Industrial music is generally all klang, and it is truly industrial more by association than by audio hallmarks. The sounds are sourced from what might very well be an active factory floor, but the dance floor is where they are intended to reside, and where they are most at home. Another kind of industrial music is more akin to environmental industrial music: the sound of an inactive factory floor, when the motors are humming but activity is on pause. Such is “Grave doubts – Decisioni difficili” by the Italian musician Marco Mascia, who lives in Cagliari. The gorgeous echoes of grating noise suggest an immeasurably cavernous space, one built to house vast human aspirations, and either temporarily unused, or perhaps left behind entirely. The spaciousness does have a space-ness, the more you listen into it. Because this is not merely music one listens to. It is music that asks you to step inside it, to explore it from the inside, from inside the geography it intimates. Perhaps this is interstellar industrial music, the room tone of a former robot-making facility on Mars, before civil war tore the planet apart, or an ice-processing plant in the asteroid belt, no longer in use since the stargates opened.
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/progettosonoro](https://soundcloud.com/progettosonoro/grave-doubts-decisioni-difficili). Found via a repost by Robert Knote.
With each Fall of my Foot the sense
of tIme can almOst feel
natural, Vital compoUnding
momEntum the gRoove deep
In fact, this is a double mesostic. I haven’t done one of these previously. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before, though I imagine they must exist. I have seen double acrostics.
Stoked to have two pages of [mesostics](https://disquiet.com/tag/mesostic/) in the [third issue](http://theb0ardside.com/b0ardside3/) of *The B0ardside* (tagline: “Art and Culture from the Edge of the World,” that being the ocean side of San Francisco). The invitation came from Thorsten Sideb0ard, the *B0ardside* cofounder who put together the [Algorithmic Art Assembly](https://aaassembly.org/), at which I gave [a talk back in March 2019](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzHrOpBwhMU). Here’s the cover (atop the two previous issues) and the spread.
More at [theb0ardside.com](http://theb0ardside.com/).
I do this manually each Saturday, collating recent tweets I made at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet/), my public notebook. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form or otherwise) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.
▰ Morning sounds:
– bird singing outside open window
– refrigerator humming
– car ignoring stop sign at corner
– cabinet closing
– distant motor rumbling
– drawer opening
– elderly person talking (unintelligibly aside from emotional content) to their dog on the street below
▰ UFO in the hallway toward the ceiling
▰ “If John Cage Rode a Horse”
Third in [a short series](https://disquiet.com/2021/06/12/if-john-cage-rode-a-horse/)
▰ A subtly differentiated soundmark of the neighborhood, north side of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, is the occasional appearance of what seems like the buzz of an approaching swarm of especially slow-moving bees but is in fact duckling-like Segways transporting tourists.
▰ Two of my favorite words with which to start the day are [“gatefold essay.”](https://twitter.com/marcus_fischer/status/1405909573043642370)
▰ Misplaced my earbuds so I played Fugazi really loud from my phone and heard them on a shelf across the room.
▰ Listening to old Monolake records and tidying the week’s notes. Have a great weekend, folks.
☑ Commemorate Juneteenth
☑ Support some local businesses
☑ Catch up on science news
☑ Re-watch a favorite movie with the sound off
☑ Get some rest
This is an experiment that occurred to me to undertake as I walked through a forest three hours north of San Francisco. I was in the redwoods the week before this one, staying in a small cabin to mark the start of summer, or something close to the start of summer. Clearly marked hiking trails behind and all around the cabin made for easy ventures out. The lines of these trails crisscrossed each other at junctures useful to gauging and adjusting one’s itinerary. It was hard not to photograph things, so striking was every direction and every stage of one’s depth of field, from the densely layered beauty of the widely varying greenery, to [the markings of horseshoes in the dusty trail](https://disquiet.com/2021/06/12/if-john-cage-rode-a-horse/), to sudden glimpses of the broad ocean, to the occasional bird, though these were more heard than seen.
I am not frequently in the wilderness. When I am at my desk, I frequently have running on a second screen footage from one or another YouTube account, generally someone’s point-of-view wandering through a city, and sometimes amid a more rural environment. This is adjacent viewing, something that provides a vantage on another place, something that feeds the imagination.
While I stood there in the forest looking ahead at the trail, it occurred to me to do the same. I just had my phone with me, and an old one at that. I set it to video mode and took one step after another forward. I was not about to endeavor to document the hour-long meanderings that my favorite YouTube accounts feature. I just wanted a sliver of the moment, a few minutes. Each step took me further along. The sounds of my feet became more evident to me, because I was aware they were being recorded. The forest ahead brought details into focus out of what, moments before, was just a thicket. Eventually, after two and a half minutes, I stopped mid-trail, did a sweep of the area, and stopped recording. And eventually I returned home, home to the city.
The whistle-like presence of a bird, the rough noise of the microphone responding to a slight breeze, the crackle of a dry twig — each element came into greater focus when I had returned to my desk and was viewing the moving image on the same screen where I normally have YouTube running. I confirmed my own wandering as akin to the ones I so often appreciate vicariously. And so I uploaded it, and jotted down these notes. I don’t foresee myself making many of these — there is only so much time for so many pursuits — but it was useful to share my walk, to experience the layering of memory and moment, to put myself in the footsteps of those who do, to aim my lens in a similar direction, to hear my own footsteps as I have heard theirs.
Video originally posted to [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvYA8ayJ3gw&t=1s).
