The short version of this is that if you have subscribed to this email list for some time and have yet to do a Disquiet Junto project, then this one, the one starting on April 23, 2023, is one to consider doing. The gist is this: this week you record a solo piece of music, not a complete piece, but a piece that will be added to, potentially, by other musicians over the following two weeks. Next week, many if not most of the tracks recorded this week will become duets, thanks to the additions by musicians other than yourself — again, with space left intentionally. Then finally two weeks from now, other musicians will add something else, completing a trio. The process can feel magical, especially when the same solo becomes numerous duets, and the same duet, multiple trios — which does happen sometimes. But what really happens is simpler: by recording music that leaves room for other music, you learn something about constraints, and listening, and sharing. And when you fill that space in a subsequent week, you learn the same things, from a radically different perspective.

Stoked to be part of this latest series of Hilobrow essays, all about “analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics.” I wrote about Rudy Rucker’s foundational cyberpunk classic Software (1982), the first of his four-novel (“tetralogy”) Ware series. These Hilobrow essays are being posted one at a time. Mine will be up down the road. What great company to be in. Deb Chachra, Douglas Wolk, Seth, and so many more. Details and the first few at hilobrow.com.

A tableau on my walk

▰ New collaboration between trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and guitarist Mary Halvorson, Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings, gets a preview with the forthcoming (June 12, 2026) album’s fourth track (of nine), appropriately title “Soundcheck.” It’s especially exciting because it appears (check around 25 seconds in) to evidence Akinmusire employing electronics to layer his instrument and, soon after, to develop foundational pads.

An advance note from the releasing label, Nonesuch, confirms this:

Though Halvorson regularly uses effects pedals on her guitar, Akinmusire’s use of one on Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings is new. Having recently gotten an updated model of the Line 6, Halvorson was passing her old ones along to friends. “Ambrose was interested in trying a Line Six. I gave him one five minutes before the rehearsal and was amazed how quickly he was able to do incredible shit on it … in literally five minutes,” she says.

“But I’ve been watching you, I’ve been watching Bill [Frisell] and other people use it for a long time,” Akinmusire says. “I approached it as if it were its own musician. I played and it would process the sound and then I would choose to react to that or not.

▰ Super dessicated minimal dub techno from Paperclip Minimiser, aka John Howes. The embed isn’t working so get the set, titled II, at Bandcamp.

▰ The YouTube account Ambient Modular has been uploading solid 15-minute sessions, largely with the same set-up, by appearances, providing a glimpse into the variety a single system is capable of. The streams happen daily starting, per the channel’s information, at “00:00 AM UTC (9:00 PM JST).”

▰ It’s a good sign when you arrive at a jazz club for a concert and the pre-show music playing on the house stereo is un-Shazam-able.

▰ I think there was a break of about two years between when I stopped capitalizing the internet and started occasionally capitalizing the Algorithm.

▰ Not a single “Avril 14th” video was uploaded to Vimeo in the seven days leading up to and including (as of 5:45pm Pacific) April 14th?

▰ Read a bunch, finished nothing, but wrote a lot, and so that’s OK.

LJ Holoman (organ), Joe Warner (piano), Michael “Tiny” Lindsey (bass), and Dante Robertson (drums) killed it on April 15th at the Black Cat basement club in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. It was a packed house for a jazz/r&b session on a Wednesday at 7pm, a two-hour set. Holoman, who was sitting in as part of a residency called the Soul Sessions (presented by the JaZzLine Institute), is a marvel, and the band was tight as heck.

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 0746: Music for Takeoff
The Assignment: Help airplane passengers get off the ground.

Record a piece of music intended to be listened to in preparation for and as a plane begins its takeoff and initial ascent.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0746” (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-0746-music-for-takeoff/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long do you taxi?

Deadline: Monday, April 20, 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 746th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music for Takeoff — The Assignment: Help airplane passengers get off the ground — disquiet.com/0746.

Just a quick note that talks and performances from the 2026 edition of the multi-day Algorithmic Art Assembly event have begun popping up on YouTube thanks to the tireless efforts of its founder, my friend Thorsten Sideboard. I had the pleasure of giving a talk (“The Woodshed Is a Black Box”) at the first AAA and interviewing Mark Fell, Rian Treanor, and James Bradbury during the second AAA. As with those years, the 2026 AAA was held at Gray Area in the Mission District, here in San Francisco. I sadly couldn’t attend this year because as timing worked out, I was across the country in New York City when it happened (March 26 – 28), so I’m especially happy the material is getting a second life online. There’s — among many other videos — a performance and separate talk by Keith Fullerton Whitman, a live set by Kara-Lis Coverdale, and a lecture by Daniel Temkin, author of the excellent book Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, which I’m currently reading. Can’t wait to spend time checking out everything I missed.

Each year, musicians around the world record versions of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th” and share them on YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp, and elsewhere. Collected here are some of the covers to appear this year in the week leading up, and on the day itself. I kept some threads of these rolling throughout the day on social media, collating ones I located, or that I had recommended to me, like the Shane Parish one (via Curtis Burns on Threads). The first four here are particularly solid. I may add some more to 2026’s list before winding down from the festivities.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the song, which first appeared on Aphex Twin’s 2001 album, Drukqs. When something cultural like this takes root, as enough time passes that you can think of it as an annual tradition, you start to wonder if and why the communal activity might ever stop — which is to say, in 25 years we will likely still be celebrating “Avril 14th” Day, and doing so on instruments and technologies that don’t yet exist, as well as on ones that predated the late-1980s technology, the Disklavier, on which it was first recorded. In that way, the song moves both forward and backward in time as it nestles deeper into the collective culture.

• Shane Parish
• with drums
• marimba
• B-flat clarinet and piano
• acoustic guitar
• what I think is a clavichord
• electric piano
• acoustic guitar
• Moog
• Just listed as “MIDI”
• syrupy new age / ambient
• unidentified
• Orca
• MIDI horn
• acoustic guitar
• piano and drums
• electric guitar
• keyboard
• sparkly synths
• keyboard
• electric piano / Korg
• glistening goodness
• modular
• guitar
• electric piano
• DAW piano roll
• dungeon synth
• electric bass

Ballardian errors in automated transcriptions of spam robocalls is the glitch our current era may deserve.