Love a good “electpic” horn. (And yes, I know it said “electric” before part of the R got rubbed off, but first, for a while after seeing the sign, I thought it said “elliptic,” like a descriptor of the sound running up and down in cycles, or something like that.)
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.
▰ There’s a new album out, Friendship Survival Guide, that is a classical-tinged drone collaboration between Adam Wiltzie (of Stars of the Lid) and the late film composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (Sicario, The Theory of Everything, Arrivals). Wiltzie has done several scores, too. Its Bandcamp page has it for purchase but not streaming. This is the opening track, and there’s an informative interview by Peter Kirn with Wiltzie at cdm.link:
▰ I’ve been listening to the forthcoming David Cordero ambient album, Más allá de las palabras (“beyond words”), a lot, and tracking down Cordero’s previous work as a result, which led me to this live set with Miguel Otero recorded on a narrow balcony in San Fernando in Cádiz, Spain, in October 2020, at something approximating the height of the pandemic. You’d never know, the sounds are so relaxed and inspiring. Both Cordero and Otero are based in Cádiz.
▰ Due to the current Disquiet Junto project (“Remix Therapy”), I’ve been thinking a lot about remixes — a deep dive, correspondence, and conversations that, fortunately, led to this excellent edit of Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” in which all we hear is the first eighth note of every bar. It’s quite something. The musician, Behrooz Parham, is apparently obsessed with “Take Five,” because the YouTube channel is full of other versions, like one with the drums and piano at regular speed but the sax and bass at half speed, and another with the same two beats removed from every bar, and on and on. Parham is based in Sweden.
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 serves, I’ve found, as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. Some items show up on disquiet.com before this post, in which case I don’t repeat them. 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.
▰ When you’re auto-transcribing a rough draft of an interview and “Very strange indeed” comes out as “Quest spring and jundee,” which is very strange indeed
▰ Robert Plant is playing Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a late announcement. He was incredible the last time he played the festival.
▰ It’s fun to make a good joke on Instagram (where I am @dsqt). Philip Glass posted this photo of a work-in-progress, and if you look closely you’ll see the actual music has been blurred out. I don’t think any comment of mine on Instagram has gotten more than a handful of likes previously.
▰ I know I live in a heavily and longtime Russian (among many other cultures) neighborhood but this is the first time in 30 years I’ve seen someone wearing a Dostoyevsky t-shirt.
(Someone humorously replied online: “Oh you like Dostoyevsky? Name five of their songs.”)
▰ No music at the barbershop today, but there was this nugget:
Customer: “What’s longer than three?”
Barber: “Four.”
▰ Animal control caught the apex kitty so it’s safe to end the week with a walk to the ocean.
There’s an endless and growing corpus of live recordings of synthesizer music on YouTube by highly skilled and informed musicians, and I particularly enjoy this ongoing channel called Modular Ambient, named for the modular synthesizers that are the focus of each video. Whoever runs it sets up these inventive and deceptively simple generative (in the pre-LLM sense of the word) or otherwise ever-changing systems of varied sound sources and processing, and then records them for half a day straight. You can hear the shifts over time, and, indeed, note the natural light change as each given recording proceeds. The account owner, whose name I can’t sort out, also posts information in the comments for other musicians who are learning how to use these or similar tools. This video is from yesterday.
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 0768: Remix Therapy
The Assignment: Do yourself a favor and re-work it out.
There is one step for this project: Take care of yourself by remixing something.
Major thanks to Diego Bernal for having proposed this project.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0768” (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-0768-remix-therapy/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up for you. How abstract will you go?
Deadline: Monday, September 21, 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 768th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Remix Therapy — The Assignment: Do yourself a favor and re-work it out — at disquiet.com/0768.
