disquiet. Mark Weidenbaum

And I uh

These Are The Scenes...

around and around the beside

2025-06-11

calypso

I 'misused' Microsoft Word to create this ... see the accompanying visuals at https://youtu.be/6dIBIYtLmE4 ... and hear the 'spinoff' track at https://soundcloud.com/half-unusual/half-akjhdjsdmnn ... I think you'll agree, it's the best use of the word akjhdjsd,mnn to date ... 😁😜 ... Oh, and lead vocals by the Word robot! 🤖

This project is the second of three that are being done by the Disquiet Junto in collaboration with the 2025 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 3 through 7. The festival topic this year is « Kette » — which translates, as the organization explains, to “Chain”: “Chains connect but they also bind. They create relationships but also restrictions. As a gift they look nice, feared when used in vice, and yet they can span bridges across fire and ice.” All three Junto projects will engage with the work of Svetlana Maraš, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 festival.

We are working again at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the seventh year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

More on the 702nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Applications — The Assignment: Make music by misusing a piece of music software — at https://disquiet.com/0702/

visuals (YouTube)

halF wrotE [disquiet0702]

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”  ― Guy de Maupassant

Track list and start times:
00:00  Jake Muir – Siren's Call
04:31  Ecclesiastical Scaffolding – Heavy Lies The Afternoon Heat*
10:14  Belial Pelegrim – TAFFETA | 234
16:54  Amby Downs – Garrawang Biderap Black Field Cricket Mating Song (Excerpt)*
21:48  Object Collection – Disappear By Fire
25:26  Pharmakon – Nakedness of Need
31:38  claire rousay & Gretchen Korsmofind – yourself in a hole on the beach
36:06  Erik Griswold & Rebecca Cunningham – Sounding Tides
42:20  Loop(c)y - Afterglow Of Memory
45:36  Ambient Annie – When The Gale Has Passed
52:08  Hari Maia – Static Eyes
58:29  Lost Ether – Mavis and Roland have a Picnic*
1:02:25  Throbbing Gristle – Exotic Functions
1:06:35  Velvet Something Superdark – Those Were The Days
1:11:09  Mat Ward – Caligo Paean (excerpt)
1:25:03  Jake Muir – Spectre's Bonfire
1:31:28  Jimmy Lem – Downstream Procrastination
1:34:43  vheissu77 – hazy rays (naviarhaiku592)
1:39:50  Cadlag – Integral (excerpt)
1:45:44  Deaf Center – Rev (edit)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* From the recent release “Anthology Of Experimental Music From Australia” from Unexplained Sounds Group
https://unexplainedsoundsgroup.bandcamp.com/album/anthology-of-experimental-music-from-australia

Eclectic current – Memory upgrade required

2025-06-17

meeting in the fjord

unspoken

ongequce

Last week I had a quick visit to Wheal Lovelace, which is one of the many mine shafts on the edges of the "Wheal Maid valley" also known locally as "Cornish Mars" due to the colour of the arsenic tainted earth. This mine is just around the corner from Wheal Fortune and seems to partly share the same lodes according to the old charts. I found a mass of boxy crystallised pyrite, dragged up from the depths a few hundred years ago and expertly separated from the copper ore by the balmaidens who worked here.

It may be the case that the larger the crystallisation is the harder it is to find good semiconducting junctions though, at least in pyrite - as this seems less active than samples from elsewhere. 

Here I used two samples from the same rock on the squarewave fm and sawtooth generator, and tried out a new mixer circuit on the breadboard I've been slowly working on.

wheal lovelace pyrite drones

A remix of Disquiet's Library Drone:
http://soundcloud.com/disquiet/the-library-drone

Library SyFy Drone (20130212-ssu3012)

Sometimes quiet sounds are the most jarring, such as hearing what could be a stream while walking down a particularly cement-lined and tree-less street in a large city. It's a sunny winter Friday in San Francisco, not far from the ocean. There's a strong wind, and passing planes and cars, and yet the sound is there, for certain, the sound of a small stream. Of course, it isn't a stream, not in the general sense. It's a drain, whose holes let the passing water echo above. A struggling bit of microfoliage, tiny weeds making their way to the sunlight, confirm the liquid below. 

