The graffiti/tag-style Post-it additions to hip-hop albums at Amoeba Records here in San Francisco do not disappoint
Street Calligraphy
In the instrumentals section
Category: field notes
News, essays, reviews, surveillance
The Christophers
Soderbergh x Holmes
I don’t often go to the movie theater these days, but when there’s a new Steven Soderbergh joint, you can bet I’m gonna do my best. I really dug The Christophers, in no small part due to the director’s renewed collaboration with the excellent composer David Holmes, who also scored Soderbergh’s Black Bag, from last year, but prior to that the two hadn’t worked since 2017’s Lucky Logan. Holmes’ second professional film score was Out of Sight, in 1998, and a few years later he famously set the tone for Ocean’s 11, and returned for the two sequels. The score in The Christophers was particularly prominent, in part because of the numerous sequences that otherwise silently surveyed various artists’ homes and studios. Also prominent: a certain considered debt to Radiohead.
Scratch Pad: Temptation(s), Earth, Tortoise
From the past week
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 tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online 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.
Been pretty low-level on social media since I got back from New York.
▰ Today in barbershop music: “Get Ready” by the Temptations. Usually there are more songs, but the barber who selects the music was on a lunch break for most of my time there, and the other barber enjoyed the temporary reprieve.
▰ Happy Earth Day. Open a window and listen. What do/did you hear?
▰ I usually read during lunch, but Tortoise on Amoeba’s What’s in My Bag? series on YouTube got 12 of my minutes immediately.
▰ Read a bunch, finished nothing, but wrote a lot, again, and that makes it O-K.
20 Solos and (I’m) Counting
Tracking the Junto trios
Most weeks, a given Disquiet Junto music community project essentially runs itself. Nearly 15 years into the process, the scenario is set: I post the prompt shortly after midnight, Pacific time, on Thursday, and folks who see it online or receive it via email have until the following Monday at 11:59pm to post a track in response to the prompt. As of this week’s project, we’ve done it 747 times in a row, week after week.
The one time a year I have to keep a close watch on things is when we do this current “trios sequence,” which is the one where someone posts a solo, and then the next week someone adds to it, and the week after that someone completes the piece as a trio. Except it’s more than one solo, one duo, one trio. The first week there are dozens of solos, and the second week there may be multiple duos based on individual solos, and so on the third week with the trios based on various duos. To facilitate the process, I maintain a close watch on the tracks as they’re added, and I regularly update a public matrix of the activities, a detail of which appears below.
This year I’ve added something to the matrix, which is that alongside the track URL, which is usually on SoundCloud, I share the message board link for the Lines (or llllllll.co) BBS, where discussion takes place. Those Lines posts are where there is often additional information about a given track, such as key, BPM, chord changes, and instrumentation. More details on this week’s project at disquiet.com/0747.
The Process Can Feel Magical
Talking trios
This paragraph appears in the Disquiet Junto email newsletter that will go out shortly after midnight, Pacific time, via juntoletter.disquiet.com
The short version of this is that if you have subscribed to this email list for some time and have yet to do a Disquiet Junto project, then this one, the one starting on April 23, 2023, is one to consider doing. The gist is this: this week you record a solo piece of music, not a complete piece, but a piece that will be added to, potentially, by other musicians over the following two weeks. Next week, many if not most of the tracks recorded this week will become duets, thanks to the additions by musicians other than yourself — again, with space left intentionally. Then finally two weeks from now, other musicians will add something else, completing a trio. The process can feel magical, especially when the same solo becomes numerous duets, and the same duet, multiple trios — which does happen sometimes. But what really happens is simpler: by recording music that leaves room for other music, you learn something about constraints, and listening, and sharing. And when you fill that space in a subsequent week, you learn the same things, from a radically different perspective.