There’s a trenchant, pulsing necessity to the three tracks that comprise *Under Huden*, a new EP from Henrik Meierkord. The music’s urgency is belied by its seeming quietude, the key word being “seeming.” The tracks are quiet by appearance, and by appearance only, for each is dense in its own way. Each is layered with sawed strings, blurs of overtones, stray trace elements. (What, for example, is that wonderful warble from 6:18 to 6:20 in the EP’s closing piece, “Under Huden III”?) Density is, arguably, simply another form of volume, not so much *loud* volume as *heft* volume, the sheer substance of what is occurring gathers in the imagination.
Also particularly striking about *Under Huden* is the sense of place. This may or may not have been recorded live, but the end result has a spatial quality to it, offering up a mental picture of a room, dimly lit, light cutting through the blinds, dust motes in the air, feet firmly placed on old planks, the cold winter just outside.
Music originally posted at [henrikmeierkord.bandcamp.com](https://henrikmeierkord.bandcamp.com/album/under-huden). More from Meierekord, based in Stockholm, Sweden, at [soundbread.se](https://www.soundbread.se/).
I spent last night performing the routine if time-consuming update of the firmware for various synthesizer modules while the rain provided a white noise background just outside the living room window. A few months ago I acquired a new laptop, one that thankfully came with an SD card slot built in. This old-school upgrade (retrofurbish? untweak? phoenifix? deminimalism?) from the previous laptop model presumably meant no more dongles. But of course, the work I was doing required a microSD card, so an adapter in the form of a dongle was necessary. And another piece of hardware required a USB-A type connector — and, thus, another dongle, since the new laptop only has USB-C type connectors. The phrase “two steps forward, one step back” took on new meaning while I shuffled Zip archives, searched BBS discussions, consulted with friends via social media, and kept track of mental bread crumbs amid nested file folders.
The word firmware is the term for software that provides hardware with its underlying functionality. Often with music hardware, there are alternate versions of the standard firmware. These alt-firmwares add utilities and other tools, sometimes extending the life of sunsetted equipment, other times serving as a parallel development process to the real deal. Such alt-firmware may ride side by side with or entirely overwrite the original firmware. Sometimes the alt-firmware is such a great realization of the hardware object’s potential that it’s hard to believe the hardware wasn’t designed with it in mind. Among the more widespread examples is a package called [JJOS](http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~mpc1000/), a full replacement system for some of the MPC line of Akai beat machines. I’m not sure if the identity of the creator of JJOS is publicly known or not. I’ve read that it’s a former Akai software engineer.
The piece of alt-firmware I use most often is [Hemisphere](https://synthmodes.com/modules/o_c_hemisphere/), a suite of several dozen virtual modules replacing (or complementing) the software that comes with a module called Ornament and Crime (which has a great home URL, [ornament-and-cri.me](https://ornament-and-cri.me)), the title borrowed from architect Adolf Loos. Unlike the Akai MPC line, the Ornament and Crime module is entirely open source, not just software but hardware, so it’s quite possible to be running alt-firmware on alt-hardware, which is the case with my o_C (as Ornament and Crime is abbreviated) setup.
Another device I updated recently made the step of taking its formerly closed source code base and [turning it open-source](https://forum.orthogonaldevices.com/t/v0-6-x-release-candidate-packages-and-mods/5246), thus unleashing a lot of opportunity that hadn’t existed previously, such as virtual instances that run on standard computers. I located an interesting piece of third party software for the device, which required another piece of third party software in order to run. Neither of these two pieces of additional software were directly related to the device’s new open source status, but they did reflect the interconnectedness of individuals’ efforts.
I doubt I’ll ever have the skills to produce or even contribute to alt-firmware myself. The best I can do is employ it, make something with it, celebrate it, and occasionally note a shortcoming or propose a tweak. Last night, all I was doing was updating software, swapping in and out cards, attaching cables. And there’s more of this to come. Before bed, I did finally have a few moments to test out what I had done, and to marvel as my devices made sounds they never had before.
And just like that, it’s been 25 years since I faxed the paperwork necessary to purchase the domain Disquiet.com. This having been 1996 (December 13, a Friday), no one, I believe, owned the URL previously. I wanted a new “identity,” having then recently left Tower Records’ magazines (*Pulse!*, *Classical Pulse!*, and epulse) after seven years of employment (I stuck around in a freelance capacity for another eight years while working full-time elsewhere). I was a big Fernando Pessoa fan, and remain one. The name Disquiet was a natural choice, thanks to Pessoa’s *The Book of Disquiet*, although much deliberation was involved before it became the obvious one.
At first, Disquiet.com’s material was ported from a site I’d housed on services with names like Netcom and Calweb since 1994, mostly focused on music and comics. The one cool thing was you could mouse over handwritten text on an image (writing on yellow lined paper) and click on the word. Fancy! I wish the Wayback machine was old enough to locate a copy of it. Far as I can tell, it’s lost to the digital dusts of time.
Soon enough I finalized the logo, and I got the site set up, and then I started uploading old articles from *Pulse!* and other places. In time I added datelines (at the suggestion of my friend Jorge Colombo) and started writing for Disquiet.com, rather than just porting over writing from elsewhere. (It’s hard to describe how new all this was at the time.)
From 1996 to 2007, it was all hand-coded by me in HTML, even the RSS feed. Then I paid someone to port it over to a CMS, and then a friend (Max La Rivière-Hedrick) upgraded that to something properly responsive. Around then I also started collaborating with musicians, later still came the Disquiet Junto (celebrating its own 10th anniversary in less than a month), and now, in a way that feels quite sudden, it’s December 13, 2021, two and a half decades gone by: 25 years I’ve been doing this thing that eventually became known as a “blog,” a few years after I started. I never loved the word, but I’ve made peace with it, and even embraced it.
I feel fortunate that today, December 13, 2021, falls on a Monday. December 13, 1996 was a Friday, giving me the weekend to set things up. Today’s a Monday, so even though I’m looking back a quarter century, the fact it’s Monday, the start of the week, feels like it’s the start of something. Today’s a big anniversary. Tomorrow is just another day, another day to post something else about sound.
Oh, and below is the earliest Disquiet.com snapshot recorded by the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, the current Richmond District, San Francisco, offices of which are just a block away from where I was living in 1996. It’s a small web after all.
An archival ambient advent calendar from December 1st – 13th, 2021
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
The route shown here comes out at about 2,835 feet. That’s the length, roughly estimated, of a soundwalk I’ve taken my students on most of the semesters [I’ve taught a course](https://disquiet.com/tag/sounds-of-brands/) about sound at a local art school, the Academy of Art University.
A soundwalk can be understood as follows: Ever take a docent tour at a museum? A soundwalk is like that, except the museum is the world, and the art is the sound that surfaces in the world.
I’ve occasionally done this particular soundwalk for private groups. There’s a lot packed in on a stroll that lasts just over half a mile: urban sound, retail sound, public space, private space, Hollywood, silence, acoustics, architecture, noise pollution, urban planning, and much more. Only a few blocks away is Union Square, a central setting for Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 1974 film *The Conversation*, a great teaching tool about sound in its own right.
On a good day, we’ll have watched the movie in advance, and after the soundwalk we’ll wander over to the plaza to talk about the topics that Coppola, in collaboration with editor and sound designer Walter Murch, explores in the film: surveillance, perception, technology.
I didn’t teach the course in 2021 because Covid-19 impacted the school’s planning. This coming year is up in the air. Who knows what the future will bring, whether post-pandemic or during an extended mid-pandemid? Either way, I have no doubt that aspects of this soundwalk will have changed, in some cases drastically, because the city has changed. At some point I’ll walk this path again, and I’ll see what I hear.
This park serves as the next to last day of the 13-day countdown to the 25th anniversary of Disquiet.com. Read the full post described above: [“A San Francisco Soundwalk.”](https://disquiet.com/2013/12/13/a-san-francisco-soundwalk/)
I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet), which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up [in expanded form](https://disquiet.com/2021/12/07/disquiet-com-25th-anniversary-countdown-7-of-13-home-decorating-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction/) or [otherwise](https://disquiet.com/2021/12/07/rewinding-2021-in-the-wire/) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.
▰ Yeah, I’m digging *The Last Tourist* by Olen Steinhauer OK.
▰ There’s an alternate universe where *Fringe* ran for a decade, and a simulation where *Person of Interest* is still unfolding weekly, and I’d love to visit both places.
