▰ Solo ambient cello, heavy on the texture, from Ukrainian musician Fedir Tkachov:

▰ On July 17, Kate Carr will release Vertical London (New Year’s Day), a collection of field recordings that aim to collate the sounds of London from minus 20 metres below sea level to 240 metres above, hence the album’s title. As of this writing, four of the set’s 22 tracks are online:

• “Early birds and planes in Loughborough Junction”
• “I am not sure which tube station is the furthest below sea level, but I am visiting quite a few”
• “Under the Thames with cyclists, joggers and echoes in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel”
• “Popping up at Island Gardens.”

The embed isn’t working, so visit katecarr.bandcamp.com.

▰ The two-track EP Graceless is driving industrial noise, made with no-input feedback loops, from Chia-Chun Xu, based in Taipei City, Taiwan. The embed isn’t working, so visit chia-chunxu.bandcamp.com.

My friend Łukasz Langa, who went with me, took this shot of the interior after the performance we attended:

Founded by Stan Shaff and Doug McEachern, the Audium’s first dedicated physical space, with a quarter as many speakers, was in my longtime neighborhood, the Richmond District, in what is now a small office between a day spa and a hair salon. That was back in 1967.

By 1969, the Richmond District space had expanded to 61 speakers. Then in 1975, following an NEA grant and substantial construction work, the Audium moved to its current location, a former donut shop on Bush Street, not far from the major thoroughfare of Van Ness Avenue. Here’s a shot of my hand holding a photograph of the current space when it was still under construction, in the context of the space as it appears today. That’s Shaff’s son, David Shaff, in the baseball hat on the right.

There’s a lot to be said about any Audium show, and in addition to hearing everyday sounds and synthesized fragments move in three dimensions, I’ve had the pleasure of listening to a live jazz band perform, also in the dark. Something new-to-me always is happening at the Audium, and this time what struck me in particular was a thoughtful little design touch.

The lobby of the Audium serves as a gallery for an ever-changing series of sound art installations, and the current one plays through wall-mounted speakers. The exhibit is an audio-visual collaboration between Alex Abalos and Roco Cordova. What I noticed as I walked around wasn’t just the sounds or the projected images. It was how the sounds were being emitted: Each of the speakers is inside a cloth bag, which is pulled tight.

The carefulness of the speaker presence at the Audium reminded me of the snaking cables that caught my eye at a Marina Rosenfeld sound art exhibit back in 2021. In that case, rather than the bulky black cables being casually arranged out of necessity, they were artfully, even playfully, placed, and thus they became, in essence, part of the work, rather than a necessary byproduct.

In the Audium’s lobby, it was, frankly, nice not to be surrounded by a bunch of hard plastic and metal commercial objects, which is the standard mode for sound art. I also couldn’t help but connect the hand-tied cloth bags with the handcrafted nature of the space itself. It’s a simple touch, and one I’m surprised, in retrospect, that I don’t see more often in sound art exhibitions.

This article originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of my Disquiet.com email newsletter, This Week in Sound.

▰ Erica Grayscale Bastl Doepfer Frap

▰ Eno Guðnadóttir Bryars Dempster Fennesz

▰ Elfman Goldenthal Badalamenti Desplat Fiedel

▰ I made a friend down by the ocean. (After I posted this image, a friend of mine commented, calling it a “viral photo.”)

▰ Erksine Garbarek Bley Darling Frisell

▰ I marvel how you can have lower than average “skill” on a Wordle, and lower than average “luck,” and still somehow best the average score (in terms of “steps”) by over a point.

▰ Eckstine Garrett Blakey DeJohnette Foster

▰ Draft revisions underway, following an editorial check-in, for a very cool project I hope to be able to share news about soon. It’s someone else’s book. I’ve just contributed 1,000 words or so. It’s gonna be beautiful.

▰ EHX Glou-Glou Boss Donner Fairfield

▰ I highly recommend eating an apple cut with a blade that just previously cut an orange. And on that note, have a good weekend, or best you can.

▰ Head Trip: “A new study by Britton Elliott Brooks argues that medieval religious images were never truly ‘silent.’ Instead, they could evoke imagined soundscapes in the minds of viewers, creating immersive experiences that blended sight, memory, and sound. The research focuses on the Harley Roll, a medieval English scroll depicting the life of Saint Guthlac, and suggests that pilgrims and worshippers may have mentally ‘heard’ winds, hammering, animal cries, and demonic noises while viewing its images.” Brooks received a PhD at Oxford in English and is an associate professor at Kyushu University in Japan.

▰ Bio Drone: “Scientists from TU Delft, SoundCell and RHMDC (the laboratory at the Reinier de Graaf hospital) have discovered that different bacterial species produce their own characteristic sounds. Building on an earlier development from the same team, they have now shown that bacteria can be identified and their antibiotic susceptibility determined simultaneously, based solely on their sound. This combined approach delivers results within hours instead of days, offering a major step forward in the diagnosis and treatment of bacterial infections.”

