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.
▰ There is seemingly nothing Matt Madden can’t do. He’s foremost a highly inventive cartoonist, and also an expert guitarist. This is an ambient glitch track of shifting drones that I’ve been playing on repeat. Matt, an old friend, is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
▰ I owe thanks to Bruce Levenstein for introducing me to For renstemt klaver, a collection of contemplative recordings by Jo David Meyer Lysne, based in Oslo, Norway, utilizing a remarkable prepared piano of his own invention. I include the cover here to give a glimpse of what is going on. More information in the album’s liner notes, available on the album’s Bandcamp page.
▰ I owe a debt to Patricia Wolf for introducing me to the work of Pablo Diserens. This video is a concise documentation of a 2024 exhibit by Diserens, alytes, at Espacio Vilaseco in Lugo, Spain. The pinging calls are those of the midwife toad. Diserens is based in Berlin, Germany.
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 0706: Tile One On The Assignment: Make the most of your bathroom.
This week’s project has just one step: record something that makes use of the acoustics of your bathroom. (Or someone else’s bathroom.)
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0706” (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 706th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Tile One On — The Assignment: Make the most of your bathroom — at https://disquiet.com/0706/.
There’s little chance that Saturday didn’t amount to the longest continuous* walk I’ve undertaken, nearly 14 miles across San Francisco, from the southeast (Fort Funston, which had so many dogs walking their humans that you’d think you’d stepped into a chapter of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials) to the northwest (Pier 23, following a trail-ending descent of the twisty Greenwich steps).
This route is called the Double Cross Trail, and it’s a twin to the Crosstown Trail, the two meeting atop Miraloma. By my iPhone’s telling — and these things differ by device generation, even by device, so I’ll note mine is an iPhone 13 Pro — the urban hike amounted to 71 flights and well over 30,000 steps. We started off at 10:41am and were done at 5:50pm, or just over seven hours. The trail is designed not for expediency but for green spaces and variety and vistas. It’s marked in blue in the image shown here: beginning at Fort Funston, then on to Lake Merced, then Stern Grove, then up through West Portal to Miraloma, up and down through Twin Peaks, Tank Hill, and Buena Vista Park, over to Alamo Square, then up Van Ness and over into Chinatown and North Beach, past Washington Square, up to Coit Tower, and down.
The next day I felt fine, though my calf muscles registered the impact. Two days later, I’m back to normal. Gonna try the Crosstown Trail next, likely starting in the southeast corner and continuing northwest, where it ends near where I live in the Richmond District.
I can’t recommend the Double Cross Trail highly enough. It’s fantastic to experience in one stretch of time not just a sense of the range of people and places here, but also how interconnected they are. I have never stood in Washington Square and thought, “Hey, let’s head over to the Embarcadero,” or driven down Sunset Boulevard and realized just how close Fort Funston is, even by foot. Long familiar landmarks, such as the statue of Juan Bautista de Anza at Lake Merced and the Painted Ladies alongside Alamo Square, took on new meaning as I thought of them not just as proximate to other areas, but as points along a greater, city-spanning itinerary.
I expected to take tons of photos and record lots of audio, but I only took a dozen or so of the former and one of the latter, this bit of a wind chime as we we approached West Portal. On the one hand, I can be disappointed when a sound can’t easily be isolated from apparent noise; on the other hand, I found myself reflecting on the combination of all the sounds, and how that correlated with the numerous connections (geographic, cultural, environmental) revealed over the course of the walk.
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:
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.
