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.
▰ The Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, a jazz foursome, posted a full video recording of a live set, doing their new album, Happy Today, co-released May 15 by the International Anthem and Nonesuch labels — heavy on atmosphere and exemplifying a rich sense of ensemble:
▰ SML, a jazz quintet, revs percolating minimalism into virtual Afrobeat in this first available track from their forthcoming live album, Spontaneous Music Live, due out June 26, also on International Anthem:
▰ Glitch/IDM producer Loraine James works with vocalists a lot lately — introspective rap, sultry soul, stream-of-consciousness spoken word — and her excellent recent album, Detached from the Rest of You, released May 8 on Hyperdub, exudes artful anxiousness:
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 tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online 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.
Another light week. Guess I’ve been busy. (I have.)
▰ You know it was a good Sichuan meal when afterwards, as you walk down the street, even the air you inhale is tasty.
▰ The Disquiet Junto music community is collaborating for the eighth year in a row with Musikfestival Bern, in Bern, Switzerland, and they posted this about the first of four projected projects we’ll be doing together this year, in the lead up to the September events:
The Assignment: Contribute sounds to a 2026 Musikfestival Bern installation.
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0752: Pong Pings The Assignment: Contribute sounds to a 2026 Musikfestival Bern installation.
As part of Musikfestival Bern 2026, which takes «Blitz» (flash/lightning) as its theme, a ping pong table will be set up in the newly renovated PROGR courtyard for passers-by to play quick matches against musicians, artists, and each other. During lunch hours, matches will be dynamically scored with outsized storm sounds, triggered with piezo mics and/or game controllers. In this week’s Junto you are invited to contribute to the sound library that will be used for this project. Think “tiny impacts, large sound effects.”
The assignment: Compose abstract storm events: single impacts (rumbling thunder, lightning strikes, etc) and/or textural sounds (wind, rain, hail, etc). Each event or texture should stand on its own. Record one or more. If you record a sequence of these, please make a single track of them and include a brief clean silent break between each. All musicians whose work is included in the installation will be credited on-site. And please be sure to set your track as downloadable.
More on Musikfestival Bern at https://musikfestivalbern.ch. Many thanks to the festival’s Tobias Reber for the invitation to again collaborate. This is the eighth consecutive year of Bern x Junto collaborations. This project is the first of four planned this year.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0752” (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.
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 752nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Pong Pings — The Assignment: Contribute sounds to a 2026 Musikfestival Bern installation — disquiet.com/0752. More on Musikfestival Bern at https://musikfestivalbern.ch. Many thanks to the festival’s Tobias Reber for the invitation to again collaborate. This is the eighth consecutive year of Bern x Junto collaborations.
The video game Hela is not due out until later this year, and in the lead up to that release, the developer has been posting videos, most of them short glimpses of gameplay. Hela is described as “a cozy co-op adventure where you play as a tiny mouse exploring a magical world inspired by the forests and wilderness of Northern Sweden.” It’s not natural, at least not in the sense of being realistic. Reads the description appended to one or more of those videos: “It will be up to you to help a kind witch care for the land she has protected for generations, while you explore, experiment, and create your own adventure.”
And among these promotional videos is a expansive, continuous, three-hour segment showing some of the mice characters resting out in nature. The point is less what you see, as the camera remains in the same position throughout, than what you hear. Sounds of running water, bending trees, and birdsong fill the air. Given the immersive nature of this sort of game, the advance taste of the world of Hela makes a certain amount of sense. There is, in effect, an acoustic ecology to modern video game playing. One can gauge the health of a given game — in the sense of its world-building cohesiveness, its level of detail, its version of realism — by just listening to it.
