… to Disquiet, a little locus of ambient and other electronic music. The site’s name honors Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935), the late Portuguese poet. Son of a music critic, illuminator of the everyday, loner, futurist — he is as good a patron saint of electronic music as the burgeoning genre could ask for.
Supporting himself as a clerk, the early-20th-century equivalent of a McJob, Pessoa toiled in willful solitude like today’s electronic musicians, who tend to compose alone in their bedrooms. Also like today’s electronic musicians, Pessoa employed numerous pseudonyms to concentrate distinct, and often opposed, aspects of his creativity. In fact, one could say these pseudonyms — heteronyms, actually — employed, or possessed, him.
The Book of Disquiet (or Disquietude, in the less common translation) is the title of an autobiography Pessoa wrote for one of his many egos, “Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon.” It is a work rich with lucid dreams, more a compendium of fragments than a direct narrative; it comprised but a portion of the 25,426 literary items Pessoa left in a trunk when he died.
This is the web site of disquiet: reflections on ambient/electronic music, and interviews with the people who make it. For more information, check out the site’s F.A.Q., or list of “frequently asked questions.”