We kept in touch, and then last year, as he was putting thought into an upcoming collection of his work, he asked if I would write the essay for it. The book was published recently by Landslide, which is a Sydney, Australia, imprint run by Jake Wotherspoon. The book made its debut at the recent San Francisco Art Book Fair. Both Yubai and Wotherspoon were in attendance, and I spent several days during the fair at their table.

The pervasive theme in Yubai’s recent work, a few reproductions of which appear below, is “discommunication,” a concept of his that serves as the book’s title. Discommunication is a massive, sprawling document, each page 42 cm × 30 cm (16.5” × 11.8”), the pages a shiny silver, the images stark and evasive. While it is a photography book, it is one fueled by music, and its urban imagery naturally suggests the soundscapes of the unnatural environments that Yubai chronicles and creates.

With permission from Yubai and Wotherspoon, I am sharing here the text of my introduction for the first time outside of the book, which was printed in a limited edition of 120. My essay fills a page toward the end of the book and is broken into three sections. I am proud to have played my small role in the book’s production, and very much enjoyed observing from the sidelines as its development progressed.

Encounters

I once found myself at a dinner seated between a businessman and a graphic designer. During the meal, the businessman became increasingly wary whenever discussion turned to the designer’s profession. This tension was of the fleeting yet consequential sort that can occur when polarized individuals meet for likely the only time in their lives — a blunt snapshot, an emphatic moment, an elemental fissure.

Eventually, the businessman spoke his mind, concern having built up such steam that it demanded release. What he said was structured like a question, but leapfrogged to accusation. “So,” the businessman asked of the designer, “you’re telling me that you take ‘ideas’ and … then you express them … ‘visually’? You turn ideas into … images?”

The businessman’s pauses were troubling, like he felt his version of reality being yanked away, and he was doing his damnedest to pull it back to his side of whatever line he perceived had been drawn. The stakes seemed high — though perhaps only to him. His tone signaled that the graphic designer was either self-deluded or a fraud. I politely rose to the designer’s defense, but in the mind of the businessman, I clearly dug myself a hole right next to this person on whom he had focused his incredulity.

The incident feels like a modern day Aesop’s fable, one arriving by way of J. G. Ballard’s anthropological x-rays: a charged interaction between white-collar workers, a study in societal contrasts that borders on the violent — all due to the provisional status of the image.

Renderings

That images can and do express ideas seems self-evident to me, no less today than at the dinner decades ago. If anything, as time has progressed, aesthetics seem ever more like encapsulations of perspectives, concepts, ideologies, narratives, scenes, cultures. The very word “aesthetic,” for example, has shifted its form, morphed as culture has evolved, from noun to adjective, from described to descriptive.

For something to “be” “aesthetic” today means for it to have a sensibility that extends well beyond objects themselves, well beyond (mere) matters of design, and to stand for something akin to a statement, an ethos. At the least, something being approvingly recognized as “aesthetic” signals the presence of a coherent, consistent point of view — and the term can imply far more; being “aesthetic” can encompass, as it were, an entire worldview.

Such are these prints by Yoshi Yubai, an extraordinary street photographer from Japan’s Hiroshima Prefecture, and one who is fully grounded in global urban culture. Yubai, in this book, sets war mementos against storefront hallucinations, ominous structures against corrupted data, surveillance residue against damaged silhouettes — and it is all of a piece. The intense aesthetic — in the older sense of that word — of Yubai’s art takes two forms in particular. There is the work itself, and there is the way it connects past the realm of photography.

Street photography often aspires to capture the beauty in the broken and the mundane, to document fleeting moments that don’t so much defy as transcend classical conceptions of what is condoned to be aesthetically pleasing. By identifying essential subjects and shapes, figures and stories, textures and moods, in the everyday, Yubai’s street photography stakes a claim. There is the denuded affect of faces removed from any helpful context, the extreme saturation that elevates the simple to the iconic, and perhaps foremost, the emotional impact of a vision that is at once inspirational and post-apocalyptic.

Yubai then pushes those same subjects — whether generic models or battle sites, advertisements or street signage, car graveyards or images of images — further than their original forms suggested, often past the point of recognizability. These images are rendered — like with fat, reduced to vital components — in order to amplify any inherent texture, and to draw out the opportunities for abstraction, building back up from the elemental.

If in much street photography, a moment is captured for consideration, then in Yubai’s, those moments are starting points for serial reuse: layering, degradation, polarization.

Throughout, as his work takes on the impure patterning of a dying television screen, he retains the flavor of street photography. Rather than (merely) document a dingy alley or a seedy business corridor or a forlorn building, he summons their graffiti-coated spirits. In turn, the haphazard angles and violated surfaces of the environments he studies become fantastical works of art.

Generations

Yubai cites diverse resources for focusing his imagination, notably the pioneering computer graphics of Robert Abel. Countless generations of Moore’s Law have rendered Abel’s early animations quaint by comparison, perhaps — but those works share with Yubai’s contemporary prints an emphasis on willfully basic geometries that bleed surrealism.

