Peter Kirn / CDM on the Disquiet Junto

“It’s really the opposite of the current trend toward sameness”

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

CDM.link, the long-running website from Peter Kirn, calls itself “a home for people who make and play music and motion.” CDM is a required-reading part of any electronic musician’s RSS feed, covering music and performance technology, as well as the highly creative work that people do with such tools.

And so, it was great this week that Kirn took the time to highlight the 750th consecutive week of the Disquiet Junto, which he has covered many times over the course of its existence, including way back at the start, in 2012, as well as in 2016 and in 2019. For this week’s coverage, he says, in part:

It’s been running continuously, without a break, since 2012. Every Thursday morning, Disquiet’s Marc Weidenbaum posts a call to a community for a new compositional assignment. And this week, the project reaches the 750th (!) week. That means a call for something epic.

It’s really the opposite of the current trend toward sameness, big data, and extractivist industry capitalism, or even snobbery as an antidote. Membership is open. You can post however you like, though SoundCloud is an easy shortcut. (Hey, it started in 2012, back when that was sort of the only game in town.) It’s just a chance for people to share music with each other. None of the elitist think-piece agonizing about whether there’s “too much music” and art requires scarcity, blah blah.

As Marc puts it, the goal is “to use constraints to stoke creativity.” It’s the process of making — that challenge in the assignment — that’s a big part of the appeal, and the camraderie of tackling it together and discovering how others respond.

Read the full piece at cdm.link. And thanks again, Peter!

On the Line: wGotowości, Balle, Daydreamers

Some favorite recent(ish) writing

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

▰ Gimme Shelter:

“Always take spare socks,” the instructor advised. And you might want earplugs, he added. There are always lots of snorers in emergency shelters.

That is from an article by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times about Poland’s wGotowości (or “Readiness”) civilian defense training program.

. . .

▰ Time Warp

The reader might notice a ripple of trouble in what Tara tells us about her marriage: they used to travel together but have stopped; their phone conversation ‘lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio link, a muted love mumble’.

That is Joanna Biggs writing in the London Review of Books about Solvej Balle’s series of novels, On the Calculation of Volume. Tara, the main character in the books, wakes every day having to live the same day all over again — sort of like in Groundhog Day, but not exactly. A New York Times story by Hilary Leichter about Balle’s books reminds the reader of the “infraordinary,” the late George Perec’s term (l’infra-ordinaire in the original French) for “the perplexities of the habitual and the banal.” Seems as well like a good term for hyperawareness of the quotidian, including everyday sound.

. . .

▰ Dream Weaver

In the car, an oscillating whine I mistook for engine noise played over the stereo: bursts of light between long stretches of darkness, gentle rocking back and forth between frequencies, dissonant cries bubbling up as if from inside a well, more alien than any impressionism I was familiar with. My sister was the one playing, the instrument she had played from childhood unrecognizable. She sent these to him instead of letters.

That is from Daydreamers, the recent novel by my friend Alvin Lu. The book was published by FC2 last year. The narrator here is the brother of the musician in question. In a book steeped in matters of translation, gaps both generational and cultural looming large, the avant-garde music played by the sister provides a striking example.

This article originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of my Disquiet.com email newsletter, This Week in Sound.

Sound Ledger

Audio culture by the numbers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

100: The decibel level, 24 hours a day, near some data centers

20: The estimated percentage of Europeans whose health is at risk due to noise pollution

13.4: The percentage by which the organ density of grasshoppers in noisier habitats is higher than that of grasshoppers in quieter habitats

Sources: data centers (techradar.com), pollution (msn.com), grasshoppers (Nature)

This article originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of my Disquiet.com email newsletter, This Week in Sound.

Disquiet Junto Project 0750: Let’s Get Heavy

The Assignment: Record something epic.

/ 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 llllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0750: Let’s Get Heavy
The Assignment: Record something epic.

This week’s project marks the 750th consecutive week of the Disquiet Junto music community. The instruction is simple: Record something epic.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0750” (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-0750-lets-get-heavy/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Short and sweet — or gargatuan?

Deadline: Monday, May 18, 2026, 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 750th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Let’s Get Heavy — The Assignment: Record something epic — disquiet.com/0750.

In (In (In)) the Audium

Before and after, and during

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In my latest issue of This Week in Sound, I posted a photo of a photo. The photo I shot contains a photo of the San Francisco sound performance space called the Audium back in the early 1970s, when it was under construction. I’m holding the photo in the space as it is today, and the resemblance between the exposed beams and the actual lobby of the Audium is self-evident. Here, to follow up, is another photo, which is one that my friend Łukasz Langa, who accompanied me that evening, shot of me taking the photo I put in my newsletter: