Scratch Pad: Fog, 707, STT

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.

▰ It’s one thing to think the sounds from neighboring construction kinda resemble experimental percussion music. It’s a whole other level when it all starts to sound vaguely like the muffled vocals of an unidentifiable singer-songwriter.

▰ The city’s Tuesday noon sirens are still out of commission, but the bay fog horns appear to have gotten a new subwoofer

▰ A happy 707 Day to all who celebrate

That’s for the Roland TR-707 Rhythm Composer, which was first released 40 years ago, way back in 1985. The above INXS track came out two years later.

▰ I love when my speech-to-text tool identifies two different speakers, even when it’s just me rattling off notes verbally. There should be an LLM STT tool called Black Swan Fight Club that identifies your various sub-personalities for you.

▰ Been digging having my phone on grayscale mode. For one thing, it looks nice. For another, I find myself less drawn to wasting time on the device. For a third, the setting obviates the remotest consideration I might have had for a “dumbphone,” not that I had much of such a desire in the first place.

▰ The fog is so intense today. I wrote all day and then went for a walk and it felt like I was still indoors.

I kinda love it.

▰ Sometimes I just think about how much toast is consumed in the book Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, engineer/producer Geoff Emerick’s excellent memoir

▰ And this week in #dronescrolling — i.e., stuff other people posted: (1) Yuri Suzuki, sound artist and designer formerly of Pentagram, mentioned on Instagram that his partner, Amy Croft, founded a bed and breakfast in Margate, England, called Modja Modja House, and it now has artist residencies. He writes: “I’ve long had a passion for music and sound, and an ever-growing collection of synthesizers that really needed to be put to good use… so we thought: why not invite artists to stay and create?” ▰ (2) Robin Rimbaud is one of the OG electronic solo musicians from the 1990s, a peer — in time, impact, and sui generis quality — to Aphex Twin, Oval, and Squarepusher. His Instagram posts are regularly filled with his creative activities, as well as with a generous serving of what he is, himself, enjoying in terms of art and music. He writes detailed posts each time, such as this week about a visit to Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s “Clinamen” exhibit in the rotunda at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.

End of Week

Down at China Beach

I’ve been doing my best to really contain my social media use. This means not just limiting when I post (that is: not on weekends, nor on weekdays before breakfast or after dinner — with, of course, occasional exceptions, because being too strict is its own problem) but also frequency and range of topics. These end-of-day and end-of-week posts I make occasionally are a subcategory that just arose naturally, as I found myself at the edge of land on a regular basis, at the midpoint of a walk, whether to the Pacific Ocean or the San Francisco Bay. To a degree, these will all the look the same, which can also be said of most days. But at the same time, they’re quite distinct, as here given the awesome intensity of the fog down at China Beach. I watched a half dozen crows fly overhead, chatting nosily, and I could tell their relative distance from me because the closest ones were nearly black, the ones a little further were gray, and the ones furthest away seemed almost white, so deep were they in the fog.

Disquiet Junto Project 0706: Tile One On

The Assignment: Make the most of your bathroom.

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 0706: Tile One On
The Assignment: Make the most of your bathroom.

This week’s project has just one step: record something that makes use of the acoustics of your bathroom. (Or someone else’s bathroom.)

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0706” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0706-tile-one-on/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long do you shower?

Deadline: Monday, July 14, 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 706th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Tile One On — The Assignment: Make the most of your bathroom — at https://disquiet.com/0706/.

Sentry

This sentry stands atop a hill in San Francisco. Not a sentry, really. One of the city’s many outdoor public warning system (OPWS) speakers. Except not speakers, really, either — because the speakers don’t function. They were turned off years ago in advance of being updated. Then the pandemic hit, and budgets got hit, and now the speakers are remnants of best laid plans. The recent floods in Texas are a reminder that as archaic as such systems may seem, they are an essential component of life — rural and urban alike. I’m hopeful the San Francisco OPWS will eventually get fixed, and that the Tuesday noon siren tests, which were silenced toward the end of 2019, will once again be part of our local soundscape.

“gl-i-iv-v-tched”

Lunch time, fun time

A simple drone and I IV V progression, both from electric guitar, the latter part glitched thanks to a somewhat chaotic LFO, the former frozen from a single opening chord, the combination done live in VCV Rack over lunch. Very simple, a lot of fun.

This setup has proved useful at the office. It’s an elegant way to get the guitar, via a simulated guitar amp cabinet, into the laptop: