An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
Unlike at clock shops in movies, in this tiny, one-person clock shop the majority of the clocks that tick are blissfully still. But enough are ticking to provide a nice quiet rhythmic segmentation of each second. I’d love to record this place in the middle of the night.
What Sound Looks Like: An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
“Ethics being Smiley’s own choice for the least alluring doorbell he could think of.” That’s from early on in John le Carré’s novel A Legacy of Spies. A longstanding safe house has survived decades of political turmoil both within and beyond the halls of Britain’s intelligence operations, and the location is now being investigated by a new breed of officious bureaucrats who are congenitally blind to any shades of moral gray. The label of the doorbell is a coy attempt by Smiley — George Smiley, le Carré’s spymaster character — to hide in plan sight, to have a doorbell that no one would in their right mind ever elect to touch.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
I pushed this button. Nothing happened. I wondered what I did wrong.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
If you arrive at the farmers market late, you can hear the sound art.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
This little gadget is the Pisound, which I spent much of yesterday building under the guidance of a far more informed and experienced friend. Its existence is predicated on the Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive bare-bones computer, around $35, that is used widely in education and by tinkerers/makers. The Pisound is a sound card that attaches to the Raspberry Pi and turns it into a full-fledged media device, with an emphasis on high-grade audio processing. The Pisound is capable of serving many purposes, including a networked audio player. What I’m most interested in is its ability to serve as a programmable musical instrument, such as an effects pedal of infinite possibilities. After we got it set up yesterday — the Raspberry Pi organization is based in the U.K., and Pisound arrived from Lithuania — my friend showed me how a single line of code could transform my inbound electric guitar signal into an outbound warble that sounded like we had captured Angelo Badalamenti’s spirit in one tiny little semi-opaque box. Anyhow, yesterday was day one. Actually, the first thing we did, even before the guitar processing, was to drop in one of Fredrik Olofsson’s mini-compositions that come in the form of Twitter-sized bits of SuperCollider code. Makes me want to get a second PiSound and make a music box of generative compositions. I’m looking forward to exploring this thing more as the summer progresses.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.Latest
• I was on Vivian Host's Peak Time show (on Red Bull Radio) on March 11 to extol the timeless virtues of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, and related works. You can listen to a recording here: redbullradio.com.
• My latest article is a review in the March issue of The Wire magazine of the week-long Recombinant Festival (held in San Francisco), whose performance highlights included Herman Kolgen, Rrose, and Electric Indigo.
Upcoming
• March 22, 2019: I'm giving a talk at noon on Friday at the Algorithmic Art Assembly, two days of events (Friday and Saturday) in San Francisco: aaassembly.org. The talk is titled "The Woodshed Is a Black Box" and this is its description in the program: "How a rules-based system formed, shapes, and fuels the long-running online music community known as the Disquiet Junto."
• May 7, 2019: This day sees the release of Rob Walker's book The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday (Knopf), which has entries about the Disquiet Junto.
• May 22, 2019: Final day of the semester of the 15-week "Sounds of Brands" course I teach once a year at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. I post occasional updates here. Follow the tag #sounds-of-brands.
• December 13, 2019: This day marks the 23rd anniversary of Disquiet.com.
• January 7, 2020: This day marks the 8th anniversary of the Disquiet Junto.
Dates TBA
• A chapter on the Disquiet Junto ("The Disquiet Junto as an Online Community of Practice," by Ethan Hein) appears in the forthcoming book The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning (Oxford University Press), edited by Stephanie Horsley, Janice Waldron, and Kari Veblen.
• There are entries on the Disquiet Junto in the forthcoming book The Music Production Cookbook: Ready-made Recipes for the Classroom (Oxford University Press), edited by Adam Patrick Bell.
Ongoing
• The Disquiet Junto series of weekly communal music projects explore constraints as a springboard for creativity and productivity. There is a new project each Thursday afternoon (California time), and it is due the following Monday at 11:59pm: disquiet.com/junto.
• My book on Aphex Twin's landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, was published as part of the 33 1/3 series, an imprint of Bloomsbury. It has been translated into Spanish (2018) and Japanese (2019).