A highlight from the Es Devlin exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in Manhattan. This is a plan for her installation at the 2021 Art Basel in Miami Beach, Florida. Titled Five Echoes, it was a full-scale maze based on the floor of the Chartres Cathedral, a “sound sculpture” that contained a “temporary forest”: “We immersed visitors within a soundscape that Invited them to learn each plant and tree species’ name, making a habitat for the non-human species within the human imagination.” The exhibit runs through August 11 ..read more

This old white van is something of a neighborhood white board. It gets written over, and then it’s painted over, and then the circle of urban life begins anew ..read more

As I type this, I’m preparing to drive over to Berkeley, from San Francisco, to see guitarist Bill Frisell in a sextet that will be premiering new music. The group, who will play at Freight & Salvage, consists of Frisell plus violinist Jenny Scheinman, violist Eyvind Kang, cellist Hank Roberts, bassist Thomas Morgan, and drummer Rudy Royston. There is, as far as I can tell, no available footage or audio of them playing as a group, so I’ve been piecing together a mental sonic image, as it were, from various smaller group settings. These two short videos are all the strings from the sextet e ..read more

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media. ▰ The sole downside to opening the living room window is the terrible music that people play in their cars ▰ I saw Brad Mehldau two weeks ago. I’m seeing Bill ..read more

Way back in March 2013, I recorded the Tuesday noon siren that used to resound throughout San Francisco. The siren has since been silenced for municipal budgetary reasons, but the recording lives on. It is one my most listened-to tracks on SoundCloud, and it’s been sampled by various musicians over time — as have other recordings of the siren that circulate on the internet. And now, for the first time, my recording has appeared on a vinyl record album. Neil Stringfellow, who records as Audio Obscura, opens his new full-length album, Acid Field Recordings in Dub, with a track titled “Through N ..read more

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) trac ..read more

Two days ago I posted a preview video I recorded of some virtual synthesizer modules being developed by my friend Mahlen Morris, who does so under the name Stochastic Telegraph. What appears here is a video that Mahlen himself recorded, earlier in the development process, when some of the modules had different names, and at least one of them had fewer features. You can read along in the video as he describes, by typing, what it is that he’s up to in real time. The source audio that he’s working with here is a guitar part that I recorded for him with this delay/buffer approach in mind ..read more

I wrote about one of my favorite movies of all time for hilobrow.com, as part of a series of 25 pieces on “the topic of ‘offbeat’ movies from the Eighties” (the decade loosely defined). Here’s how it opens: In 1993, the year Groundhog Day hit theaters, that furry near-term Nostradamus named Punxsutawney Phil gazed into the meteorological future and saw his shadow. Historical records of this Americana hokum date back to the late 1800s, when Groundhog Day first became an annual ritual at Gobbler’s Knob, an inland Pennsylvania town with the sort of Capraesque name that lends itself to fables mixi ..read more

I was talking, some time back, with a friend of mine about my fascination with buffers in the making of music, with the way digital memory access has become a normal function of sound production. One doesn’t simply play the sound of the moment, with the pluck of a string or the touch of a key on keyboard; one can reach back into the recent past and play something that has already occurred. Furthermore, if we gain a sense of ease in that prior moment, we can linger there, essentially inhabit that pre-moment moment for the length of the performance, and occasionally reach into the future to pla ..read more

A Keith Haring boombox illustration from 1984, displayed as part of the Urban Art Evolution exhibit at the Nassau County Museum of Art through July 7, 2024 ..read more