A solid five minutes of ambient industrial music from Peter Lukeson of Denton, Texas.
What begins, initially, as a quiet, lofi atmosphere expands by adding a series of rhythmic patterns, notably mechanical bursts that resemble a heartbeat, and then on top of that some precise pixie stick percussion. When the music returns to original atmospherics, they don’t just carry the memory of the recent pounding. In addition, the drones are louder, and higher-pitched, and overall more threatening, more commanding. Good stuff. More from Lukeson on Bandcamp.
Kenneth Kirschner in Four Parts
On July 19, 2024
[bandcamp width=640 height=274 album=1453748474 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]
Bracing. Ecstatic. Borderline impossible. Impeccably minimalist on the surface. Substantively abstract down below. This is often the experience of listening to the music of Kenneth Kirschner, and it’s most certainly the case with July 19, 2024, which he posted on Bandcamp late last month. The album, which consists of four tracks, is nearly three and a half hours long, and I will not claim to have yet listened to the full thing myself, but I do recommend starting, as I did, with the first — and shortest — track, “July 19, 2024 – i.” This opening section sounds like a quintet for strings and piano as reflected in the freshly wiped screen of a broken cellphone, turning everything into a frenetic kaleidoscope. It’s brittle and lively, vibrant and exploratory, and impossible to pin down. The themes flow by rapidly, and your ear has to retrain itself to a different sort of listening, not so much following as succumbing. Highly recommended.
End of the Road
Or, lessons in in-appropriations
An unfortunate end to an otherwise stellar weekend
Scratch Pad: Concerts, Spiders, Glaspy
From the past 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.
▰ Afternoon trio for two air filters and a ceiling fan
▰ I’m seeing Marc Ribot on Friday, Nick Lowe on Sunday, and Autechre the following Thursday — it’s the mid-1990s all over again.
▰ The start of October in San Francisco is when you traditionally sweep away the actual spiderwebs in order to then put up fake spiderwebs
▰ An under-appreciated feature of Apple’s Find My Phone service is that after using it to play a sound on your lost phone you are left with an earworm of Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”
▰ I briefly thought the shutdown might mean a quiet Fleet Week, but no, there still will be jet fighters (Canadian ones) LARPing WWIII (see: sfgate.com).
▰ Most of the time in an interview, if the interviewee says, “That’s an interesting question,” what they mean is “I don’t have a prepared answer for that, and so I’m gonna buy myself a few valuable seconds of thinking time by instinctively complimenting you.”
▰ I don’t need to put Bandcamp Friday on my calendar. I can tell it’s Bandcamp Friday first thing when I look at my inbox that morning and there’s a 100 more emails than usual.
▰ Current status, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2025:
▰ Read a bunch, finished nothing. In the middle of many books.
Hardly Strictly Report (Part 1 of 3)
Oct 3, 2025
Every year (pandemic excepted), San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is host to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, a three-day free (!) extravaganza of American roots and roots-derived music. I live close to the park, and marvel that many years — including this one — I get to walk on over and see Nick Lowe play outdoors. Today, the first day of the festival, I caught two acts: Margaret Glaspy and, shown above, the great Marc Ribot. The week’s fog and rain had disappeared overnight, and these sets made for a fantastic start to the weekend. Glaspy (in a trio) and Ribot (solo) were just two of numerous acts on two of the festival’s six stages, the others much larger than this one.