When I got back home from the store — with a gift receipt — I carefully peeled off the price tag, only to find a second and, in fact, a third tag underneath. The sandwiched price tag was inaccessible. The lowest of the three was from my former employer, Tower Records. This close-up photo, unretouched, better reflects my aesthetic-emotional experience of peeling off the labels than did the actual object in my hand at the time. There is so much detail here, notably those little slits, which I believe existed to make it impossible to remove a tag and affix it to another, more expensive item. The archeology of tactile media, the cycle of records being sold again and again back into the used bins, the visual wonders of mechanical typography — it’s all there, smaller than a postage stamp.
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ It’s one thing to think the sounds from neighboring construction kinda resemble experimental percussion music. It’s a whole other level when it all starts to sound vaguely like the muffled vocals of an unidentifiable singer-songwriter.
▰ The city’s Tuesday noon sirens are still out of commission, but the bay fog horns appear to have gotten a new subwoofer
▰ A happy 707 Day to all who celebrate
That’s for the Roland TR-707 Rhythm Composer, which was first released 40 years ago, way back in 1985. The above INXS track came out two years later.
▰ I love when my speech-to-text tool identifies two different speakers, even when it’s just me rattling off notes verbally. There should be an LLM STT tool called Black Swan Fight Club that identifies your various sub-personalities for you.
▰ Been digging having my phone on grayscale mode. For one thing, it looks nice. For another, I find myself less drawn to wasting time on the device. For a third, the setting obviates the remotest consideration I might have had for a “dumbphone,” not that I had much of such a desire in the first place.
▰ The fog is so intense today. I wrote all day and then went for a walk and it felt like I was still indoors.
I kinda love it.
▰ Sometimes I just think about how much toast is consumed in the book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, engineer/producer Geoff Emerick’s excellent memoir
▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: (1) Yuri Suzuki, sound artist and designer formerly of Pentagram, mentioned on Instagram that his partner, Amy Croft, founded a bed and breakfast in Margate, England, called Modja Modja House, and it now has artist residencies. He writes: “I’ve long had a passion for music and sound, and an ever-growing collection of synthesizers that really needed to be put to good use… so we thought: why not invite artists to stay and create?” ▰ (2)Robin Rimbaud is one of the OG electronic solo musicians from the 1990s, a peer — in time, impact, and sui generis quality — to Aphex Twin, Oval, and Squarepusher. His Instagram posts are regularly filled with his creative activities, as well as with a generous serving of what he is, himself, enjoying in terms of art and music. He writes detailed posts each time, such as this week about a visit to Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s “Clinamen” exhibit in the rotunda at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.
I’ve been doing my best to really contain my social media use. This means not just limiting when I post (that is: not on weekends, nor on weekdays before breakfast or after dinner — with, of course, occasional exceptions, because being too strict is its own problem) but also frequency and range of topics. These end-of-day and end-of-week posts I make occasionally are a subcategory that just arose naturally, as I found myself at the edge of land on a regular basis, at the midpoint of a walk, whether to the Pacific Ocean or the San Francisco Bay. To a degree, these will all the look the same, which can also be said of most days. But at the same time, they’re quite distinct, as here given the awesome intensity of the fog down at China Beach. I watched a half dozen crows fly overhead, chatting nosily, and I could tell their relative distance from me because the closest ones were nearly black, the ones a little further were gray, and the ones furthest away seemed almost white, so deep were they in the fog.
This sentry stands atop a hill in San Francisco. Not a sentry, really. One of the city’s many outdoor public warning system (OPWS) speakers. Except not speakers, really, either — because the speakers don’t function. They were turned off years ago in advance of being updated. Then the pandemic hit, and budgets got hit, and now the speakers are remnants of best laid plans. The recent floods in Texas are a reminder that as archaic as such systems may seem, they are an essential component of life — rural and urban alike. I’m hopeful the San Francisco OPWS will eventually get fixed, and that the Tuesday noon siren tests, which were silenced toward the end of 2019, will once again be part of our local soundscape.
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Gonna start a noise band called Din DeLillo.
(I got some fun responses to this, most mentioning White Noise. My favorite suggested a producer: Thomas Punch-in.)
▰ I managed to crash the dictionary on my MacBook. That’s a first.
(I was searching for whether we spell it “labeled” or “labelled” in the U.S., and it’s the former.)
▰ Three men sitting silently in a barbershop while Rod Stewart sings “Hot Legs” on the stereo
▰ I had a dream, before Bill Viola died, that he’d film an Earth music video focused just on drummer Adrienne Davies
▰ Ah, summer in San Francisco.
In case it’s unclear, the temperature is 60º Fahrenheit. And it felt a lot colder.
▰ I now recognize my best use of a large second screen (that is, when I’m at my desk) is not as a larger version of my laptop screen, but as a digital cork board for various smaller windows: notes, audio player, messages apps, browser windows, etc. I just keep working on my laptop as usual, and the large screen plays a supporting role.
▰ Either a funny choice or a modern absurdity, this is a captcha I had to do when trying to fill out some forms on the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) website to renew my driver’s license:
▰ It occurs to me there isn’t a day of the week I don’t spend with the Disquiet Junto. From Thursday to Monday there are new tracks arriving. Tuesday is for listening to the final tracks that appeared overnight. Wednesday is prepping the next project. And then it begins all over again.
▰ I finished reading one novel this week, Sandro Veronesi’s The Hummingbird. I enjoyed how it jumped around in time and employed lots of different formats, including email and letters. I posted, earlier this week, a list of the dozen novels I finished reading during the first half of 2025.
▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: Woshibai, based in Shanghai, China, is one of my favorite comics artists working today. Check out this piece, posted on Threads, about tinnitus. You can easily translate the brief captions using Google Translate or a similar service. I’d reproduce the rough English translations here, but I’d say part of the pleasure for me of reading Woshibai’s comics is the time that it takes for me to copy and paste. In an age of constant and immediate media, I’ve come to appreciate the pace required to select an individual caption at a time, paste it into a browser window, and wait to see what is revealed. Much of Woshibai’s work feels fractured and elliptical. This one, titled “Tinnitus” (“耳鸣”), is especially tight, and it closes expertly. ▰ Mode Exchange is new to me. It’s a venue (or maybe a promoter?) of sound work in Tokyo. The aesthetic and line-up are aces. Check it at instagram.com/mode.exchange. ▰ I love how a local used record store, Noise, one of two that are walking distance from where I live, fills its Instagram with photos of people and the vinyl albums they’ve purchased. This occurs on Instagram. Here’s a recent set of 10 such images.
