The above screenshot is from the movie Relay, a recent thriller starring Riz Ahmed reminiscent of Hitchcock and mid-period Mamet. I may write more about the movie later, but at the moment what I’m wondering about is what a “stunt cello” is, and how it’s different from the non-stunt cello also listed here. There is a sequence with a string ensemble, so maybe “stunt cello” refers to the person who plays that cello on-screen? I dunno.
This is the email that went out, along with the latest project instructions, on Christmas Eve to email list subscribers:
Dear Members of the Disquiet Junto,
Next Thursday is the first day of 2026, which means that this week’s project is the last one of 2025. If you’ve been involved in the Junto — or followed it — for some time, you likely know what this week’s and next week’s projects are going to entail, since we do the “diary project” at the end of every year, and the “ice project” at the start of every year.
We just finished up the 729th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project, and it went great. I had a sense that, as this year came to a close, a “shared sample” project would be a particularly welcome opportunity for people, the idea of everyone involved, wherever in the world, using the same source audio to make something new, something personal. To listen back (at llllllll.co and soundcloud.com) to the work of the four dozen or so musicians who participated is a downright kaleidoscopic experience, hearing that 100-year-old recording broken up and reconfigured to so many different creative ends. We do shared sample projects on occasion in the Junto, and I have a feeling that this year’s may be the start of another annual community tradition.
If you’re reading this, I can’t thank you enough for your contribution to the Junto, whether you’re just following along, or participating on occasion, or inviting others to join in, or spreading the word. The Disquiet Junto turns 14 years old next Thursday, January 1, 2026, and I can’t wait to hear what we all do together in the coming year. The 750th consecutive Disquiet Junto project is just 20 weeks away, and the 15th anniversary of the Junto is a year away. That 15th anniversary will coincide, perchance, with the 300th anniversary of the founding, by Benjamin Franklin, of the original Junto way back in 1727. So, lots of creative resources and inspiration await.
And that covers it. Thanks, as always, for your generosity with your time, creativity, and curiosity. I know the holidays can be hard for some folks, and if the Junto community can take the edge off, that’s great. Whatever your engagement in the Junto, please never feel any pressure to participate, to post, or to comment. The whole point of it being weekly is that it’s there, dependably, when you have both the time and the interest.
Best from San Francisco,
Marc Weidenbaum
[email protected]
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 0730: Calendar Advent
The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.
As has become the tradition at the end of each calendar year, this week’s Junto project is a sound journal: a selective audio history of your past 12 months.
Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2025 — or you might opt for even more elements, choosing a segment for each week, or each day, for example. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, your own devising, and not drawn from third-party sources.
Step 2: You will then select one segment from each of these (most likely) dozen audio elements. If you’re doing a dozen items, one for each month, then five-second segments are recommended, for a total of one minute. Ultimately, though, the length of the segments and of the overall finished track are up to you.
Step 3: Then you will stitch these segments together, equally weighted, in chronological order to form one single track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.
Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0730” (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-0730-calendar-advent/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. How long did your year feel?
Deadline: Monday, December 29, 2025, 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 730th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Calendar Advent — The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments — at https://disquiet.com/0730/.
There was a break in the storm, a break between storms. A few days earlier, fire had taken out the city’s power, and now water threatened to do the same. The “atmospheric river,” the “Pineapple Express,” the potential “bomb cyclone” — so many colorful names for what amounted to endlessly grey days. An urban hike to the bay served as an unintentionally ironic way to spend the time when rain wasn’t prohibitively pouring — a walk between the raindrops, as the song goes. Being outside felt good, even as the gathering clouds encouraged a near-term retreat. At the water, the waves seemed more powerful than usual, a microcosm of the week’s weather: fierce pounding, followed by relative quiet, then more water-on-land violence. They’re called “breakers” for a reason. I raised my phone and hit the red record button, and almost instantly a distant emergency vehicle’s siren inserted itself, underlining the severity of current circumstances. Listening back to the recording, after I got home, I knew to expect that siren, and still I had to restart the track a few times, because I wasn’t certain if the siren I heard was coming out of my speakers or leaking in from outside, where clouds grew darker by the minute.
Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro at 3:56pm on Wednesday, December 24, 2025, at Baker Beach in San Francisco. 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.
Most of the field recordings that I post are almost exactly as I receive them at the end of the recording process: I hit record, I hit stop, and most of what happens in between is what I share. Which isn’t to say the audio is “pure” by any means. The device I elect to use for the recording, the time and circumstances when I choose to record, the (usually) continuous clip of 30 seconds I select from within the longer recording — all of these elements, among others, are beyond the bounds of anything that might be self-described as purism. The editing process in particular lends an aspect of self-reflection (even, at times, of what George Eliot taught me to term self-rebuke). When recording the sound emitted inside my refrigerator, for example, I immediately chopped off both ends of the process: first, when I closed the door after placing my phone inside the fridge, and second, when I opened the door to extract my phone. In between those mirror-image poles was a minute or so of sound, from which I then extracted what seemed, to me, like prime climate-controlled droning. Later, however, I kept thinking about the recording process, and I returned to what hadn’t made the initial cut. I combined the two ends into one half-minute whole. The clunky percussion of the fridge drawer and door being shut and, then, opened has a industrial-grade vibrancy. While its jittery, stuttering aspect places it in stark contrast to the monotone of the internal hum of the fridge, these two sets of sounds share a welcome practical simplicity, the beauty of an everyday mechanism at various stages of its utilization.
Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro at 7:57am on Friday, December 19, 2025, in San Francisco’s Richmond District. 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.
