Fizzy, twitchy little sonic trinkets, the longest just a couple seconds over four minutes, the shortest a little over two and a half. Lulling bits of room tone split into fragments and scanned through as if with a radio dial. Beats made of considerably less than the sound of dust brushing against a vinyl player’s needle, other times — in classic glitch fashion, here rendered all in lowercase — like a questionable, all-plastic CD player well past its return date. Beats like windshield wipers made of eyelashes. Beats like stray thoughts caught in a spider web on a rickety wooden metronome. A hushed voice struggling to be heard, and yet cagey about what it might want to say. These are the components that comprise New Old Loops, a set as compact as it is delicate, at once intimate and private, and yet vibrating with decisive purpose. The musician is Oleg Malov of Tuapse, Russia. Malov, who goes by Okmiracle, knows exactly what he is doing, and it’s low-key glorious.
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ Really digging this mix of light synth tones, nature field recordings, and slow singing from Manja Ristić and Tomáš Šenkyřík, from the Czech record label Skupina. There are moments on Vstal when the artificial tones fit in more like background sound than prominent additions.
▰ I don’t have an embed or a link for this, because the music isn’t available — yet? — as an album, but I’ve ben enjoying the scene-setting score that Volker Bertelmann (aka Hauschka; All Quiet on the Western Front, The Old Guard) composed for the new The Day of the Jackal, the one starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch. Spy thriller scores, especially those serving stories that don’t veer too much into science fiction, are a steady source of rhythmic and moody background listening, and this one doesn’t disappoint. (He’s been very busy. He also scored the new Dune TV series, Dune: Prophecy, and Conclave, both of which have album releases.)
▰ I’m still working my way through Samuel Rohrer’s new album, Music for Lovers, which I discovered due to a guest appearance by characteristically ethereal trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer on one dubby track, “The Gift.”
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating 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.
▰ Does the conductor perspiring while the orchestra plays Brahms count as Sweatin’ to the Oldies?
▰ One odd downside to being off social media from Friday night to Monday morning is may you receive Instagram alerts about stories you’ve been mentioned in that have since disappeared, as have stories those stories might have responded to. It’s like showing up to a party after it ended, but I’m happy for my low-digital weekends.
▰ Whew, a month and a couple days from the 28th anniversary of Disquiet.com. Getting that URL and getting the site going was one of the best decisions I ever made. I resisted the word “blog” for a long time, but I’ve long since embraced it.
▰ A British novel introduced me to the term “crosspatch,” apparently a derogatory word for a “bad-tempered person” (versus, I suppose, a laudatory term for a bad-tempered person?). Now I wanna hear bad-tempered synth patches. And I realize as I type this that “tempered” also has a musical meaning. And there is a synth company called Crosspatch, but I don’t think the name choice had anything to do with the slang term. They make one Eurorack module, called the Triggerpad, which serves as an interface for grids, such as the Launchpad.
Ah, as the Further Records account (on Bluesky) subsequently pointed out to me, “curmudgeon” arguably counts as a laudatory term for a bad-tempered person.
▰ Best autocorrect yet: while I was typing the word “are” my laptop decided to unfold those three letters into “aesthetically pleasing.” We’re going to wake up one morning and computers will simply have gone insane and there will be no walking it back.
▰ Remarkable how much better a laptop seems to run when you simply clean the grime off its screen
▰ It’s funny to think I might want my streaming music service to learn from my Shazam usage, like I can’t be interested in the identity of a song yet never ever want to hear it or anything like it again
▰ This elevator would make an even better synthesizer sequencer:
▰ 1999: Begin to download new email in the morning, and by the time it’s all downloaded, there’s more email to download.
2024: Begin to download new app updates on your phone in the morning, and by the time they’re downloaded and installed, there are new app updates.
▰ Let’s get liminal, liminal:
▰ “noise sewer” — Say what you will about the blight that is noise pollution, it sure does reap linguistic rewards. This phrase is from concerns in Kent about the impact of changes at Gatwick, already one of Britain’s busiest airports (telegraph.co.uk).
▰ Finished reading one novel this week, on top of the two I finished last week — and of course, immediately started reading three more. I finished Lawrence Robbins’ The President’s Lawyer, based on a positive mention by Sarah Lyall in the New York Times.
This whole series of Disquiet Junto projects got started, to a good degree, on Twitter, back when it was actually called that — and to a lesser degree on Instagram, back when it seemed like it was mostly fuzzy photos of nature and street scenes — as a result of discussions there toward the end of 2011. I’m still on social media, mostly Mastodon, but as Bluesky has been having a bit of a moment lately, I figured I’d mention: if you’re on Bluesky, please let me know your account name (email me: [email protected]). I’ve begun a “Starter Pack” — which is, in part, a way to collect Bluesky users with some shared characteristic — of Disquiet Junto participants. You can find it at https://go.bsky.app/EaKoSoS.
The Assignment: Make a handful of sonic alerts for various purposes.
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0672: Day Break The Assignment: Make a handful of sonic alerts for various purposes.
Step 1: You’re going to make alarm sounds. Think about the alarms and alerts — phone, egg timer, microwave, neighborhood church bells, etc. — that currently go off regularly in your life.
Step 2: Make a list of a handful of instances you want to create an alert for, like something urgent and something that’s a gentle reminder, and so forth. Maybe you have a different tone for each morning of the week?
Step 3: Record roughly five (more or less) sonic alerts for the purposes you decided upon in Step 2.
Step 4: Make one track with each of the alerts separated briefly by some silence. When posting the track online, be sure to list the intention behind each alert.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0672” (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.
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 672nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Day Break — The Assignment: Make a handful of sonic alerts for various purposes — at https://disquiet.com/0672/
