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.
▰ The first track off the forthcoming duo album from pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and guitarist Mary Halvorson, Bone Bells. Bluesy, funky, gently atonal, sweet, rough. This may be my single favorite thing Halvorson has recorded to date:
▰ I love how a “single” nowadays is so universal: any standalone track that’s put out in advance of a full album release. No matter the coinage, chill out to the Sixteen performing some seriously ethereal Hildegard of Bingen (I couldn’t get the embed code to work) from their forthcoming Angel of Peace:
▰ An incredible concert recording (audio only) of Power Tools (guitarist Bill Frisell, bass player Melvin Gibbs, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson) at the Bottom Line in Manhattan on September 10, 1988, which is to say the first September of my life when I wasn’t in school since I’d entered preschool. This band meant so much at the time to me, just outta college, and it still does.
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.
▰ Looks like The Agency has been renewed, so there will be a second season — so maybe we’ll see a release of Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s score to the first season?
▰ The wind is intense. Fortunately some of it sounds worse than it is, exacerbated by planes flying by, but the power of 50-mph gusts is something to behold. The occasional beep on my phone alerts me to my concern about another tornado warning. Really don’t want to go through that again anytime soon.
▰ Current vibe
▰ Been thinking about what are probably the four most important concert venues of my life, and how only one of them is still around
Knitting Factory (Houston Street, Manhattan), RIP
Old Ironsides (Sacramento)
Mermaid Lounge (New Orleans), RIP
Luggage Store Gallery (Market St, San Francisco), RIP
▰ Just sitting here listening to the wind, the washer, the dryer, and Palestrina
▰ I feel like I’d read that the bridge* song had been tamed, but judging by today’s storm that clearly isn’t the case
*Golden Gate Bridge
▰ I don’t think I understood until now that Obsidian could have not just multiple tabs and multiple panes open, but also multiple windows. On a Mac, a two-finger click on a given tab allows you to “Move” or “Open” the tab “to a new window.” It’s fantastic, as is Obsidian in general.
▰ The link for the website exposure.band is going in and out, but the news is that on the heels of the awesome Beat tour currently underway, there’s another a Crimson-adjacent reenactment/cover band in the works, doing Robert Fripp’s solo Exposure album, with Terre Roche, Pat Mastelotto, and others. Expooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-sure!
▰ Have a great weekend, or best you can. Open a window and listen. Play one of your least favorite LPs, CDs, or tapes and decide if it’s worth keeping. Pick up a favorite book and read a section at random out loud.
▰ And I read a lot this week, but I only finished reading a few graphic novels, four of ’em: writer Ed Brubaker and illustrator Sean Phillips’ Houses of the Unholy, writer James Tynion IV and illustrator Fernando Blanco’s w0rldtr33 (volume 1), writer Ryan North and illustrator Iban Coello’s Fantastic Four: Whatever Happened to the Fantastic Four? (the first volume of their collaboration), and writer-illustrator Quentin Zuttion’s All Princesses Die Before Dawn. Making my way, meanwhile, through the massive Cryptonomicon and Middlemarch, and a thriller I picked up.
There is now a proper index — at at disquiet.com/fxf — for the ongoing Frame by Frame comics series I’m doing with illustrator Hannes Pasqualini. The next standalone episode is due out on February 17th.
It’s hard for me to describe what a huge impact Nicolas Collins’ sample-rich album Devil’s Music (1985) had on me, not to mention his later book, Handmade Electronic Music (2006), so it was a huge pleasure to be invited by The Wire to review his memoir, Semi-Conducting: Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket, due out later this month, just in advance of his 70th birthday. It’s in the new issue, the one with Masma Dream World on the cover.
The illustrator Hannes Pasqualini and I revived our 2020 comics series in late December of 2024 and ran a second new comic last month. This entry in Frame by Frame is the first on our planned schedule: the first and third Monday of each month. See a full index of Frame by Frame comics at disquiet.com/fxf, which features a special index page just for the episodes. And check out more from Hannes at hannes.papernoise.net.
