thus they became, in essence, part of the work, rather than a necessary byproduct.
In the Audium’s lobby, it was, frankly, nice not to be surrounded by a bunch of hard plastic and metal commercial objects, which is the standard mode for sound art. I also couldn’t help but connect the hand-tied cloth bags with the handcrafted nature of the space itself. It’s a simple touch, and one I’m surprised, in retrospect, that I don’t see more often in sound art exhibitions.
This article originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of my Disquiet.com email newsletter, This Week in Sound.