▰ Radio On: The great ongoing Cities and Memories project — developed and maintained by Stuart Fowkes — of field recordings and sound works based on field recordings now has its own dedicated online radio station: “an uninterrupted flow of more than 8,000 sounds and reimagined pieces from across more than 140 countries.”

▰ Buzz Killers: The New York Times ran a wonderful online feature by Gina Ryder, with photographs by George Etheredge, about the city’s intercoms and doorbells, and as anyone who follows my Instagram account might imagine, I enjoyed it immensely. It opens: “When a visitor presses a button on an analog New York City apartment intercom, they enter a time portal to somewhere in the last century when the wiring was likely installed. If they’re lucky, someone upstairs will hear it: a metallic, almost offensive clang that sets the dog barking and sends cortisol spiking. Then comes the electric sigh of the lock releasing, and they’re let inside.”

▰ GRACE NOTES: (1) Disintegration Tapes: A study in Nature measures how mildew degrades analog tape. ▰ (2) We All Scream: Whales have learned to “yell” to compensate for the noise of ship traffic. ▰ (3) Volume Matters: A New Yorker cartoon (by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski) joked about loud bird song as a form of, er, compensation. ▰ (4) Ether Madness: A recent XKCD cartoon joked about the absurdist concept of “soniferous aether.” ▰ (5) Coma Dose: Brains under anesthesia may still hear and process the sound of podcasts.

▰ Citation Credits: Thanks, Nicola Twilley (bacteria), Michael Rhode (cartoons), and Rich Pettus (anesthesia)!

And so, it was great this week that Kirn took the time to highlight the 750th consecutive week of the Disquiet Junto, which he has covered many times over the course of its existence, including way back at the start, in 2012, as well as in 2016 and in 2019. For this week’s coverage, he says, in part:

It’s been running continuously, without a break, since 2012. Every Thursday morning, Disquiet’s Marc Weidenbaum posts a call to a community for a new compositional assignment. And this week, the project reaches the 750th (!) week. That means a call for something epic.

It’s really the opposite of the current trend toward sameness, big data, and extractivist industry capitalism, or even snobbery as an antidote. Membership is open. You can post however you like, though SoundCloud is an easy shortcut. (Hey, it started in 2012, back when that was sort of the only game in town.) It’s just a chance for people to share music with each other. None of the elitist think-piece agonizing about whether there’s “too much music” and art requires scarcity, blah blah.

As Marc puts it, the goal is “to use constraints to stoke creativity.” It’s the process of making — that challenge in the assignment — that’s a big part of the appeal, and the camraderie of tackling it together and discovering how others respond.

Read the full piece at cdm.link. And thanks again, Peter!

“Always take spare socks,” the instructor advised. And you might want earplugs, he added. There are always lots of snorers in emergency shelters.

That is from an article by Patricia Cohen in the New York Times about Poland’s wGotowości (or “Readiness”) civilian defense training program.

. . .

▰ Time Warp

The reader might notice a ripple of trouble in what Tara tells us about her marriage: they used to travel together but have stopped; their phone conversation ‘lapses imperceptibly into a kind of audio link, a muted love mumble’.

That is Joanna Biggs writing in the London Review of Books about Solvej Balle’s series of novels, On the Calculation of Volume. Tara, the main character in the books, wakes every day having to live the same day all over again — sort of like in Groundhog Day, but not exactly. A New York Times story by Hilary Leichter about Balle’s books reminds the reader of the “infraordinary,” the late George Perec’s term (l’infra-ordinaire in the original French) for “the perplexities of the habitual and the banal.” Seems as well like a good term for hyperawareness of the quotidian, including everyday sound.

. . .

▰ Dream Weaver

In the car, an oscillating whine I mistook for engine noise played over the stereo: bursts of light between long stretches of darkness, gentle rocking back and forth between frequencies, dissonant cries bubbling up as if from inside a well, more alien than any impressionism I was familiar with. My sister was the one playing, the instrument she had played from childhood unrecognizable. She sent these to him instead of letters.

That is from Daydreamers, the recent novel by my friend Alvin Lu. The book was published by FC2 last year. The narrator here is the brother of the musician in question. In a book steeped in matters of translation, gaps both generational and cultural looming large, the avant-garde music played by the sister provides a striking example.

This article originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of my Disquiet.com email newsletter, This Week in Sound.

20: The estimated percentage of Europeans whose health is at risk due to noise pollution

13.4: The percentage by which the organ density of grasshoppers in noisier habitats is higher than that of grasshoppers in quieter habitats

Sources: data centers (techradar.com), pollution (msn.com), grasshoppers (Nature)

This article originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of my Disquiet.com email newsletter, This Week in Sound.

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 0750: Let’s Get Heavy
The Assignment: Record something epic.

This week’s project marks the 750th consecutive week of the Disquiet Junto music community. The instruction is simple: Record something epic.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0750” (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-0750-lets-get-heavy/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Short and sweet — or gargatuan?

Deadline: Monday, May 18, 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 750th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Let’s Get Heavy — The Assignment: Record something epic — disquiet.com/0750.

Got a new issue of This Week in Sound out. Yeah, it’s been a minute. Feels good.