I dropped by someone’s place and knocked on the door — clearly, since ringing the doorbell wasn’t an option. This extensive protective treatment of the mechanism certainly begged explanation. I was told the bell was so loud that it caused the skittish family dog to have heart palpitations, and the device itself didn’t have an adjustable volume. Hence the makeshift reinforced warning system.
I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets [pop up sooner](https://disquiet.com/2022/06/03/listening-to-jennifer-egans-a-visit-from-the-goon-squad/) in [expanded form](https://disquiet.com/2022/05/29/expanse-leviathan-falls-naomi-rocinante/) or otherwise on Disquiet.com. I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself. And sometimes I tweak them a bit, given the additional space. And sometimes I re-order them just a bit.
▰ YouTube’s automated captions turned “one volt per octave” into “wonderful proactive” and I’m OK with that.
▰ I dug *Oval*, by Elvia Wilk, the 15th novel I’ve finished reading this year. When this book (about many things, among them corporations and philanthropy commingling in Berlin) pushes from club-hopping to unfettered environmental tinkering it gets invigorating and scary. Looming threat is only fully evident in the rear-view mirror.
▰ When driving over a long bridge triggers memories of early flight simulators
▰ OK, website, I’ll allow you one cookie: the cookie that tells you I don’t want you to use any cookies.
▰ Those are some serious cables.
▰ This but AI-generated short reviews of music sent by individuals who like to “just follow up” a half dozen or more times
Per [twitter.com/nearcyan](https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1532076277947330561), via qDot.
▰ I’ve got a short piece coming up in the near future at [hilobrow.com](http://hilobrow.com). Two, in fact. This one’s about a color.
▰ I interviewed Ingram Marshall last year around this time. We ended the call with plans to follow up down the road. That road has ended for him. He died this past week at age 80. I’ve thought of his music whenever I’ve heard the San Francisco Bay fog horns, and I always will.
The universe loves a coincidence, so I happened to start reading Jennifer Egan’s novel *A Visit from the Goon Squad* the week Ingram Marshall died, and I stumbled on this in the third chapter:
For years people recommended the book to me, almost always because of a rock’n’roll element, and I would try to explain that sleaze nostalgia is not my thing, and that I’m more interested in refrigerators humming than in the same three chords all over again (I meant and mean that literally, not just as a diss on the straightjacket that verse/chorus/verse songwriting can be). Fortunately the book shifts gears pretty quickly (or at least appears to, or at least adds new gears — I’m only four chapters in). And the author has less than kind words for nostalgia in the process. Though that may be a fake-out.
These moments stuck out from the second chapter:
>”He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room.”
>”the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh”
>”Nostalgia was the end—everyone knew that.”
The “he” in the first quote is Bennie Salazar, one of the main characters in *Goon Squad*. The second and third are from the especially (if you’ve read the book, you know what I mean) omniscient narrator, but reflects Bennie’s perspective, and seemingly that of his mentor, Lou, both of them being music industry figures.
For every Bennie who bemoans the rise of digital technology in modern music (and there are a lot of Bennies in that regard), there was someone decades earlier who bemoaned the rise of amplification (there were a lot of those someones, too). Bennie is trapped in his own perspective.
I’m not particularly a Bruce Springsteen fan — having grown up on Long Island, I suffered from overexposure near the source — but I definitely get his fixation on not being stuck in the past: “It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap.” The line is from “Born to Run,” and it’s directly about leaving behind a town but, like the comically misunderstood “Glory Days” (curse of the chorus, à la Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son”), it’s also about uprooting oneself from the past before it’s too late. I think of Springsteen here because that rough and tumble posturing connects with Bennie’s East Coast record label vibe, and because of his own self-proclaimed old-fashioned-ness.
I think there’s a connection between Bennie’s aesthetic anxiety, in the face of modernity, and the way his brain loops frequently back to the past — in what Egan excellently describes in this chapter as a “memory spasm.” I say “I think” because I haven’t finished the book yet.
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 6, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 2, 2022.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
**Disquiet Junto Project 0544: Feedback Loop**
The Assignment: Share music-in-progress for input from others.
Step 1: This project is about two things: (1) requesting feedback and (2) providing feedback. Keep that in mind.
Step 2: Upload a track you’re working on and would appreciate input on from fellow Junto members. When doing so, consider mentioning the sort of feedback you’re looking for: tone, production, development, instrumentation, etc.
Step 3: After uploading your track, and in the days following the conclusion of the project, provide feedback to other people’s tracks, either on the Lines discussion (link below) or on the website where they’ve posted their track.
Note: The Lines BBS runs on a discussion platform called Discourse, which has some built-in restrictions. Among these is that you can’t reply too many times to the same thread before someone else replies first. This is a “consecutive replies” matter. The best practice is to compile feedback to multiple tracks, and to tag reach recipient in one reply. If those instructions aren’t clear, just wait a little while after tracks begin to appear on the thread. Soon enough you’ll see examples of people doing exactly this.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0544” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0544” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0544-feedback-loop/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0544-feedback-loop/)
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.
Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.
Additional Details:
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 6, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 2, 2022.
Length: The length is up to you. Consider it’s a lot to ask people to listen to something very long.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0544” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.
Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.
Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).
For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 544th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Feedback Loop (The Assignment: Share music-in-progress for input from others) — at: https://disquiet.com/0544/
More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0544-feedback-loop/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0544-feedback-loop/)
I’d certainly like not to have to wait until whenever in the human future it is that the ninth book of the Expanse series takes place for this to be actual UI for voice dictation. There’s another voice-activity comment a little after this one, making me wonder if at least one of the authors, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (dba James S. A. Corey), usesd voice dictation while writing these books.
