Scratch Pad: Quake, Venues, Listening

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

▰ I can confirm that the 4.3 earthquake that occurred at 2:46am Monday morning, September 22, did significant damage … to my sleep.

▰ I wish more experimental music venues around the world had subscription services for folks who lived far away but liked what the places did, sort of like what Cafe Oto is up to in London. You pay something, it supports them, you get recordings, maybe live feeds, maybe a zine, or a newsletter, “merch,” etc. You’re in the loop, informed. “Patreon for clubs.” “Bandcamp for venues.”

Thanks to responses to the above comment, I learned about several venues, and also about something called venuecms.com, which is, per the name, a content management system for venues, and the person who told me about it said that this sort of subscription model is, in fact, the “next feature on the list.”

▰ On a positive note, if I’m getting targeted ads for Go boards featuring noticeably antiquated laptops, the Algorithm is telling me I’ve made some OK life decisions

▰ I acknowledge that when I opened this article in New Scientist, I wondered if I could listen to it.

▰ Oblique Strategies are generally right about what to do on a given day

▰ Another week during which I read a ton in a variety of books but did not complete one of them.

Solo Roger Eno

From his forthcoming album

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A lovely solo piano piece from Roger Eno, “Alembic Distillation,” appears in advance of his forthcoming album, Without Wind / Without Air, due out October 31, 2025. The album features a host of collaborators (among them soprano Grace Davidson, sisters/vocalists Cecily and Lotti Eno, Jonathan Stockhammer conducting the Scoring Berlin strings, and musician/arranger Christian Badzura). This, however, is just Eno (younger brother by more than a decade to Brian) on his lonesome. I particularly love solo compositions that feel almost like sonic essays, and that’s what you hear here, themes explored for what they are: ideas in the form of sound.

Disquiet Junto Project 0717: Generation Gambit

The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0717: Generation Gambit
The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary.

Step 1: Imagine some long ago ancestor of yours, one who also made music. This doesn’t have to be a real person.

Step 2: Record a rough track that is supposedly by your ancestor from Step 1. It should be evident in the sound that this recording is quite old (e.g., warble, surface noise, degradation).

Step 3: Record something on top of the ancestor track from Step 2, so the result is a combination of your contemporary sounds and your (perhaps fictional) ancestor’s antiquated sounds.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0717” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0717-generation-gambit/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How many years have transpired?

Deadline: Monday, September 29, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 717th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Generation Gambit — The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary — at https://disquiet.com/0717/.

No-Input Mixing from Raleigh, NC

Courtesy of the musician who goes by Phonets

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is no instrument quite like a no-input mixer, which to say: a mixer with no instrument going into it. That may sound like the end of the story, but it’s really just the beginning. By building sounds from feedback loops — that is, patching the mixer’s outputs back into itself — a no-input mixer, as in this extended live performance by Phonets, can create something from what might mistakenly be thought of as nothing.

In Phonet’s hands, it’s a carefully balanced progression of noise swells that edge slowly toward the abrasive, and combing discernible layers. Phonets says the results “are loosely inspired by plate tectonics, slow development, and the sense of being in a landscape,” and that the plan was “to play around with resonance and picking out harmonics from an underlying pitch set.”

If you’re interested in knowing more about no-input mixing, Phonets has a playlist of technique examples, including a basic overview of the process, how to use send/return, and deploying a small-size mixer.

More music from Phonets, who is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, at phonets.bandcamp.com.

Loving the Alien

For hilobrow.com

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
A photo of the head of one of Alien's famed aliens

As I mentioned on Saturday in advance of its publication, I wrote another little piece for hilobrow.com. The current Hilobrow series is 25 short essays on “our favorite sympathetic villains.” The series is named for Endora, from Bewitched. Other entries include Clarence Boddicker (Robocop), Skeletor (He-Man and the Masters of the Universe), and Alexis Carrington (Dynasty). I chose to write about the xenomorphs from Alien. I proposed the entry in advance of the Alien: Earth TV show, and have been quite happy to see the business-suite shenanigans of the earlier storytelling take center stage in this latest serial.

My piece begins: “A corrosive line runs through the Alien franchise, and I’m not talking about the acid blood of H.R. Giger’s famous monsters. I refer to the grim corporate future.” To borrow a phrase from David Bowie, this is a short essay about me loving the alien.