Disquiet

*From today’s weekly edition of the email ([tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto)) I send to the Disquiet Junto community members:*

Sleepily, I typed this while the cup of coffee to my right slowly dissolved the two ice cubes I placed in it a little over 10 minutes before starting. The time was 7:16am as I began typing this email, though my body knew it was really 6:16am. These cubes — of course not these exact cubes — were in my cup of coffee the very first week I sent out the Disquiet Junto, way back in January 2012. The sound of the ice popping, rattling, and whizzing partly informed the original Junto project, the one we now do at the start of every calendar year.

Change has come slowly to the Junto over the past decade, but when change works, it has a tendency to settle in. For example, only this year did I begin to use automation to post the latest Junto project to Disquiet.com and to [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet) while I’m asleep. If Tinyletter could do automated emails, you’d have received this already. Likewise the [llllllll.co](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0533-numbers-magik/) post. Instead, I’m sending and updating now that I’m awake — or as soon as the coffee kicks in. (Last week it hadn’t, which is why I first accidentally sent the project to my other email list, This Week in Sound: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](https://tinyletter.com/disquiet). That was a mess, though no one complained — at least not to me.)

Similarly, the trios project sequence (more on which in the instructions, if you’re new to the Junto and it isn’t familiar) that was an experiment back in 2018 has become so routine that I find it hard to believe we hadn’t started it years earlier. One thing about the trios project sequence is that each time the third of the weekly phases is complete, I have it in mind to do a fourth round that takes the collective material as a shared sample resource, but most of the time it feels like overkill. And so this year I waited a few weeks. And now we’re going to revisit the recent trios project in the form of a communal remix. Can’t wait to hear what people do with it. The instructions are brief, just two steps, but please read them carefully, especially the second step.

Each week I say thanks for your generosity and your creativity. In the case of remix and collaborative projects like the trios, the word “generosity” is more literal, in that I am referring, in part, to your comfort in making your music available for others to alter. That takes some amount of trust, and I want to say that trust is appreciated. 

It’s been almost nine years since Jeffrey Melton died. On Twitter, he was better known as Nofi. Melton was an early Junto member, a key participant in Twitter Junto discussion. He and I never met in person. I never heard his voice. His death was a unique one for me. It felt unusual in March 2013: a sorrowful, abstract gut punch.

A wise friend once told me you’re never sad about one thing at a time. At the time of Melton’s death I was sad for the loss, sad for his family (he and his wife had a son), and sad at the premonition: short of war (which of course, as I write this, is actual, not hypothetical, and all the closer due to online friendships and news), we may very well lose many more people than our parents lost. It will be a different loss than they experienced, much as people who never leave their hometowns have different personal connections than those who go away for school, who travel, and who settle somewhere else, if they settle at all.

Nine years after Melton’s death, adoption of online life has spread, scaled, mutated, and become normalized even as it mutates further. I think, perhaps, we’re a little more used to deaths of digital friends now. Not inured, just a little more familiar — a strange gap where there had been a kind of presence, an echo that no longer echoes, a source that has run dry, a potential sounding board that has evaporated, and over time: a memory that always lacked a physical form; a silhouette of a concept that was always, to some degree, a concept.

In 2013, within a week of Melton’s death, we memorialized him in the 66th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project, when participants played along with one of his recordings: [“Communing with Nofi.”](https://disquiet.com/2013/04/04/disquiet0066-nonofi/)

At the time of this writing, Melton’s Twitter account remains public: [twitter.com/nofi](https://twitter.com/nofi). There are a little more than [a dozen](https://twitter.com/search?q=junto%20(from%3Anofi)&src=typed_query) of his tweets mentioning the Junto, among them ones about his efforts to compile a list of the email accounts of Twitter participants. There are additional ones in which he and I corresponded. In what appears to be the last one, he [quoted](https://twitter.com/nofi/status/191331621998305280) some language that had come out of the Junto project: “Social music is about participating not promoting.”

Jeffrey Melton was from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he died in Indianapolis at the age of 42. There’s a brief obituary for him at [legacy.com](https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/fortwayne/name/jeffrey-melton-obituary?id=20697538).