On Repeat: Akinmusire / Halvorson, Paperclip Minimiser, Ambient Modular

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

▰ New collaboration between trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and guitarist Mary Halvorson, Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings, gets a preview with the forthcoming (June 12, 2026) album’s fourth track (of nine), appropriately title “Soundcheck.” It’s especially exciting because it appears (check around 25 seconds in) to evidence Akinmusire employing electronics to layer his instrument and, soon after, to develop foundational pads.

An advance note from the releasing label, Nonesuch, confirms this:

Though Halvorson regularly uses effects pedals on her guitar, Akinmusire’s use of one on Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings is new. Having recently gotten an updated model of the Line 6, Halvorson was passing her old ones along to friends. “Ambrose was interested in trying a Line Six. I gave him one five minutes before the rehearsal and was amazed how quickly he was able to do incredible shit on it … in literally five minutes,” she says.

“But I’ve been watching you, I’ve been watching Bill [Frisell] and other people use it for a long time,” Akinmusire says. “I approached it as if it were its own musician. I played and it would process the sound and then I would choose to react to that or not.

▰ Super dessicated minimal dub techno from Paperclip Minimiser, aka John Howes. The embed isn’t working so get the set, titled II, at Bandcamp.

▰ The YouTube account Ambient Modular has been uploading solid 15-minute sessions, largely with the same set-up, by appearances, providing a glimpse into the variety a single system is capable of. The streams happen daily starting, per the channel’s information, at “00:00 AM UTC (9:00 PM JST).”

Disquiet Junto Project 0746: Music for Takeoff

The Assignment: Help airplane passengers get off the ground.

/ 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 llllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0746: Music for Takeoff
The Assignment: Help airplane passengers get off the ground.

Record a piece of music intended to be listened to in preparation for and as a plane begins its takeoff and initial ascent.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0746” (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.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0746-music-for-takeoff/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long do you taxi?

Deadline: Monday, April 20, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

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 746th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music for Takeoff — The Assignment: Help airplane passengers get off the ground — disquiet.com/0746.

“Avril 14th” Turns 25

My kinda holiday season

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

April 14th is up there with August 8th (aka 808 Day, after the classic Roland drum machine) as the best electronic music holiday of the year. And you can fold in July 18, World Listening Day, timed to the birthday of Canadian acoustic ecologist and composer R. Murray Schafer.

Each year, musicians around the world record versions of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” and share them on YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp, and elsewhere. Collected here are some of the covers to appear this year in the week leading up, and on the day itself. I kept some threads of these rolling throughout the day on social media, collating ones I located, or that I had recommended to me, like the Shane Parish one (via Curtis Burns on Threads). The first four here are particularly solid. I may add some more to 2026’s list before winding down from the festivities.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the song, which first appeared on Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs. When something cultural like this takes root, as enough time passes that you can think of it as an annual tradition, you start to wonder if and why the communal activity might ever stop — which is to say, in 25 years we will likely still be celebrating “Avril 14th” Day, and doing so on instruments and technologies that don’t yet exist, as well as on ones that predated the late-1980s technology, the Disklavier, on which it was first recorded. In that way, the song moves both forward and backward in time as it nestles deeper into the collective culture.

Disquiet Junto Project 0745: Double Down

The Assignment: Do something you do too much even more.

/ 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 llllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0745: Double Down
The Assignment: Do something you do too much even more.

Step 1: Think about something in your music that you feel like you do too often.

Step 2: Make a piece of music in which you double down on what you focused on in Step 1. Own it. Turn a crutch into a superpower.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0745” (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.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0745-double-down/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Maybe twice as long as usual? Or half your normal length?

Deadline: Monday, April 13, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

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 745th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Double Down — The Assignment: Do something you do too much even more — disquiet.com/0745.

The Westerlies Do Frisell

Live at Roulette in NYC

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s sort of amazing to think that Bill Frisell, despite being as prolific as he is, also has so much unrecorded music sitting around that he can hand enough to constitute a concert-length program to another ensemble, here the Westerlies, and on top of it, that program introduces a new album that is apparently, per its title, the first in a planned series: Have You Heard? The Music of Bill Frisell, Vol. 1. The unusual format of the Westerlies, a quartet, is two trumpets (Riley Mulherkar, Chloe Rowlands) and two trombones (Andy Clausen, Addison Maye-Saxon), and despite the fact that essentially between them at any time there are two fewer notes than Frisell can, on his own (not even counting his various electronic processing devices), ring out of his electric guitar, they masterfully summon up his earthy mix of jazz and Americana, of tradition and experimentation, and bring an enticing attentiveness to their brainy arrangements, which also serve as a testament to Frisell’s substantial legacy. The video was recorded live in concert at Roulette on March 26, and it sounds like it’s from some alternate universe where the OG Knitting Factory and Preservation Hall are/were one and the same place. More on the group at westerliesmusic.com. And check out the album’s Bandcamp page for the informative liner notes, which include a message from Frisell himself.