Walked to the edge of the world and back. Hibernation mode is real.
Close to the Edge
As the year fades
5 Albums to Work To (Ambient Zone)
When in Listville, it can help to learn how to talk lists
I’m not much of a list-maker, especially lists with “best” in the name. I do submit lists, at the end of the year, to The Wire and to Pitchfork, but I don’t take a lot of pleasure in compiling them. For each record I name, there are a dozen I could slot in, and a hundred I haven’t heard. I participate because it’s nice to be asked, and because I do want to root for albums that might not otherwise be noticed, and to add my voice in favor of those that have been, especially those only by a few other people. I find end-of-year lists are all the more interesting years later, when I might look back and spot things I no longer listen to, and gaps that seem canonical in retrospect but hadn’t, to me, at the time. In other words, they’re especially interesting in the ways I find them lacking, not necessarily for what they include.
Also, lists are also a cornerstone of all kinds of online activity. When in Listville, it can help to learn how to talk lists. By way of example I’ve been peeking around, lately, both Amaya Lim’s Turntable (see: turntable.amayalim.com; her newsletter is recordstore.substack.com) and record.club (which I mentioned this past weekend), two means of reinvigorating the social media aspect of listening to recorded music. I’m @disquiet on both, and both are focused on lists. To that end, I put a little list together of music that I habitually have playing during daylight hours — what I described, at record.club/disquiet, as “five albums to work to when you need music that can create the sonic equivalent of a wool-lined space in which to get stuff done.”
First and foremost on this list is Nils Frahm’s Music for Animals, which benefits from a combination of consistency and length, and how its ambient quality has a rhythmic pulse. Then comes Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, which used to be my headphones-during-work go-to, until it became too familiar, and thus a little distracting. Considering that Thursday Afternoon came out in 1985 (and was one of the first CDs, if not the first, I ever bought), the thing took decades for me to penetrate it to the point where I could consider it familiar, let alone knowable. The three others on my work-listening list are Max Richter’s Sleep, which despite the title need not be thought of as somnolent, Éliane Radigue’s glacial Trilogie de la Mort, and that proto-ambient-jazz classic, Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way.
On Repeat: Jakobsons, Reider, Stars of the Lid
Home/office playlist
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ Marielle V Jakobsons has a new album due out on Thrill Jockey. The record, The Patterns Lost to Air, doesn’t arrive until late February 2026, but a first track, the opener, “Warm Spring,” is up now. It was made with, primarily, violin, Fender Rhodes, and Moog Matriarch, and it is a fully formed exploration of slowly evolving melodies and broken reflections.
[bandcamp width=640 height=208 album=1496638844 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small track=2294056861]
▰ Autechre’s music is sometimes described as the sound of things breaking down, so it is somewhat ironic that C. Reider, who opened for Autechre on their October 1 Denver tour date, found afterward that “the recording of the performance was ruined by a bad cable.” Unruffled, he set about re-recording the set, now titled New Impossibilities, and then uploaded it to his Bandcamp account. It’s a half hour of rhapsodic noise table activities: buzzing whirs, churning substrata, crunching irritants. Good stuff.
[bandcamp width=640 height=208 album=3166185096 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]
▰ There is a new Stars of the Lid fan site at starsofthelidforever.com that documents, to date, nearly 20 live shows by the ambient duo, which consisted of Adam Wiltzie and the now deceased Brian McBride. Definitely check out the 2008 set from Echoplex in Los Angeles, for which they performed, along with other pieces, Arvo Pärt’s “Frartes” and some of Alexandre Desplat’s score for the film Syriana. (Thanks, Paul Ashby, for letting me know about it.)
