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 video (and the album it promotes), by flugelhorn player Andris Mattson, exemplifies the reason I do these On Repeat segments. It’s music I listen to a lot, and keep thinking, “Oh, I’ll hold off on mentioning this, because I want to say more,” and then time passes. The album, simply titled Flugel, came out at the start of December, and the video shows how Mattson transforms the sound of his horn live. Beautiful, richly harmonic work.
▰ This is a little hyper-specific, but I have found myself going back to this single-video collection for one specific note. Ólafur Arnalds, on piano, had some musicians over for the shortest day of the year to play together, and this was the result. At 5:58 — in a video that lasts just over 14 minutes — he lets a motif resolve, and then it just lingers in the air for about nine seconds. Even before it fades, other sounds occur, as the the video shifts from one vignette to another.
▰ Very pleasing dub techno from Pittsburgh-based bytecas, aka Rui Peixoto, all the better because it’s 10 minutes long, so it really becomes encompassing.
▰ Stellar little ambient modular synth sketch by he_nu_ri, who’s based in California.
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.
/ 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 0731: Chill In The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.
Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto communal music projects. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one step:
Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.
Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each January ever since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. By now, it qualifies as a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0731” (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.
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 731st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chill In — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0731/.
The drone and click and whir and rattle of the devices that populate home often recede into the background — at least until the machines emitting those sounds break. When they break, the rupture in service is evidenced by a change in tonality. Drone becomes whine, click becomes clatter, and whir becomes squeal. Until then, the sounds attain a level of familiarity that verges on the audible realm’s equivalent of near invisibility. In many cases, the sounds are not merely sounds, but hints at sounds, ventures toward sound. The noise of a dishwasher midway through a cycle hints at the unseen oceanic turbulence. Same goes for a dryer and for a refrigerator. I wondered what our refrigerator sounds like from the inside, so I set my phone to record, put it on a shelf between some milk and hummus, and closed the door. The result, the fridge’s internal monologue, feels like something in motion; while the massive structure is, of course, stationery, the noise it makes can sound like a long, slow conveyor belt going off into the distance. If you set this file to loop, the seam created when it repeats will display just how much higher the tone is at the end of the recording than at the beginning. This snippet is just a part of a longer recording, during which the pitch shifting is even more varied. The inner life of the refrigerator is, indeed, more compelling than might be suggested by the light drone one hears through walls from several rooms away.
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.
Early this morning, right when doing so became legal according to local noise ordinance standards, construction began down the block, by “down the block” meaning what was being attacked by a small army of workers was the entire next block and then continuing around its far corner and down the subsequent hill. The rattling was constant, like the world’s largest coffee grinder on a coarse setting. I set about recording the goings-on, but too many other morning noises conflicted. I set down my phone and got to work. The phone and I were eventually drawn back to the window by the sort of beeping that signals a vehicle is backing up. Each time this bulbous alert sounded, everything else quieted down: traffic, footsteps, construction clatter. It was real-world sidechain, in which the relative seeming volume of one set of sounds seemed to drop in inverse correlation with the rise of another sound, in this case the warning beeps. I never did manage to get a good recording of the rattle caused by all the hammering and digging, but if there is anything I am confident of, it is that this morning will not have been the last of that.
Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro at 9:20am on Thursday, December 18, 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.
The Assignment: Rework a shared recording from over 100 years ago
/ 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 0729: Community Remix (Nina) The Assignment: Rework a shared recording from over 100 years ago
There is just one step to this project: This week’s project, the next to last of 2025, is a community remix. In an act of globe-spanning asynchronous holiday-season camaraderie, we’ll all work from the same shared source material, a recording that dates back well over 100 years. Download the performance of “Nina” by Hans Kindler (1892 – 1949) and remix it and rework it to your heart’s delight. The recording credits G. B. Pergolesi (1710 – 1736) as the work’s composer, but more recently it has become attributed to Vincenzo Legrenzo Ciampi (1719 – 1762). Access it at:
Label: Include “disquiet0729” (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.
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 729th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Community Remix (Nina) — The Assignment: Rework a shared recording from over 100 years ago — at https://disquiet.com/0729/.
