Scratch Pad: Final Days of Hiatus

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad — and I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online 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.

Right now, though, I’m on a more extended social media (and adjacent) break, through the start of January 2026. (This marks my last weekend before I get back on that horse.) Which raises the question: when I’m on such a hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since this Saturday habit is, by definition, a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week? Apparently it’s random notes I make to myself that I would have posted online, plus bits I’ve sent to friends via email and other means. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts. Anyhow, here’s this past week’s roundup:

▰ The last time I had social media posts to share was mid-November. I’ve gotten deep enough into the annual hiatus to not fully remember. I actually had to look back to confirm when it started, and I’m taking my lack of certainty as a good sign: the hiatus has been successful. I’ve found I’m making fewer than ever cursory notes as the given day goes by. Just have a few this week. I have some other thoughts on the digital break, and I may flesh them out later.

▰ On the second floor of the San Jose Art Museum right now, if you stand in the right place, you can hear two art installations overlap: a recording by Futurefarmers, as part of the Young Bay Mud exhibit, featuring the San Jose State University marching band, and solo female Hmong vocalists, in a work devised by the artist Pao Houa Her. The combination of the pair is (semi?) unintentionally fantastic.

▰ I’ve mentioned the little waveforms on my iPhone that appear when I’m speaking with someone. This is on an iPhone 17 Pro, with the “dynamic island,” running iOS 26. I hadn’t shown previously what they look like: the green is me, and the orange is someone else. This is when we were both speaking at the same time. Note this is a still image, while the waveforms vibrate and grow larger and smaller, depending on the individual speaking.

▰ As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner is one of many books entering the public domain this year. It especially lends itself to the zombie treatment, say As I Lay Undying?

▰ Why doesn’t Audacity have the ability to save a single clip to an audio file?

▰ I finished reading one book this past week, just before the year ended: Jinwoo Park’s cross-cultural thriller Oxford Soju Club, which features North Koreans, South Koreans, and a Korean-American, all fish out of water in Oxford, England. It was the 27th and final novel I read in 2025. I posted the full list earlier this week. I’m now well into Flesh, by David Szalay, and that’ll likely be the first novel I finish reading in 2026.

#30s Unplanned Drone

Un-recommended listening

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are various forms of distance, key among them spatial and temporal. A week or so ago, the rain had colluded with fires at key infrastructure outposts to turn off power across the city, especially in our immediate neighborhood, where outages planned and “unplanned” took a wrecking ball to holiday plans. The wind masked the rain, but nature couldn’t entirely overpower the sound of the generators put in place to temporarily serve the area while the nearest substation was out of order. Several of these massive portable machines appeared quite suddenly, and my phone’s meter registered the noise at close to 100 decibels when we walked by to investigate. That was what it was like at the time. Now that the time is at a distance, the generators, while still in place, have been turned off, and the neighborhood is back to quiet, or what passes for quiet in a city. I can summon up memory of the physical discomfort, while the recording manages to retain the sense of shock at what was unfolding.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Wednesday, December 24, 2025, in San Francisco’s Richmond District near the corner of 24th Avenue and Balboa. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of a collection of field recordings that last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.

Jamuary 2026 01–02

Giving it another go

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The annual Jamuary — that isn’t a spelling error — event is a month-long, communal effort during which people (try to) commit to recording one piece of music a day. I’ve never made it all the way through the month, but that repeat failure hasn’t kept me from trying my hand at it again this year.

The calendar reads January 2 as I type this, with two more days of holiday break left before the start of the work-year, a year that looks to be plenty packed, between proper work and personal/professional creative efforts. We’ll see where 2026 goes. I don’t think I’ll post these Jamuary pieces here individually, more likely in small batches. Here are the first two days:

▰ 01\31 — “Retail Pneumat”: I’ve been experimenting with taking field recordings and reworking the material by repeating and layering small segments, as well as applying light effects, notably pitch-shifting. That’s what this is. I use various tools. In this case, I did it all just in Audacity. The source audio is something I recorded in an office supply store on my phone. (I also used this as my first track of the year in Weekly Beats, which is sort of like Jamuary, except aimed at one track a week for the year, rather than one track a day for a month.)

▰ 02\31 — “Cashier Seq”: Another go at transforming a field recording. This is based on the same source audio as my first Jamuary track of the year. This time around, I pulled out the ping of the cash register, and then created some melodic loops of it in VCV Rack, using pitch-shifting, and then imported those back into Audacity, where I did some subsequent editing.

▰ “Retail Phase”: And for reference, this is the source audio on which the above two are based. Working with field recordings as source material for musical manipulation and creation is a useful engagement for thinking about everyday sound. To listen closely to such audio is to find patterns both in the recordings and in everyday life. Once you start working, hands-on, with that raw material, you start to more readily hear the music inherent in quotidian experiences. The seeming lines between music and sound, between music and noise, and between sound and noise begin to disappear.

On Pressure and Being Particular

Some guidance on the Disquiet Junto

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This following guidance regarding Disquiet Junto projects was included in the email announcement newsletter that went out on Thursday, January 1, 2026:

The instructions for this week’s project are the same as those for the very first Disquiet Junto, way back in January 2012, exactly 14 years ago this week. It’s a fresh start to a new year.

Since this is a ripe time for resolutions, I want to clarify that there is no intention inherent in the Disquiet Junto that people should do every project every week. Certainly feel free, but don’t take on any unnecessary pressure. The Junto projects go out weekly simply so they are dependable: when you have the time and interest, they are ready for you.

I will mention one other thing, which is that it’s recommended not to concern yourself too much with whether a given project feels like your thing; often people have had the best results and the most rewarding experience by taking on a random project, regardless of their cultural and procedural predilections.

Disquiet Junto Project 0731: Chill In

The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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 0731: Chill In
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.

Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto communal music projects. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one step:

Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each January ever since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. By now, it qualifies as a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0731” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0731-chill-in/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How slow a thaw are you up for?

Deadline: Monday, January 5, 2026, 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 731st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chill In — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0731/.