Autechre live, Nigerian ambient, and (virtual) driving in the rain
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This issue of This Week in Sound is usually a thank you solely to paid subscribers — a bonus round, supplementing the free issues that feature a broader array of sound studies coverage. Since I missed Tuesday’s issue — due to some escapism in the form of a lot of book-writing — I’m sending this out to the full subscriber list (a little north of 4,600 people, a rewarding concept, let me say). Here’s this latest virtual mixtape of highly recommended ambient and (somewhat) adjacent audio. Enjoy. (I’ll post the three recommendations here over the coming days, too.)
I want to thank everyone — present and past — who participates in the Disquiet Junto. This ever-changing and growing — and yet consistently paced — community of musicians around the world has been running since the first week of January 2012. The Junto projects are very centering for me to work on each week, and I know the Junto is of benefit to those who participate regularly, and to those who drop in occasionally, and to those who simply like reading the new assignment each passing week. I want to thank you all, as always, for your time, creativity, and curiosity — and in equal measure. Be good to yourselves, and each other. The Junto projects go out every Thursday so you can depend on them: they are available for you to join in when you have the opportunity and the interest.
Note: Disquiet Junto assignments are distributed via the juntoletter.disquiet.com email announcement newsletter.
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I also find knowing I will 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.
▰ I was revisiting some of the past year’s albums on labels I follow, and I was struck how several 2024 Warp releases, such as Bibio’s “Llyn Peris” and Seefeel’s “Hooked Paw,” could easily be mistaken for lost Selected Ambient Works Volume II tracks.
▰ Remember: the proper way to listen to audio files is to download the WAVs, check the metadata, add them to your player, get frustrated that the player has subdivided them into multiple albums, delete the WAV files, and then download the MP3s and then listen to those.
▰ Getting an email alert about an upcoming aerial drone safety inspection of your neighborhood’s power lines and roofs is like being in an early-years Heinlein novel
▰ I appreciate that the home security camera alert says “person seen” every time someone is noticed, like it isn’t doing surveillance and instead it’s taking the time and doing the work necessary to recognize people as individuals for their thoughts, feelings, and needs.
▰ I don’t think I understood in 1999, newly arrived in New Orleans and beginning to telecommute for the first time, that the Niels Diffrient Freedom chair I bought was a totally new thing. Mine lasted until about 6 months ago, and I’m seated on its replacement now. Happy anniversary to the original.
