Yes, the mushroom dolsot for lunch was excellent, and at some point the sound of the sizzling dipped below hearing level.

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 0763: 3 Pedestals
The Assignment: Make music with three sounds.

There is just one step for this project: Make music with three sounds: one you love, one you dislike, and one you consider to be neutral. The individual sounds should, over the course of the piece, maintain roughly equal prominence, though one or another may be more at the forefront at a given time.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0763” (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-0763-3-pedestals/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up for you. How long do you choose to maintain the balance?

Deadline: Monday, August 17, 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 763rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Lunch Break — The Assignment: Make background music to read to midday — at disquiet.com/0763.

Random shot from recent trip to the UK. Every time I walked by one of these, I imagined I was in Jacques Tati’s Playtime.

I was trying to figure out what these were on a shelf in the spartan-chic apartment of the character Martian (it’s a nickname, I believe), played by Michael Fassbender in the TV series The Agency. Turns out they are books in the Contemporary Artists Series published by Phaidon.

▰ Based in Malta, Robert Farrugia is a fairly prolific ambient musician. The track “Projections” is a melody-intrigued bit of ambient released in advance of his forthcoming full album, Still, due out next month. His website, robertfarrugia.eu, is enjoyably old-school — like, late-’90s old school.

▰ Poland-based Grzegorz Bojanek celebrated getting to 2,000 subscribers on YouTube with an eight-minute live ambient performance with four Buddha Machines running through a variety of effects pedals

▰ Great full 10 minutes of Ellen Fullman performing her Long String Instrument in Sokołowsko, Poland. The video’s been up since January, and the event occurred last year, but as of this writing, it has just 35 views. It’s one of the better documents of the majestic sounds she generates with her strings. And the brick-walled space looks gorgeous.

▰ This generic note-taking app I’m installing so I can sync notes between my laptop and a video game device is rated 3+. You have to be at least 3 years old to use it. You can’t be 2, and presumably by 4 you’re already onboarded and deep in the ecosystem.

▰ You watch tutorials and reviews about various handheld video game devices and you hear complaining about “quality of life” issues with Windows-based ones, and you think, who are these whiners? And … then you try one, and you fully understand the mess they’ve been describing. (Status: Currently trying to set up Bazzite dual boot.)

▰ Yeah, my birthday dinner was pretty darn good — thanks to Sichuan Home on Geary (in San Francisco).

▰ Started the day, after some writing time, with a five-mile walk that took me along the coast. Not sure I’ll often have the time for such a thing, but it was a nice change of pace, so to speak.

▰ Started the day with a five-mile hike with friends, and after a buncha work did a different sort of Big Walk (the new game, that is).

▰ Strikes me as sort of weird that Big Walk on Steam is a one-time purchase, but on the PS5 you have to have a PS Plus subscription?

▰ The automated transcription on YouTube renamed* Danny Carey’s band “Tool” as “Tulle” and now I really wanna hear gauzy prog rock.

*In a video about Terry Bozzio sitting in on the Beat tour

▰ Living just two blocks or so from the Outside Lands festival, I enjoy the numerous brief spurts of pre-show soundchecks the day before the events begin. It’s like a Naked City album on a vast scale. (No, I’m not attending. I am looking forward to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass from October 2–4, also very close to home.)

▰ I love how at the opening of the penultimate episode of the TV series Devs, the eventually manic looping of the music — Steve Reich’s classic “Come Out”* — prefigures the freaky-as-heck one-second-into-the-future predictive video that the software team accomplishes.

*Interestingly, the subtitles (correctly) identified Daniel Hamm as the speaker in “Come Out”

▰ Me watching something in a genre I like: More of that, please.

Me watching something in a genre I don’t like: Ugh, that again.

▰ A post on Instagram by an Italian musician who had lost a colleague read “ciao, maestro” and I, foreseeing what was likely going to happen, clicked the “translate” button, and indeed this phrase became “hello, master” when in fact the precise opposite was the actual meaning.

▰ I read a bunch this week, mostly a manuscript for a friend’s non-fiction book-in-progress, and some manga, and I’m close to finishing off a mid-1970s science fiction novel, one which I only became aware of recently, despite that having been a prime reading period for then me.

I finished reading one other short non-fiction book, Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick, as recommended by a friend. Philbrick knows the material well, having studied the wreck that inspired Herman Melville’s novel, the result of which was his own In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.

As someone who’s been struggling to appreciate various canonical works in recent years, I can’t say this book answered the question satisfactorily. Like late-era Harold Bloom, Philbrick radiates the literary equivalent of religious fervor, which to the even vaguely skeptical reader can register as presumption, so the result is rather more fait accompli than illustrative argument. There is no moderation to such claims as “he is a god in our literary pantheon”; elsewhere: “our American bible.” You don’t come away appreciating genius, just being informed of its presence. The only thing less satisfying than hagiography is tautology.

I happen to be reading, and greatly enjoying, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent currently; Conrad, perhaps tellingly, is one of the few nods to dissent in the whole of Philbrick’s book — he gets a parenthetical that registers with my experience: “(Joseph Conrad ridiculed Moby-Dick for its romantic, overblown prose).” Conrad was 38 years Melville’s junior (he also died on my birthday, as it turns out).

At the Philbrick book’s best, you do gain a fairly detailed sense of Melville, of his place in his time, his troubles, which does make the source book more approachable — ironically, that is to say, bringing it down to earth; less faith, more toil. There are also brief elements here of how Moby-Dick, a critical and commercial failure in Melville’s lifetime, came to be adored, in particular how authors at the end of World War I found a kinship in its experimental nature. That is something I want to learn more about next.

Great show Wednesday night — August 5, 2026 — at Mr. Tipple’s (SF), a quartet led by bassist Billy Edwards, with Rico Jones (tenor sax), Joe Warner (piano), and Sylvia Cuenca (drums). Jamal Ramirez was listed as drummer on the venue’s site, but something must have come up. And then, during the second of two sets, trumpeter Joel Behrman joined for “Blue Monk” and stayed until the end. (Behrman’s group, Currents, played earlier that evening at Black Cat, about a mile away.) Warner did expert dissections of the standards while Jones, in stark contrast, used them as starting points for rich, soaring solos.

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 0762: Lunch Break
The Assignment: Make background music to read to midday.

There is just one step for this project: Make music intended to be listened to in the background while one is reading in the middle of the day.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0762” (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-0762-lunch-break/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up for you. How long before you have to get back to work?

Deadline: Monday, August 10, 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 762nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Lunch Break — The Assignment: Make background music to read to midday — at disquiet.com/0762.

Always worth looking up when you’re at a concert. This is at the bookshop Medicine for Nightmares, which also hosts concerts, in San Francisco’s Mission District.