Also in the passing years, as technology has made one consequential footfall after another, art has grappled with how to curb the monster. Cyberpunk recognized the rust in the machine, and set a precedent for the grit that Yubai ekes out in his imagery. The metallic surfaces and reflective qualities of his prints speak to digital dreams and artificial pleasures, to Mirrorshades appetites and Neuromancer bohemia.

Further along the way, glitch came to celebrate the beauty of systems tested well beyond their limits. Yubai finds camaraderie and regeneration in the glitch-inflected music of electronic acts like Oval and Autechre, which push their digital audio tools past intended purposes — until, like in his photography, the quotidian reveals itself as raw material for adulterated abstraction. Music fuels him. He identifies (and identifies with) a through-line back to the time of barebones bands like Suicide, which wrestled with fundamentals — the minimal, the electronic, the experimental, the febrile.

That proto-industrial era followed immediately on the heyday of Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, a pronounced presence in this book, not just in subject matter (advertising, commerce, beauty, appropriation) but in presentation. Printed onto silver foil beneath a reflective gloss finish, the images glisten like the surface of still water, amplifying the book’s atmosphere, at once sharp and ambiguous.

Take that materiality into consideration. Discommunication is not simply a container for reproductions; the book itself functions as the work. Yubai explains that his images stand in deliberate opposition to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous “decisive moment,” the singular instant of clarity traditionally associated with photography. These photographs arrive instead through accumulation, degeneration, and prolonged processing. Moments are layered, repeated, inverted, and pushed toward abstraction until documentation gives way to something stranger: unstable images suspended between recognition and mirage. If Cartier-Bresson sought revelation through precision, Yubai embraces distortion and overload. These are anti-decisive moments — photographs that resist resolution.

And those are just some of the ideas, the perceptions, that infuse Yoshi Yubai’s art. The stark contrasts of his hypnotic images bounce between the familiar and the peculiar, the monotonous and violent, the wan and the strident. The viewer gets lost in compositions where processing has, literally, blurred the lines between object and atmosphere; this murkiness is the essence of discommunication. Architecture is mistaken for typography, concern for scale gives way to a fixation on the granular, and the nocturnal — that dominant environment of street photography — takes on the qualities of an x-ray.

Learn more about Yoshi Yubai’s book Discommunication at landslide.sydney. Follow his photography at instagram.com/yoshi_yubai and the publisher’s work at instagram.com/landslide_books.

Nine is a very small number but sure I’ll play along, and I no doubt will have a half dozen to switch in tomorrow.

▰ I really love the zone where jazz and chamber music overlap, and I followed bassist partner, Thomas Morgan, to this ensemble set in which the quartet Fnussjen teams with him and trumpeter Arve Henriksen, another personal favorite:

▰ Suss Müsik has described his new release, Fallow, as “autumnal pieces for acoustic guitar and electronic gadgets,” and that’s exactly right. Here the gadgets come in as both accompaniment and a form of processing, as the guitar maintains its chill seasonal vibe.

▰ I saw an early show on the first phase of the Beat tour, which teamed half the 1980s King Crimson lineup, guitarist Adrian Belew and bassist Tony Levin (also on the Chapman Stick), with Danny Carey of Tool filling in for semi-retired drummer Bill Bruford and Steve Vai taking guitarist and founder Robert Fripp’s place. Carey is sitting out the band now, and Terry Bozzio has joined on drums. This video is a classic Crimson piece, “Indiscipline,” from the start of the reconfigured quartet’s new tour, recorded yesterday, October 10. It’s clearly early going for with Bozzio, but I had a great time watching the prior version of Beat come into its own, and look forward to doing so again in the coming months with this version.

▰ I’ve gotten fairly conversant if not fluent in fog horn and today’s mournful bleating means, “Yow this is thick.”

▰ I saw trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire lead a trio that featured guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Herlin Riley, both roughly twice his age, and Akinmusire mentioned having borrowed a friend’s Frisell CDs when he was a kid and having his mind blown. Frisell just joined the band Big Thief on stage at Red Rocks and recalled having seen Jimi Hendrix and Thelonious Monk play there when he was in high school. Love when these influence byways circle back around.

▰ It’s the time of year when there’s almost always an exclamation point next to the weather, but one day it’s extreme heat and the next it’s dense fog. (Bonus points for small craft warnings.)

▰ Sure, my disquiet.com site celebrates the 30th anniversary of its 1996 launch in December, but Curt Gardner’s amazing Don DeLillo website launched even earlier in 1996, and is still going strong: perival.com/delillo.

▰ When I started the Disquiet Junto, it hadn’t really occurred to me that the thing could last so long that we’d be revisiting projects a decade later. The Junto turns 15 years old in January, and here we are exploring a project about Steve Reich we did (a “mere”) 10 years ago. Time is weird.

