Discommunication, a fantastic book of street photography by Hiroshima, Japan–based artist Yoshi Yubai (right, white t-shirt), published by Landslide, a Sydney, Australia–based imprint run by Jake Wotherspoon (left), is part of the ongoing SF Art Book Far (sfartbookfair.com), which opened last night, Thursday, July 23, and runs through Sunday, July 26.

I wrote the book’s essay (which I’ll publish online in the near future), and I spent the second half of today, Friday, at the fair, where Landslide held its launch event (at booth D14, shown here), at 1150 25th Street in San Francisco, aka part of the Minnesota Street Project (minnesotastreetproject.com).

I’m going to try to make it back Sunday, July 26, in part to hang out some more at the Landslide booth, and also for the Santino “Tino” Gonzales (santinogonzales.com) performance for his Holy Dirt album release from Deep Time Press. And, you know, to buy some more books.

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 0760: Harness the Light
The Assignment: Use audio of a light bulb to express the pervasiveness of energy.

This year at Musikfestival Bern, the musician and media artist Michael Vorfeld will have an installation that “investigates lightning as a natural phenomenon, a carrier of electrical energy, a source of light, and a source of danger.” He has provided us with a sample of his Light Bulb Music setup for our creative use:

https://bit.ly/3TvW12A

There is one step in this project: Utilize Michael Vorfeld’s shared sample in the creation of an original piece of music/sound that expresses and explores the pervasiveness — whether subtle or overt — of light and energy all around us.

Bonus: Remember that Benjamin Franklin — after whose 1727 Junto our Disquiet Junto collective is named — famously harnessed the power of lightning with his “kite experiment.”

Additional Background: The immediate and intense encounter of light and sound during thunderstorms and lightning is one of the primal distinctive experiences of humankind. Already at a very early state, lightning has also shown its enormous potential of electric energy. With the discovery and the utilization of electric current in the 19th and early 20th centuries, our lifestyles were confronted with radical changes, in which the invention of the light bulb and the overall general dissemination of electric light plays an essential role. Through the increased use of electric light at the beginning of the 20th century, the urban environment received its modern, nighttime appearance. Street lanterns, shop window and entertainment lighting, the headlights of cars, light architecture and advertisement lighting spreading out from the upper storeys to the roofs all came to define the modern society of light. Thereby, the light bulb became the symbol of modernity and urban ingenuity. The sound file made by Michael Vorfeld is the result of direct interplay of electric current and a light bulb made audible. The changes in the light intensity, the incandescence of the filament, and the rhythmic variety of the flickering light is directly transformed into a comprehensive and microcosmic electroacoustic world of sound.

About Michael Vorfeld: Michael Vorfeld is a musician and media artist, plays percussion and self-designed string instruments, and realizes electroacoustic sound pieces. He works in the field of experimental, improvised music, and sound art, realizing installations and performances with light and sound, and working with photography and film. In addition to his solo activities, he is a member of various ensembles and collaborates with artists who work in many different art forms. His list of activities includes numerous concerts, performances, and exhibitions, as well as the realization of site-specific works in Europe, America, Asia and Australia. He is based in Berlin.

More on Musikfestival Bern at https://musikfestivalbern.ch. Many thanks to the festival’s Tobias Reber for the invitation to again collaborate, and to Michael Vorfeld. This is the eighth consecutive year of Bern x Junto collaborations. This is the third of this year’s four planned projects.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0760” (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-0760-harness-the-light/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up for you.

Deadline: Monday, July 27, 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 760th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Harness the Light — The Assignment: Use audio of a light bulb to express the pervasiveness of energy — at disquiet.com/0760.

Details at landslide.sydney + sfartbookfair.com + instagram.com/yoshi_yubai.

Inspiration for managing desktop computer thermals

Spotted in the San Francisco neighborhood Glen Park (or maybe Sunnyside?) during a walk on Saturday, July 18, 2026. More of this sort of public art / gesture / physical graffiti / intervention, please.

▰ This is a cool coincidence. Last week I mentioned the great new album, Shards, by the trio of electronic musician BlankFor.ms, pianist Jason Moran, and drummer Marcus Gilmore, and I linked to an archival live video of a different artist from the excellent NYC venue Roulette — and now here’s a brand new video of that trio themselves at Roulette (bonus: multi-camera, so you can see what each person is up to). A great merger of jazz and electronic approaches. Interestingly, this show was billed with Moran and Gimore essentially supporting BlankFor.ms, which is not quite how the trio’s two albums have been billed. Not sure what’s up with that. Two other groups are mentioned in the YouTube description, but that’s because they played the same night. They’re not in this video. Recorded May 1, 2026. 

▰ Fresh live footage of Shane Parish performing one of his Autechre guitar arrangements.

Here’s the original, for comparison enjoyment’s sake:

▰ Olec Mün fills a brightly lit space with drones, and then fills the drones with bits of melody and, eventually, around two fifths of the way through, with pulsing beats, before cycling back around. (Olec Mün is the music-making moniker of Marcelo Schnock, who is originally from Argentina and lives in Barcelona.)

▰ Wasn’t expecting this random portable monitor manufacturer to include a Teenage Engineering OP-1 in its demo.

▰ Yeah, 1987 was an exceedingly great year for record releases. My top 10 albums and singles from our college music magazine, Nadine. Apparently I posted this 10 years ago this week, when Steven Young of M/A/R/R/S (and Colourbox) died.

▰ New categories of “media condition” for Discogs:

• Played by someone who has a life but gives a shit
• Yeah, the vinyl rubbed through the cover a bit after 40 years
• If you say this is lower than near mint, you need a Go Fund Me for significant therapy

▰ The Capture goes full Person of Interest in the third season

▰ Whew, Mimestream added an “All” category, so when I need to I can see my Work and Personal category emails in one column. This is fantastic. (Now maybe have an option for those three buttons to take up less space.)

▰ Not all waveforms are created equal. Some are more readable than others. Some, even if they tell a story different in visually than sonically, still register as unique, individual. This one, building from sparse initial strikes, caught my eye. It’s the first piece to appear in this week’s Disquiet Junto project, in which music is made with nothing but rocks.

Listen here:

▰ So now everyone’s in the West Coast Avengers?

▰ At the risk of centering one’s own personal experiences, I feel like broken music file metadata is truly OG enshittification, and it just keeps enshitting. I type this as, in 2026, Plex overwrote the file names for the Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) album The Ecstatic (Instrumentals), which upon import is now listed in my apps/database as merely The Ecstatic. At least Plex kept the new release’s cover art.

It helps when your game controllers perchance match your recently acquired vinyl

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 0759: Rock Music
The Assignment: Make music with nothing but rocks.

There is one step to this project: Make music with nothing but rocks. (Yes, processing is fine, but the sense of the “rockness” of rocks should be present.)

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0759” (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-0759-rock-music/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up for you. How long do your stones roll?

Deadline: Monday, July 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 759th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rock Music — The Assignment: Make music with nothing but rocks — at disquiet.com/0759.

I have only begun to share photos, and observations, from a recent two-week trip around the UK in June. This fairly impressive sign for a fairly simple request was at Stirling Castle in Stirling, Scotland, which is sort of midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and north of both. Even though the two larger words are on the top, I would say that putting just “PLEASE” on one line and “SOUND HORN” below might feel a bit loud. Either way, if you can’t hear a car coming on these cobblestones then either you are deaf or your window is closed and you’re blasting the air conditioning.