Scratch Pad: Ho, Slip, Club
From the past (offline) week
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. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media 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 break, through the start of January 2026. Which raises the question: If I’m on a social media (and adjacent) hiatus, what constitutes this site’s Scratch Pad, since it is by definition a collation of stuff I posted to social media throughout the given previous week. Apparently it’s random notes I made to myself that I would have posted online. Just because I’ve stopped posting doesn’t mean my brain has stopped making posts
▰ I just got to the point in Mick Herron’s latest Slow Horses novel, Clown Town, where Roddy Ho appears to be singing the theme song to the TV show (“losers and boozers”), and Lech, overhearing him, says, “Working on your theme song?” Fan service at its finest. I also understand from an interview I saw with the actor who plays Ho, Christopher Chung, that he is quite the vocalist. Nice touch setting him up to sing when this eventually becomes an episode.
▰ I’ve realized I’ve gotten into this habit of listening to the second track of an album first, because so many albums have the first track as a sort of intro thing, and I want to drop right into the thick of it. I eventually do hear the first track, because I tend to listen on loop, so eventually it comes back around to the first track — but often, oddly, it’s the last track I’ll hear.
▰ My lizard brain recognized that parts of the melodies of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” (1966) and the theme song to the TV show H.R. Pufnstuf (1969) are quite similar, and my current earworm is a mashup thereof.
▰ I’ve watched several review videos of these screen protectors for iPads that give it a paper-like quality. And the reviewers frequently mention how the material “sounds like paper,” as per this screenshot.
▰ There is a newsletter (Substack) from Liz Harris (aka Grouper). (Thanks, Pablo Flouret!)
▰ Something I typed yielded both “breaking“ and “healing” as options. That is verging on literary quantum superposition. Schrödinger’s dictionary.
▰ Tired: Last Night a DJ Saved My Life
Wired: This Morning Backblaze Saved My MP3 Hard Drive
▰ And speaking of social media, there is an odd void in streaming music. One of the best parts of the long defunct rdio, which lasted from my birthday in 2020 until the end of 2015, was how you could track what friends were listening to. Soundcloud, likewise, early on had a “groups” function, which the service dispensed with. There’s a new service, called record.club, which describes itself as “a social music network.” The founders seem pretty self-aware, per the FAQ: “The obvious comparison is Goodreads and Letterboxd (or for that matter, Rate Your Music).” (There’s also a This Is My Jam vibe, etc., etc.) And: “Sure, that sounds a bit vague—but that’s the point.” I’m on at record.club/disquiet. I may post some additional thoughts as I explore it. I’m somewhat list-averse, so this may not be for me, but we’ll see.
▰ According to the November 20 New York Times Mini Crossword, “skip” is a colloquial noun for a “Song on an album that you always avoid.” I didn’t know this was in common usage.
Digital Cozy
At the year's end
Just some thoughts about this end-of-year semi-retreat I take from digital life:
Life is inherently digital these days, so it’s not like I’ve turned off my computers, unplugged the television, or — let alone and — put my phone in a safe. I make no claims to using my devices significantly less often. In fact, just this week I upgraded my second generation iPad Pro to this year’s model, aiming to take advantage of the laptop-like benefits of iPadOS 26, aka Tahoe.
I’m not really that concerned about the extent to which I use personal technology. I already read a lot of books. I already go for walks. I go to concerts and spend time at museums. I may not spend ten minutes with a single piece of art, but I can easily do five. I have meals with friends. I spend much of my non-work hours with family. In other words, the main break that I take at the end of the year is that of digital connection to other people. Even then, I’m still checking email. I still work. I’m vaguely responding to DMs, though because I turned off social media I find many go missing for extended periods of time.
The distinction here is what I think of as “formal social media,” or “immediate social media” — by which, for my purposes, I mean the likes of Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. These are technological platforms in which much of the response cycle is short and rapid. For good measure, I also fold into this category of social media a solid number of the email lists, Discords, and BBSs (most founded on Discourse) I’m part of. I’m not a purist about just about anything, including this segment of digital activity. There are a couple book discussion groups I participate in, between email and Discord, that I won’t be turning a blind eye to, simply because I want to continue those asynchronous conversations.
What I am turning down, if not off, is the number of conversations — especially the explicitly short-term ones inherent in social media — that I participate in. I’ll almost certainly re-up come January. For now, the respite is, first and foremost, cozy. Digital cozy.