▰ The price of Nagra reel to reel tape recorders rose so steeply over the past 10 years or so that I’m convinced there’s a loose group of six or seven speculators in the area buying these and selling them to each other, round and round, unaware there is no demand beyond their little circuitous bubble.

▰ Ah, Fleet Week. The World War III cosplayers yet again take over the skies.

I caught the great Bill Orcutt last night, opening for Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 at the Great American Music Hall here in San Francisco, and he was incredible. There is, as I discussed with my friend I attended with, something at once chaotic and dependable about what Orcutt does solo, and something interesting in the tension between those two aspects — how piece after piece, he breaks things down while still pushing forward. There’s an incredible pleasure not just to the whole that is his energetic, analytical viewpoint, but also to how various earlier guitarists can be heard in the mix — John Fahey, of course, with that art brut falling-apart quality, with Captain Beefheart and Marc Ribot as additional reference points, and Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page in there, as well. The echoes of Page, in particular reminded me, in turn, of a concert I saw last year of Fred Frith solo. It’s fantastic when the avant-garde shows its rock’n’roll roots.

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 0771: Phase Incident
The Assignment: Celebrate Steve Reich’s 90th birthday.

In October 2016, the Disquiet Junto celebrated Steve Reich’s 80th birthday. That was project 0249. This month, the great minimalist composer turned 90. Let’s do it again, at the suggestion of llllllll.co member paubarrina. Same steps as last time:

Step 1: October 3 marked the 90th birthday of composer Steve Reich. Prepare to record a tribute to him.

Step 2: Select a short segment of sound or music that can be looped and, per Reich’s own technique, “phased.” Fortunately, the song “Happy Birthday” has entered the public domain. Consider using it.

Step 3: Take the segment from Step 2 and play it on repeat, layering the loop with slightly different timing to create a phasing effect. Play around with this, editing the loops until you have some successful or interesting sounds/accidents.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0771” (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-0771-phase-incident/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Will you come back into phase?

Deadline: Monday, October 12, 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 771st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Phase Incident — The Assignment: Celebrate Steve Reich’s 90th birthday — at disquiet.com/0771.

I’ve been looking forward to this. I knew Bill Frisell was due to play with Big Thief at Red Rocks on October 6th. And so last night, after when I assumed the show would have ended, I was already checking YouTube for the great gift that the internet keeps giving, which is snippets and sometimes even full-length footage of concerts from far away. There may not have been a better time in human history to be an armchair concertgoer. (Not that I only witness concerts via video. I’m literally going to one tomorrow night.) In any case, it’s fantastic to see this crack ensemble welcome someone twice their age, if not older, into the crew. It reminded me a bit of when Nels Cline formally joined Wilco. This isn’t that, per se — it’s a one-off, for one thing — but the embrace still has a lot in common, the mix of exploration with formal rock’n’roll, not to mention that beauty of a bridged generation gap. This set is a preview of the upcoming Big Thief record, Horsepower, on which they play host to a large number of guests, including not only Frisell, but Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, Iris DeMent, and Greg Leisz, among others. It sounds great, and there’s a jam not too far in, at around a minute, that’s worth checking out. But listen to the whole thing.

I’ve been slowing reading, backing up, and re-reading the novel The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. It came out in 1907, and it turns a 120 years old in a little under a year. It came out in September of that year, though on the 12th, not the 11th. The book’s depiction of politically motivated violence is so intense that Conrad saw fit to pen, a year after its publication, a non-apology (“I do not regret having written it”), and that statement appears as a preface to the edition I’ve got on my little ereader.

The moment highlighted in the screenshot above appears early on, when characters discuss where to blow something up. They decide a museum is not a meaningful target. I was reading the book outside on the top of a hill waiting for the next set to begin at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. The field where I stood, Hellman Hollow, renamed in 2011 after the man who founded the festival 20 years prior, was packed from end to end and side to side with attendees. While we waited, I watched drones fly overhead. At first I did briefly wonder if they meant trouble. Then I wondered if they were to detect trouble. Then I wondered if they were for livestreaming. Then I wondered if livestreaming presented, to some, an opportunity. Then I recognized that my head had engaged in an anxious reverie that modernized the scenarios discussed in Conrad’s story.

Then I looked down at my book, realized these weren’t words one wanted people reading over one’s shoulder in a dense crowd (not the ones about the impotency of art critics, but the blowing-stuff-up parts), a century-plus old or not. I finished the paragraph (bonus points for the “sacrosanct fetish” of “science”), and switched to another ebook.

I recently attended a celebration of life event for Om Malik, who died back in June, and whom I got to know a bit over the decades. We first met in 2005 at what was, I believe, the first WordPress meetup, and had dinner a few years back with mutual friends just as the pandemic was beginning to get under control. He would occasionally mention disquiet.com on his long-running blog, om.co, and it was always appreciated. There were stacks of his books at the memorial event, books he’d owned and that had lined his living space, and we as participants in the event were instructed to take one. A nice way to remember someone.