A highlight from the Es Devlin exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in Manhattan. This is a plan for her installation at the 2021 Art Basel in Miami Beach, Florida. Titled Five Echoes, it was a full-scale maze based on the floor of the Chartres Cathedral, a “sound sculpture” that contained a “temporary forest”: “We immersed visitors within a soundscape that Invited them to learn each plant and tree species’ name, making a habitat for the non-human species within the human imagination.” The exhibit runs through August 11.
This old white van is something of a neighborhood white board. It gets written over, and then it’s painted over, and then the circle of urban life begins anew.
As I type this, I’m preparing to drive over to Berkeley, from San Francisco, to see guitarist Bill Frisell in a sextet that will be premiering new music. The group, who will play at Freight & Salvage, consists of Frisell plus violinist Jenny Scheinman, violist Eyvind Kang, cellist Hank Roberts, bassist Thomas Morgan, and drummer Rudy Royston.
There is, as far as I can tell, no available footage or audio of them playing as a group, so I’ve been piecing together a mental sonic image, as it were, from various smaller group settings.
These two short videos are all the strings from the sextet excepting the bass, filmed back on November 4, 2017. It’s the same group (Frisell, Sheinman, Kang, Roberts) who recorded the 2011 album Sign of Life (Savoy) and the 2005 album Richter 858 (Songlines). The latter was recorded back in 2002, so this is no new partnership by any means.
Roberts has, I believe, with Frisell, the longest-running association of all the musicians playing in the premiere. There’s plenty of examples, both commercial releases and live video, including this short piece, recorded June 15, 2014, at the New Directions Cello Festival, at Ithaca College, in Ithaca, New York.
Roberts was one of the first musicians I interviewed professionally, shortly after I got out of college in 1988. By then I had interviewed numerous musicians for a school publication, including the drummer Bill Bruford (Yes, King Crimson) and the Joseph Shabalala (founder of the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo). After school I moved to New York City (first Manhattan and then Brooklyn), and for a solid swath of that time I was lucky to score a shared apartment on Crosby Street just south of Houston, incredibly close to the Knitting Factory, where I went several times a week and saw Frisell, Roberts, and so many “Downtown” musicians of that era in each other’s groups. I also saw Frisell play at the Village Vanguard around that time, but mostly just went to whatever was at the Knitting Factory on a given night. When I interviewed Roberts, it was on the subject of his then fairly new record, Black Pastels. (I wrote the piece for Pulse! magazine, published by Tower Records. In 1989 I moved to California to be an editor at Pulse!)
Frisell, bassist Morgan, and drummer Royston have recorded and toured widely and frequently in recent years. Here they are on July 3, 2023, at Arts Center at Duck Creek.
I’m imagining tonight’s music will have the “chamber Americana” quality of the quartet heard above, but the presence of Royston may rev things up a little, and it may have more of a jazz quality, closer to the trio work highlighted here.
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ The sole downside to opening the living room window is the terrible music that people play in their cars
▰ I saw Brad Mehldau two weeks ago. I’m seeing Bill Frisell and Hank Roberts together in a few days. Both times as part of larger ensembles (quintet and sextet respectively). Life is pretty good.
▰ Are there any recordings of Bill Frisell and Brad Mehldau playing together other than those on the soundtrack to the Wim Wenders film Million Dollar Hotel?
▰ It’s extraordinary that a subset of the consumer electronics manufacturing class happily foresees a future in which everyone openly records every interaction, including face-to-face ones. It’s a glimpse at a potential radical realignment of what it means to speak not only in public but in private.
▰ Amazing how those AI discussion summary bots that join calls can totally diminish the small talk and casual interactions. It’s like someone purposefully set out to make video calls worse.
▰ I just noticed that April 14 isn’t just a favorite holiday of electronic music fans. It also was the first time, back in 2016, that the Disquiet Junto projects began appearing as part of the Lines BBS, after 223 weeks just on SoundCloud, Disquiet.com, and social media.
▰ If keeping a journal is a struggle for you, write a letter. You needn’t even mail it. Think of an ideal audience — friend or family, alive or not — and write to them. Much of my journal is excerpts of stuff I say to people in emails and texts I’d never have written had it not been intended for them.
▰ Honk if an email subject line about “markdown” makes you think file type not cost reduction
▰ Alert: We are now 25 weeks from the 666th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project.
▰ There’s a unique memory hole related to software that’s sunsetted before there’s a Wikipedia page to document it having existed in the first place
▰ My hotel room’s one, tiny window did provide a view of the Empire State Building.
▰ The spellcheck in Slack doesn’t recognize “Akihabara.” Oh, neither does this one. Must be system-wide.
▰ After seeing that new Taylor Swift album art, I kinda expected a Joy Division cover or two
▰ I saw a lot of mysterious doorways in Manhattan. This one was a definite favorite:
▰ When you get home from a vacation and start receiving the inevitable email offers from restaurants, bookstores, and other places you visited and are now 3,000 miles away from
Way back in March 2013, I recorded the Tuesday noon siren that used to resound throughout San Francisco. The siren has since been silenced for municipal budgetary reasons, but the recording lives on. It is one my most listened-to tracks on SoundCloud, and it’s been sampled by various musicians over time — as have other recordings of the siren that circulate on the internet.
And now, for the first time, my recording has appeared on a vinyl record album. Neil Stringfellow, who records as Audio Obscura, opens his new full-length album, Acid Field Recordings in Dub, with a track titled “Through Nuclear Skies,” which begins with my siren recording, before deep dubby sounds take over.
Embedding hasn’t been working for me lately, so head to audioobscura.bandcamp.com to listen. And here’s the original audio:
