Disquiet.com 25th Anniversary Countdown (6 of 13): Laraaji in 2015

An archival ambient advent calendar from December 1st – 13th, 2021

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s day 6 of the 13-day Disquiet.com 25th anniversary countdown (the occasion occurs on December 13, 2021). Time is strange. You know a blog has been around for a while when you can say something like, “This from only six years ago.” In any case, this interview with the great Laraaji is from 2015. Laraaji talks in detail about how he achieves his watery sonics, bridging the spiritual gap with the great skeptic Brian Eno, finding peace in the process of tuning the zither’s 36 strings, and his early career as a standup comic.

Reads the full interview: [“The Eternal Life Aquatic with Laraaji.”](https://disquiet.com/2015/08/24/laraaji-all-in-one-peace/)

Disquiet.com 25th Anniversary Countdown (5 of 13): Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet

An archival ambient advent calendar from December 1st – 13th, 2021

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Just shy of 10 years after I founded Disquiet.com, I did something here I hadn’t done before: rather than write about music and sound someone produced somewhere else, I published music that I myself had assembled.

In 2006, Brian Eno and David Byrne posted (for free download) stems from one of my favorite albums of all time, *My Life in the Bush of Ghosts*, and asked people to remix them. I listened to what people had posted and I found nothing that was particularly appealing. Most of the tracks just slotted the provided raw material above rote 4/4 percussion. So, I sent the Eno/Byrne project news to some friends and musicians I corresponded with, and I asked if they’d participate. The response I got back was, in essence, uniformly: This is cool, but the tracks showing up on the official website leave a lot to be desired. So, I told everyone I’d post the results of their work on Disquiet.com instead. A dozen musicians participated, resulting in this collection:

1. “Help Me Help Me” – AllThatFall
2. “If You Make Your Bed in Heaven” – Roddy Schrock
3. “Leftover Secrets to Tell” – Pocka
4. “Secret Life Remix” – Stephane Leonard
5. “The Black Isle (Byrne/Eno Remix)” – (dj) morsanek
6. “Hit Me Somebody (Help Me Somebody Remix)” – MrBiggs
7. “Being and Nothingness (A Secret Life Remixed)” – john kannenberg
8. “Somebody Help Us” – My Fun
9. “Hey” – Mark Rushton
10. “My Bush in the Secret Life of Ghosts” – Prehab
11. “Not Enough Africa” – Ego Response Technician
12. “Helping (Help Me Somebody Remix)” – doogie

This was almost a year before SoundCloud launched, so the natural place to post the music was the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet), the offices of which are about a mile from where I live. (The offices are actually a block from where I lived when I first moved to San Francisco in 1996, but the building wasn’t the Internet Archive then. It was a church.)

It’s hard to describe what a transformation this collection was both for this website, and for my sense of how I relate to and communicate with musicians. In the following years, I’d release a series of other such compilation albums, largely inspired by the work of Hal Willner, and eventually I’d open up the format (moving from narrow commission to open call), resulting in the Disquiet Junto music community.

More details, and all the audio, in [the original post](https://disquiet.com/2006/09/04/our-lives-in-the-bush-of-disquiet/). And major thanks to Brian Scott of Boon Design ([boon.design](https://www.boon.design)) for the gorgeous cover.

twitter.com/disquiet: Lucier, Wrapped, Porter Ricks

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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/2021/11/29/tweeting-audio/) or [otherwise](https://disquiet.com/2021/11/28/crossing-signal/) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ Definitely digging Neal Stephenson’s new book, *Termination Shock*. It’s interesting that the title phrase appears for the first time almost exactly halfway through the novel.

▰ Had a nice 9 days off Twitter (and F’book) for Thanksgiving. Probably will do the same at the end of the year. Read a heap, Wrote, too. Perhaps there’s a connection.

▰ Getting a new laptop means learning to turn off annoying alert sounds. Every time you mute one, another makes itself known. Months will pass at some point, and only then will you look back and realize, “Oh, it’s been a while since an alert went off. I must have gotten them all.”

▰ Neal Stephenson, student of martial arts, momentarily puts aside sticks, spears, and heron-inspired fisticuffs to focus in on sonic weaponry. This is from his new novel, *Termination Shock*:

Fascinating: just a few pages later, there’s an audio deepfake scenario, geopolitical dirty tricks.

▰ Pretty ingenious. Do many other music-making devices do this, where the jack labels are upside down, so you can read them easily by just tipping the thing toward you rather than having to read upside down? (This is the OXI One.)

▰ It’s VCV Rack 2.0.0 Day.

▰ Got a new CD player. (The 5-CD changer died after 30 years of service.) First thing I played was [the Necks/Underworld team-up](https://underworld.bandcamp.com/album/drift-underworld-the-necks/), one of my favorite CDs in recent years. What CD would you play first on a new player? (Possible answer: What’s a CD player?)

▰ If you’ve been online long enough (for context, this website turns 25 years old in a few days), then sometimes simply seeing a hi-def video on YouTube of someone walking around Seattle in the snow, the image’s four edges confined within the mundane page interface, can seem truly remarkable.

▰ Moved on to a better room than the one he was in now

▰ In the Lucier, the sound as a whole decayed with each generation of recording.

In [the Reider](https://twitter.com/vuzhmusic/status/1466111199011954694), each recording is no less clear, in sonic terms, than its predecessor; [only meaning decays](https://disquiet.com/2007/09/10/alvin-lucier-auto-transcription-mp3/).

▰ I am screaming in a franchise different from the one you are in now.

▰ My top 5 artists of the year were:

1. Whales
2. The wind
3. Room tone
4. Conference call reverb
5. Public transportation (reunion tour)

The famed unintended Golden Gate Bridge noise definitely happened, but I can’t say it’s been as big a presence in my life as it has been in the news.

▰ Just left someone a voicemail. I think I need to take a brush-up course. Maybe there’s still a Cyber Monday sale for a video tutorial master class.

▰ The thing where you transfer a 60,000-word Scrivener document from a dying laptop to a brand new laptop with a different operating system and you can’t drag and drop so you open it from the menu and it works and you reflect on the dramatic power of dispensing with commas.

▰ Me: So many newsletters.

Also me: If DeLillo had one, I’d sign up in a second and pay for it.

And: I need to get my (unpaid) newsletter rolling again.

And then: Yeah, just imagine DeLillo sending sentences of dread to millions of readers.

And: Oh, the news has that covered.

▰ It’s a Porter Ricks afternoon.

When I typed that I had no idea that barely 15 minutes later someone would drive slowly down the block with a very very flat tire, which is essentially the full Sensurround experience when it comes to Porter Ricks.

Moved on from *Biokinetics* (1996) to *Shadow Boat* (2016), and now I recognize why I keep accidentally calling my Tensor guitar pedal Tresor.

▰ rooster + washing machine
river + printer
birds + car honks

This week in the Disquiet Junto, participants in the music community are combining field recordings from nature and civilization. Playlist in progress below. Join in at [disquiet.com/0518](http://disquiet.com/0518).

▰ And on that note, have a good weekend. I’ve got 100 pages to go on the new Neal Stephenson novel, and then it’s either the new Fonda Lee or the final Expanse, plus one I’m reading about the history of risk (not Risk). And some personal writing. And guitar practice. And rest.

Disquiet.com 25th Anniversary Countdown (4 of 13): Buddha Machine(s)

An archival ambient advent calendar from December 1st – 13th, 2021

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s day 4 of my archival ambient advent calendar countdown to the 25th anniversary of Disquiet.com, which was founded December 13, 1996. As time passed during the quarter century of Disquiet.com’s existence, my focus didn’t necessarily shift so much as expand. In the process, the devices used to make sound became as much an interest of mine as is the music itself. At the Venn Diagram overlap are devices that make sound where there’s an internal coherence to them, where the sound object is as much object as sound, and a key example of that is the Buddha Machine.

Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian, who together comprise FM3, introduced the Buddha Machine in 2005. It borrowed its shape from cheap boxes that Virant, an American living in China, came upon a decade earlier in the gift shops of Buddhist temples. He and Jian made their own such box, but in the place of the original prayers were abstract ambient, textural, and rhythmic material intended to be played on loop. I’ve interviewed Virant twice, once when the Buddha Machines first came out, in 1995 [“Buddha in the Machine,”](https://disquiet.com/2005/12/17/buddha-in-the-machine/) and then three years later, when FM3 introduced a second generation: [“Buddha Machine, Reloaded.”](https://disquiet.com/2008/11/03/buddha-machine-reloaded/) (And during pandemic lockdown, I also recorded a bunch of short videos, the [Buddha Machine Variations,](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MIM4mCYe17nERi9xeEWAD2w) of Buddha Machines being used as musical instruments.)

Headphone Yoga Transmitter

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Stumbled upon an outdoor “immersive” yoga session at the beach, where I’d gone to check out the king tide (which is, indeed, quite high). Everyone wore “silent disco” headphones, and the instructor spoke into a headset. This contraption appears to be the transmitter (which at first I mistook for a fishing rod, many of which were planted in the sand closer to the water).