twitter.com/disquiet: novels, HVAC, pencils

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet), which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up in [expanded form]((https://disquiet.com/2021/10/19/hotel-drone/)) or [otherwise](https://disquiet.com/2021/10/22/rem-state/) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ “Things never sounded like what they were: guns, fire. Everything terrible sounded much more innocent.”

I finished Alison Stine’s novel *Road out of Winter*. I read too many books where plot takes precedence and there’s barely a memorable phrase. Stine layers description meaningfully. The above is a good example, in that the narrator (on the road during anarchic societal breakdown following intense climate change) herself employs description to communicate, not just to set to scene but to connect back to earlier moments in the telling.

▰ “I think it’s gonna be a long long time”

Nothing like being trolled by hold music.

▰ Quality customer service from [Empress Effects](https://www.instagram.com/p/CVQccqbAyDY/):

▰ Only upon returning home did I fully appreciate how friggin’ loud the hotel’s HVAC was.

▰ Hears sound from other room.

Thinks, “Huh, I don’t listen to a lot of music with singers, but that sounds pretty great.”

Goes into room.

Learns the “singer” I heard was, in fact, an electric pencil sharpener.

▰ I’m fairly certain *Silverview* is the first John le Carré novel with a smiley face emoji in it. (As someone replied via Twitter, we’ve moved from George Smiley, who first appeared exactly 60 years ago in *Call for the Dead*, to a smiley face.)

▰ This week’s Disquiet Junto project is about, in a sense, serial composition, though not in the sense that we generally mean serial composition (that is, not in the Schoenberg sense). Instructions went out, as always, via [tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).

▰ Thanks to my friend Bart Beaty for having alerted me to this. I love when an Onion headline is arguably even more interesting when you get past the humor: “Composer Surrounded by Discarded Sheet Music Suddenly Perks Up at Sound of Rhythm of the City” ([theonion.com](https://www.theonion.com/composer-surrounded-by-discarded-sheet-music-suddenly-p-1847909347)).

▰ It’s barely rained in years here.

I’ve watched endless hours of YouTube videos of people walking around in the rain over the past few years.

It’s raining right now.

So, somewhere in the back of my head, I feel like there’s a large YouTube video shoot going on outside.

▰ Four albums you were obsessed with in high school: King Crimson’s *Discipline*, Fun Boy Three’s *Waiting*, Violent Femmes’ debut, Talking Heads’ *Remain in Light*. Limiting to four was hard ’cause I was so obsessed. The pool for obsession was small compared to today. Those are what came to mind before bed. I slept on it before posting. Also: *Let It Be*, *Double Fantasy*, *Face Dances*, *Security*, *Mr Tambourine Man*, *90125*, and on and on.

Disquiet Junto Project 0512: The Sequel

The Assignment: Record a piece of music that follows up a preexisting piece of music.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, October 25, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 21, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0512: The Sequel

The Assignment: Record a piece of music that follows up a preexisting piece of music.

Step 1: You’re going to record a piece of music that is a sequel to a preexisting piece of music. Your finished work might be an answer song, or it might be the next logical development of melodic or other material, or it may take an entirely different approach. First, select the piece of music to which you will compose a sequel. It may be your own, or someone else’s.

Step 2: Now record a sequel, however you might define it, to the piece of music you selected in Step 1.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0512” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0512” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0512-the-sequel/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0512-the-sequel/)

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, October 25, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 21, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0512” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 512th weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Sequel (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that follows up a preexisting piece of music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0512/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0512-the-sequel/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0512-the-sequel/)

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is by Larry Darling, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

[https://flic.kr/p/9xAbhi](https://flic.kr/p/9xAbhi)

[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)

The Ingredients Are the Recipe

A new sample set from Simon James French is not just for musicians

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Sometimes the ingredients are the recipe. Why eat banana bread when you can just eat a banana? Why cook salmon, when you can have sashimi? Why make a brownie, when you can eat the chocolate chips straight from a bag? And yes, you may elect to make music from Simon James French’s new sample pack, but you could also just pop the 20 tracks into an audio player, sit back, and listen. You’d hear frazzled tones with a slight delay (“Broken Phone”), and soft pads with a textural heft (“Warm Piano”), and ominous, echoing, dank-corridor ambience (“Press”), and warped nostalgia reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti (“Drunken Wander”), among many other drifty, dreamy sonic spaces. The set opens with “Glitchy Reverse Rhodes,” in which the electric piano plays the sound of a frozen moment. That track is reason enough alone to check out the new French collection, and then there are 19 more waiting.

Released at [sjfmusic.bandcamp.com](https://sjfmusic.bandcamp.com/album/field-notes-03-sample-pack). It’s the third (“and final”) in a series.

Hotel Drone

Somewhere in the South Bay

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I think that I shall never hear a drone album as beautiful as the HVAC ambient environmental sound of a hotel room in the morning before the world has woken.

The beauty isn’t merely the drone, isn’t merely the combination of foundational hum, its origin untraceable, and more device-specific sounds, like the rumbling churn of the air vent.

It isn’t merely how the passing traffic, both air and street, adds drones to the drone, in turn creating moiré patterns of drone variations: rich, seemingly uniform, yet endlessly shifting and changing.

It isn’t merely how the drone changes as you move through the hotel room, how slight shifts in the micro-geography of the space alter the balance of tonal elements, sometimes subtly, often evidencing sharp contrasts.

It’s how the drone is still, for all its components, a single drone, one that is thick yet ether-thin, transparent yet utterly blanketing.

Norah Lorway’s Maximalist Ambience

From a forthcoming Xylem Records release

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Norah Lorway’s “digitalOcean,” off a forthcoming release on the Xylem Records label, is full-on maximalist ambience. It’s quiet-seeming music that manages to remain loud even as you lower the volume. The shimmering white noise has all the signals of reflection, of peacefulness: the absence of percussion, the adherence to sameness, the limited and consistent range of sounds. But it is anything but peaceful. This is static only in the way that being in the pouring rain means to be continuously wet. This is static only in the sense of elements taking their wondrous toll on a cliff, and the whole thing being filmed over the course of millennia and then the film being sped up for our geological education. The track is beautiful in a brutal way and brutal in a beautiful way.

Originally posted at [soundcloud.com/norahlo](https://soundcloud.com/norahlo/digitalocean). More from Lorwaym based in Cornwall in the U.K., at [norahlorway.com](https://www.norahlorway.com/).