Scratch Pad: Apostrophe, Allergy, Angel,

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

▰ Truly odd. What seemed to be a car alarm on loop turned out to be from a bus stop. It had gone off accidentally. A call to 311 (San Francisco) led to a call to the police (non-emergency). The noise was sorted out quickly. Unlike (most) car alarms, this didn’t stop after a minute or so. Kept looping.

▰ The absence of an apostrophe in the title to this great 1997 David Holmes album always bugged me, but the apparent after-the-fact introduction of an apostrophe bugs me even more

▰ Love when my microphone during a call thinks my allergy-induced coughing is me trying to talk and alerts me to turn on my microphone

▰ This new Jeff Parker album is a reminder that when it comes to my favorite music, the whole is often seemingly less than the sum of its parts

▰ Insane heat. A few days of chill. Then the Blue Angels show up.

▰ The Blue Angles are back for more World War III pre-enactment, canine incitement, and remote-triggering of car alarms

Refresher Course Set 5: Autechre, Photek, Coldcut

A methodical pass through the Disquiet.com archives

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the fifth set in the Refresher Course series. I’ve begun going back through the archives of this website from the very beginning, about 7,500 posts ago. The first four sets consisted of 10 posts each. Posting every day seemed a bit much for the site’s readers, so I decided for the fifth set I’d wait until I had read back through 30 posts. However, I now think 30 posts is a little much in its own right, so I may try 20 next time. Anyhow, this latest tranche includes:

Reviews of Oval and Christophe Charles album Dok, an Up, Bustle and Out record, the compilation Blip, Bleep (Soundtracks to Imaginary Video Games), Underworld’s Beaucoup Fish, Funki Porcini’s The Ultimately Empty Million Pounds, a Hollowman project, Chessie’s Signal Series, Michael Nyman’s The Piano score, Orbital’s The Middle of Nowhere, Borden Raczynski’s Boku Mo Wakaran, Bill Laswell’s Panthalassa — The Remixes, and Moby’s Play, which I gave a particularly negative take on, but over the years I came to really enjoy the album. Also, my favorite releases of 1997 and 1998.

A ton of interviews: Autechre’s Sean Booth (1997), Coldcut’s Matt Black (1887), DJ Food talking about a David Byrne remix (1997), Amon Tobin not once but twice (1997, 1998), Photek (1998), Rob Zombie of White Zombie (1999) talking about sampling and personal memory, Dub Assassin (1999), Moby (1999), Bogdan Raczynski (1999) in an email interview (unusual at the time), and an essay with four different interview subjects about jazz and electronica (Beth Custer, Jack Dangers, Nils Petter Molvaer, and Ben Neill). That last one was only just recently added to this site, and such are the time-warping complexities of datelines.

And a grab bag of other items: a riff on the use of “NP” (for “now playing”), and apparently I thought emoticons were over; the music-slowing software Slow Gold II; how to listen to pi (the number); an essay in the mock-style of the For Dummies series, so sort of a joke, except the recommendations are real; and what I think is the earliest “sounds of brands” piece on this site, a mention of music in VW ads.

Disquiet Junto Project 0667: Neighbor of the Beast

The Assignment: What's it sound like when the devil lives across the street?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This is the cover image for the latest Junto project. It shows a purple devil-face emoji against a grey background and it has the name and title of the project on it, also in purple.

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 0667: Neighbor of the Beast
The Assignment: What’s it sound like when the devil lives across the street?

There is just one step for this project. The devil happens to live across the street from you. What’s it sound like on an average evening?

Thanks to Paolo Salvagione, who proposed this project many hundreds of projects ago. 

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0667” (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-0667-neighbor-of-the-beast/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How late and long does your neighbor rage?

Deadline: Monday, October 14, 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 667th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Neighbor of the Beast — The Assignment: What’s it sound like when the devil lives across the street? — at https://disquiet.com/0667/

Buddha Boxing Day

Grzegorz Bojanek mixes it up

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Enjoy nearly a quarter hour of a bunch of Buddha Machines mixing it up, along with the sounds of the environment in which they are present. Writes the Polish musician responsible for the recording, Grzegorz Bojanek: “Aside from the Buddha Machine loops, every sound you hear comes directly from my garden — from the gentle hum of insects and the chirping of birds to the soft crunch of my footsteps.”

Jeff Parker Goes Silent (Way)

A new one from the ETA IVtet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

We’ve now gotten a taste of the forthcoming The Way Out of Easy album due out November 22 from Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, a jazz ensemble featuring Parker (Tortoise, Isotope 217, Chicago Underground Trio) on guitar, Josh Johnson on saxophone, Anna Butterss on bass, and Jay Bellerose on drums. Titled “Late Autumn,” the slowly simmering track — it purposefully never reaches a boil — is one of four on the album, and at merely 17 and a half minutes, it’s the shortest of them. Echoing Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way and the work of the Necks, it has a steady pulse above which the musicians ease their way around each other. Both Parker and Johnson are credited with amplifying their instruments with electronics, and Parker also, according to the liner notes, employs a sampler. Those effects are quite subtle, and like the musicianship in general, never try to command attention.