The Salamander Lives in the Fire

Digital social life on pause

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“The salamander lives in the fire because it has forgotten how to live any other way.”

I was reading Nick Harkaway’s new novel, Karla’s Choice (which involves George Smiley, the legendary character created by Harkaway’s father, John le Carré), over breakfast earlier this week, and I was thinking about the breaks I take from social media (evenings, weekends, end of the year), and then I arrived perchance at the above sentence. To say it registered with me would be an understatement.

To wit: Right on schedule, as we gear up for Thanksgiving, I’m off social media (Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, Facebook) and for the most part Slacks and Discords and Discourses and so forth through at least January 2, 2025, and likely January 7, the first Tuesday of the new year. I’ve also paused several email discussion groups I’m in (groups.io, for one, makes this quite easy).

I’m fully aware I’ll inevitably end up peeking, because something I’m doing — writing, music-making, coding, gaming, reading — will lead to me identifying that the best available resource is, in fact, a thread in some useful corner of the Miasma (if you made it through Neal Stephenson’s Fall; or Dodge in Hell, you get the reference). I won’t, however, be actively engaging. It’s time to take some time off: digital social life on pause.

I’ll still be typing away here at Disquiet.com (my website turns 28 years old on December 13, 2024) and in my newsletter, and the Disquiet Junto music community (which turns 13 years old on January 2, 2025, the first Thursday of the new year) will continue weekly.

I’l have my social media notifications turned decidedly off throughout. I dream of taking an email break, as well, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Disquiet Junto Project 0673: Switch Back

The Assignment: Make the quiet part loud, and vice-versa

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0673: Switch Back
The Assignment: Make the quiet part loud, and vice-versa.

Just one step this week: Record a piece of music in which you make loud that which is usually quiet and quiet that which is usually loud.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0673” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0673-switch-back/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, November 25, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 673rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Switch Back — The Assignment: Make the quiet part loud, and vice-versa — at https://disquiet.com/0673/

Getting to the Tracks

How one ends up listening to something

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I think sometimes about not just what I listen to but how I get to the music I listen to, how a recording ends up being a focus of my attention. For example:

▰ Taylor Deupree is often on my mind, in his capacity as a musician, and a record label owner, and the moderator of a great Discord, which is an offshoot of his record label. And he has an excellent newsletter on his process, which is how I ended up spending this afternoon listening to some forays into what he calls “digital degradation territory.” Beautiful stuff. Definitely give it a listen.

▰ It was then through another Subtack, dated earlier this month, from the musician Lia Kohl, that I came across the name Dorothy Carlos, whose Split EP, which came out in August, I’ve been listening to quite a bit:

[bandcamp width=640 height=241 album=246018187 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

▰ And then there’s Julian Lage doing the bluesy “Nocturne” live in Manchester, thanks to the steady feed of his YouTube channel:

▰ And the instrumental of Casual’s “That’s Bullshit,” which I sought out after a friend informed me that the rapper Saafir (who appears on the track) had died. Choice taut sampling.

▰ And a couple tracks off the upcoming Oneiris from Chloe Lula. I learned about it from her Instagram. She’s melding her cello with her interest in electronic music. Dramatic stuff.

[bandcamp width=640 height=472 album=3098417072 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

EV Car Wash

It's a wet one

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Just as the car pulled into the low-rent automatic wash attached to the gas station and wrapping around and behind the snack shop, I pulled my cellphone out of my jacket pocket and hit the big red record button. Not documented here are the interior’s colorful flashing lights, which seemed to exist solely to heighten the mechanized entertainment factor, but the sounds tell enough of the story, beginning with the high-pressure drone of the commercial cavern, proceeding through foam and the thick Lovecraftian tongues that lapped at the windshield, past the oversized brushes, and through the final rinse and drying cycles, followed by the fade-out as the car emerged back into society, just at the start of end-of-day rush hour. This was my first time through a car wash in an electric vehicle — meaning there were no particular sounds emitted by the car itself throughout — and my first time in a car wash in a very long time. A decade, maybe two? The denouement at the end was almost complete when I hit the stop — actually, “Done” — button. (Recorded November 19, 2024, on an iPhone 13 Pro.)

It’s also on freesound.org.