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 0766: Rock Math
The Assignment: What kind of math will you channel?

You may or may not be familiar with the genre called math rock. (If not, take a moment to read up and listen.) Now, a question that the idea of math rock naturally, if perhaps belatedly, brings up is: which math, precisely? Is it calculus? Algebra? Topology? Geometry? Set theory? Probability? The list goes on and on. So, choose a sort of math, and then make a piece of music that expresses it, or utilizes it, or both.

The rock star in the cover image for this project is Isaac Newton (1642-1727).

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0766” (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-0765-sonic-kin/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up for you. How large are the numbers you are working with?

Deadline: Monday, September 7, 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 766th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rock Math — The Assignment: What kind of math will you channel? — at disquiet.com/0766.

40: Percent of fish in experiment, when submitted to motorboat noise, that mistakenly swam toward predators

95: Percent of short Chinese dramas — out of 128,000 in the first quarter of 2026 — that were AI-generated, including voices

80.65: Average noise level in decibels of the loudest of the 50 states that comprise the USA (it’s Texas)

Sources: motorboat (phys.org), China (ft.com), Texas (timeout.com)

My latest piece for the The Wire: First spread of the pair that comprise my lengthy interview with longtime San Franciscan Pamela Z (for the magazine’s Invisible Jukebox series — issue 512, October 2026, the one with Mike Watt on the cover). We sat down at her longtime studio loft in the Mission to discuss 10 different tracks, which she was to identify and discuss. We talked about voice, sampling, STEIM, folk music, MIDI controllers, festival curation, opera, the pandemic, transcribing, arrangements, neon, and much much more. In the mix: Laetitia Sonami, Joni Mitchell, George E. Lewis, Annea Lockwood, Claire Chase, Carl Stone, and Clipping (with Daveed Diggs), among others. I’ve read the Invisible Jukebox series forever, and it was super fun to actually conduct an entry.

▰ Carry On

The nightjar carries it lightly
But the world’s heavy as a lamp in a gale.
I watched it move through the olives and the hush,
Over rooftops, stones, and cragged hills,
Unclenched as it glistens in the gloam,
Indifferent, sonorous, and true.

That’s the opening stanza of Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ poem “The Nightjar” from the August 20, 2026, issue of the New York Review of Books.

. . .

▰ Novel Feature

Every home has its own sound world.

That’s musician and sound artist Alice Boyd, who was invited by the estate agent and journal the Modern House to produce a soundscape of one of its locations, a place in South Oxfordshire.

. . .

▰ Idyll Chatter

The driver muttered something that sounded like a dog trying to speak, and without understanding, Paul said yes. Never had he understood the people here and their bizarre accent, and he sometimes had the sense that they spoke unintelligibly to him on purpose, which he in turn quite liked.

That’s from Air, the novel by Swiss writer Christian Kracht, recently translated by Daniel Bowles

▰ Apparently the Fire and Water Quintet, led by jazz pianist Myra Melford, originated as a project inspired by Cy Twombly, and the late artist remains the group’s source of orientation. Their new album, Sure Grand Out, is their third outing, and this track is my (current) favorite on it. Amazing lineup, with Mary Halvorson (guitar), Ingrid Laubrock (saxophones), Tomeka Reid (cello), and Lesley Mok (drums — seat originally filled by Susie Ibarra, who exited after the first album). 

▰ Percolating synth stuff from Devonwho (Devon Fox is, I believe, his full name). The video (by Bryant Rutledge, aka Low Limit Vision), all these surveillance/quotidian snippets stiched together, is great, too. This (titled “high beams”) is from the forthcoming album TV2, on Leaving Records, a consistently excellent label. It’s due out in October.

▰ Expansive 45-minute excursion into dense, constantly shifting drone material from Shimmy-Disc label founder and former Bongwater member Kramer, aka Mark Kramer, here as Bonner Kramer. That’s Music for Pianos & Oceans, just out on August 28:

▰ I still have this thing where because only one of my two desktop stereo speakers features a little “on” light, I routinely check to confirm the other speaker is actually making any sound, which of course it is.

▰ Funny issues with sound-related search returns: an interest in “voice privacy” ends up with situations where “voice” is a verb, as in “residents voice privacy concerns,” and “field recording” routinely brings up sports articles, in which there’s a comma (or intended comma) between the two words (e.g., “flyout to left field, recording back-to-back innings”). Being sports-illiterate, I’m still coming up to speed on that meaning of “recording.”

▰ “Scam Likely.” Ya think?

▰ The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival is gonna hit extra hard this year. RIP, Dolly Parton

▰ The latest issue of This Week in Sound went out last night. Good stuff. So much going on sonically at the moment, especially between data center noise concerns, wearables with mics, and next-gen TV/movie scores/sound. (Experimenting with cards.)

▰ I kinda dig the temporary burn-in in e-ink ebook devices (mine currently: Boox Go 7, Xteink X4). It reminds me of the way text bleeds through in old paperbacks from the other side of the page you’re reading. Also, the scheduled reset of the e-ink screen gives me a sense of my reading progress (X number of pages before reset, for example).

▰ Wow, so just 35 weeks until the 800th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project

▰ I have probably destroyed my YouTube algorithm for the next month by watching a half-hour video deep dive into Yes bassist Chris Squire’s techniques, but it’s okay. The video is highly informative and entertaining, and totally worth it.

▰ It’s mid-2026, and metadata still can’t be dependably attached to wav files.

It’s mid-2026, and I’m still complaining about this. See you in 2027 for more of the same.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep converting to ALAC or FLAC, I suppose.