Track recorded on my Nexus 4 cell phone using Easy Voice Recorder Pro on Friday, February 22.

The Urban Stream

Every Tuesday at noon the Outdoor Public Warning System (OPWS) rings out around San Francisco. It has two stages. First there is a siren. Second there is a spoken announcement: "This is a test. This is a test of the outdoor warning system. This is only a test." 

As of October 2012, there are 111 speakers set up throughout San Francisco to broadcast the message. The majority have the message in English, but there are 2 in Cantonese and English and 17 in Spanish and English. See the attached image for a map of the OPWS speakers.

Because of the city's famously hilly terrain, as well as the speed at which sound travels, and the apparently inexact timing of the system's triggers, the sirens and announcement can often be heard to overlap, creating an artificial echo effect in addition to the actual echo. Also, because it rings at noon, the sound of the warning often overlays with another form of announcement: the bells of churches and other institutions.

I made this recording on Tuesday, February 26, 2013, in the backyard of my home in the Richmond District of San Francisco. This was an especially clear day. It was made on an H4n, recorded directly to a WAV file. At five of the hour I placed the H4n in the backyard and set it to record. Only after the announcement had fully trailed off and been replaced by the bird song and church bells did I approach the H4n and turn it off. Then I trimmed the length of the recording to focus on the runtime of the OPWS.

More on the OPWS system at the website of the City and County of San Francisco Department of Emergency Management: <a href="http://sfdem.org/index.aspx?page=55">sfdem.org</a>.

Outdoor Public Warning System (San Francisco, CA)

remix of disquiet's sample http://soundcloud.com/disquiet/siren-san-francisco-tuesday

working on a soloed single channel in Alchemy vst.

thanks for the audio 

Sfsiren song [disquiet remix] -alchemy

The waiting room at the doctor's office is self-enclosed. It contains a handful of chairs and is lit by two large windows, their blinds tucked just below a high, generically tiled ceiling. No one else is in the room. A tiny speaker sits on the windowsill, nearly a dozen stories up from the busy city street. The speaker emits barely perceptible music, a tinny whimper of sodden melodicism, as if the Whoville Pops is being overheard. What the speaker itself fails to do service to is further muffled by the incessant drone of the building's ancient HVAC system, and the whole resulting thick ether of white noise is punctuated by the thuddish tic of an unseen clock. 

In the audio recording made on a cellphone, the noise-like elements are greatly emphasized. They are far more prevalent and evident than they had been in person. It is as if the texture of the open road, so uniform when seen through the windshield of a fast-moving car, has been cast in high relief.

Track recorded on my Nexus 4 cell phone using Easy Voice Recorder Pro on Friday, March 1.

<i>(Image via <a href="http://pixabay.com/p-22952/?no_redirect">pixabay.com</a>.)</i>

The Waiting Room

My 33 1/3 series book about the Aphex Twin album <i>Selected Ambient Works Volume II</i> was published in 2014. The book was one of the top 5 bestselling titles for the calendar year, and in 2015 was ranked by Pitchfork as one of the "33 best" of the 100-plus books in the 33 1/3 series. It has subsequently been translated into Japanese (2019) and Spanish (2018)

Since 2012 I have moderated the Disquiet Junto group, which began on SoundCloud. More at disquiet.com/junto. 

I've written for Nature, Pitchfork, The Wire, Down Beat, Boing Boing, NewMusicBox, Red Bull Music Academy, Art Practical, the website of The Atlantic, and many other publications. 

I've exhibited sound art at galleries in Los Angeles (Crewest), Manhattan (apex art), and Dubai (DUTAC), and I had a audio-visual installation at the San Jose Museum of Art as part of its 45th anniversary.

And since 1996 I've run the website Disquiet.com about the intersection of sound, art, and technology.

The Urban Stream

disquiet

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