▰ RIP, Greg Tate (October 15, 1957 – December 7, 2021). I only spoke with him a few times. He did a bit of writing for Tower Records’ *Pulse!* magazine when I was an editor there. Last time Greg and I spoke, in the early/mid-1990s, he was gonna write for us about Anthony Braxton’s covers of standards. I sent him the vinyl, which I’d found used at Amoeba, but then he never finished the article, which is totally fine. Life happens. I’d hoped to run into him someday and joke about it. Now that’ll never happen. His was a strong, learned voice. Glad so much is on paper and online.
And here, ’cause it’s great and now it’s on my mind, is Anthony Braxton covering John Coltrane’s “Impressions”:
And via *The Wire*: “By way of tribute to the author and critic we have made [a number of articles](https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/the-portal/the-portal-greg-tate) Greg wrote for the magazine free to read in our online archive for the next month.”
▰ Again, nothing’s happening on the 25th anniversary of Disquiet.com. I’m just enjoying the reflective process of counting down from the start of December until the actual anniversary. I had plans. But then: pandemic. It’s OK. Stay healthy. Do your thing. Rest.
▰ So, the YouTube Music (which if you use it regularly you likely think of as Music YouTube, since the URL is [music.youtube.com](https://music.youtube.com)) soft-boiled approximation of Spotify Wrapped came out, and apparently pretty much all I listened to was the *Michael Clayton* soundtrack on repeat.
▰ I admit I’m no instinctive list-maker (best this, top that), or one to gauge album against album. My disinclination may relate to my disinterest in competitive sports. But I read [what Marc Masters said](https://twitter.com/Marcissist/status/1468258732672831488), and I agree end-of-year lists do serve a purpose, so I’m getting one together. (That may count as whinging, but in the service of getting past it.)
Update: Or at least trying to get one together. It’s not entirely my thing.
▰ I don’t think I recognized until last night that with the gain raised high enough, an electric guitar can be plugged directly into the ER-301.
▰ Inspiring motto on the package from the company that makes little rubberized caps to put over the blunt stiletto that emerges from the bottom of a cello.
▰ Only good thing to come of today’s news is Sly & Robbie’s music will flood the internet in the collective act mourning. Here they are with Nils Petter Molvær, Eivind Aarset, and Vladislav Delay:
“Rhythm Killer,” produced by the inimitable Bill Laswell, plus a Material who’s who (D.S.T., Bernard Fowler, Robert Musso, Nicky Skopelitis, Henry Threadgill, Bernie Worrell)
And with DJ Krush “The Lost Voices,” off *The Message at the Depth*:
One* more, Grace Jones’ “Nightclubbing”
It’s weird, ’cause just last night I was listening again to the latest Aarset & Molvaer albums, and in the process I was thinking about their work with Sly & Robbie.
*Who am I kidding? More to come.
▰ [“AI spokesman, avatars enter election campaigns”](https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20211208000709) is the most William Gibson headline I have read this week.
▰ Occasional PSA to musicians releasing music for download on Bandcamp and elsewhere that metadata is sorta important. It’s, like, floss-your-teeth important. Speaking of which, I just typed “yumload” instead of “download” and that’s alright with me.
▰ One of these makes for a quite different morning than the others.
▰ Today in #FreshMundaneHells, what keyboard sequence did I accidentally hit that flipped my audio to just the left side? (Which took a while to sort out.)
▰ There are four Disquiet Junto projects left in the year.
▰ Honk if you watch guitar tutorials on YouTube at half speed so they’re still in tune, just an octave lower.
▰ The press prerelease copy of the score to the upcoming *Matrix* movie went straight to my email spam folder, which feels like a truly mundane enactment of Matrix cyber-hijinks.
Spoilers: based on a first listen, this movie will have a lot of action sequences.
▰ There he goes: [“Michael Nesmith, Monkees Singer-Songwriter, Dead at 78”](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/monkees-michael-nesmith-dead-1270079/).
Quickly rising to top of the playlist:
▰ “This album was mastered in analog utilizing the 20-bit K2 Super Coding system.”
▰ Listening to the background sounds of apps like Calm and Audible Sleep. Making the background sounds present. Paying attention to when sounds of labor, like the threshing of a harvest, or that are threatening, like the soundscape of *Dune*, become comforting, lulling, transportive.
In the novel *Dune*, we witness Paul learning to listen by observing his mother listening. As readers, we listen with her:
*“She probed the farther darkness with her trained senses.*
*Noise of small animals.*
*Birds.*
*A fall of dislodged sand and faint creature sounds within it.”*
