30: Number of minutes of “nonstop” dog barking that becomes eligible as a noise complaint in Laguna Beach, California
60: Number of minutes of “intermittent” dog barking that becomes eligible as a noise complaint in Laguna Beach
500: Cost, in U.S. dollars, for a “third and subsequent offenses within a 12-month period”
Source: latimes.com
Learning why I wasn’t correctly tightening the jack on my guitar. (Note: that isn’t my guitar.)
Something I’ve wanted to do for the longest time was not just to get to know more members of the Disquiet Junto music community, but to do so in a way that helps others get to know them. I’d attempted trial runs along these lines a few times over the years, but it only finally kicked in these past few months, when I’ve managed to interview a range of Junto participants with a wide variety of backgrounds in terms of experience, geography, aesthetics, training, and other characteristics. The first 20 are now online, and there are more to come. Here they are in reverse order of publication date, between February 6, 2023, and September 15, 2023:
Matthew Ackerman: From Los Angeles: “joyfully avant-garde,” experimenting in DAWs, collaborating online
leon clowes: From London, England: autoethnography, transdisciplinary creative practice, revisiting the music of one’s teens
Ray Cobley: From Orkney Islands, Scotland: discarding nothing, living remotely, working with Pure Data
Magnus Lindencrona (aka gis_sweden): From south of Gothenburg, Sweden: observing while commuting, working with limitations
Darren Bourne (aka halF unusuaL): From Nottingham, England: ignoring dead ends, composing for dance and theater
Kel Smith (aka Suss Müsik): From Pennsylvania: handmade electroacoustic instrumentation; reducing complexity
Paul Beaudoin: From Tallinn, Estonia (previously Boston): studying with Morton Feldman and adding beats
Ethan Hein: From New York City: teaching technology and theory, sampling Thelonious Monk
Nick Sinnenberg, aka Sinny: From New York: drumming, collaborating, opting for blemishes
Andreas Winterer, aka Krakenkraft: From Munich, Germany: breaking rules and making “boring” music
Mark Rushton: From Des Moines, Iowa: streaming live, and leaving nothing on the shelf
Michel Banabila: From the Netherlands: “Be open for anything that can happen.”
Joe McMahon, aka Equinox Deschanel: From West Virginia, now SF Bay Area: welcome imperfection, false dichotomies
Klaus-Dieter Hilf, aka RabMusicLab: From Heidelberg, Germany: Mathematics, Munich, MIDI
Jason Richardson, aka Bassling: From Leeton, New South Wales, Australia: drafting, redrafting, and collaborating
Aethyr: From Sheffield, England: eschewing perfection, tweaking genres
Kei Terauchi Sideboard: From San Francisco, California (and Japan): embracing contradictions, reading to compose
xiiixxi: From York, England: growing up with Italian opera, working with Euclidean rhythms
Ian Joyce: From the North Wales coast: soporific synths, having fun, the cat’s meow
Daniel Díaz: From Paris, France: working in film, making space, keeping a notebook
Status
I’ve made it to true inbox zero. Not just inbox — inboxes, plural.
Plural?
I maintain a half dozen or so email addresses for various purposes. The main one remains the one associated with this URL, disquiet.com.
Impact
If you’re expecting an email from me (please note the qualification below), I respectfully ask that you remind me what the subject was. After a long haul, I’ve dug myself out of a voluminous email backlog, in some cases going back years. This required some tough decisions about what might plausibly be relegated to the past. Such is email. Such is life, digital or otherwise. Also, an empty inbox doesn’t mean a blank to-do list.
Qualification
If what you’re expecting a reply to is an inquiry from you to me about me writing about your music or art, please understand that I can’t reply to all of those emails, because I receive upwards of 100 a day. (This topic is covered in the Disquiet F.A.Q.) The majority of such inbound emails don’t even make it to my inbox. They’re filtered immediately to a series of folders that I explore when I have the time.
Process
I know people who can’t imagine letting more than a half dozen emails linger in their inbox. And I know people who think “inbox zero” is a load of procedural hogwash. To each their own. I’m not here to argue, least of all that one size fits all.
Hello
Don’t read this as an admonition against correspondence. I live, in many ways, a long-distance life, even though I have an active “in-person” social life, and I dwell in the U.S. city with the second highest population density (for a city with over 300,000 residents). My writing, my interests, my listening, and the Disquiet Junto music community put me in touch with countless people far away — the vast majority of whom I will never meet in person. All things said, I’m pro-email. You can, though, have too much of a good thing.
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 mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I take weekends off social media.
▰ The first spam call of the day is such a special moment.
▰ I was reading how the full line of new iPhones can output 4K DisplayPort video , and I started to wonder when I won’t even own a “computer” anymore. A lot of steps between now and then, but seems quite close.
▰ When I watched the preview for the upcoming Aquaman movie, my first thought was, “He’s fighting Deadmau5?”
▰ I fed the latest Disquiet Junto prompt into the Stable Audio web app (stableaudio.com) from Stability AI, and it’s been running for a few minutes. Either traffic is heavy, or it broke the neural network’s brain.
▰ I love details like this. It’s from Jon Pareles’ article about the new Rolling Stones album. The Watt mentioned here is the album’s producer, Andrew Watt. Can’t say I loved the first single, but I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of it.
▰ This next comment is solely for fans of Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men comics, but in Hickman’s world it would turn out there is only one Florida Man and he did everything ever attributed to “Florida man.” (I have been helpfully reminded by a friend that this is, in essence, the proposal offered by LaKeith Stanfield’s Darius in Atlanta.)
▰ This isn’t the first time, but I purposefully wiped clean my organized MP3s, stuck ’em all in one folder (mostly by album) and have slowly been re-adding them to Apple Music (I don’t subscribe to Apple Music but I do to iTunes Match) one at a time. Getting reacquainted is nice.
▰ I have quantified my sense of the profession:
▰ There’s metadata trainspotting, and there’s “What second of what minute did this album release appear in public?” metadata trainspotting.
