On Repeat: Seidel, Askari, Aarset

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ A characteristically deep and enveloping solo live set by Dave Seidel, aka Mysterybear, recorded in Manhattan at Waterworks 2026: Festival of Experimental Sound back in April. Absolutely drone-tastic.

▰ A quintet lead by bassist Reza Askari plays super still chamber jazz, featuring Lina Allemano (trumpet), Stefan Karl Schmid (tenor saxophone), Christopher Dell (vibraphone), and Fabian Arends (drums). This live video was recorded at Deutschlandfunk Kammermusiksaal Cologne, Germany.

▰ The great electric guitarist Eivind Aarset is associated with trumpet for various reasons, key among them his long partnership with trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, and his music’s strong aesthetic correlation with the late Jon Hassell’s Fourth World work, which this live performance slots along solidly. Aarset’s stellar quartet here includes trumpeter Max Kraft, as well as Jan Bang (live sampling, electronics) and Ingar Zach (percussion). Recorded at the Gărâna JazzFest in Romania back in July.

Scratch Pad: Jazz, Thirlwell, Quake

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts serves, I’ve found, as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. Some items show up on disquiet.com before this post, in which case I don’t repeat them. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Not only are there, per capita, a seemingly inordinate number of jazz clubs in San Francisco, but one of them serves Chinese food and another serves Ethiopian, two* of my favorites. Plan is to hit both those this week — both for quartets led by bassists.

*Mr. Tipple’s and Sheba, respectively

▰ One of my favorite things on the internet lately has been the Tumblr of Australian musician JG Thirlwell (aka Foetus), who lives in NYC, and maintains a highly active feed of snippets of the numerous concerts (among other cultural events) he attends. (Also fond of the fact that Tumblr lets you subscribe to feeds via RSS.)

▰ My tiny home office became a storage area as I tended to work by the day at the dining room table, and so finally I cleaned up the office, and marveled at how perfect it was with the monitor and dedicated surface area … and then two days later I worked at the even smaller kitchen nook table.

▰ Hello from San Francisco, where the weather is consistent enough to suggest we’re living in a simulacrum.

▰ The door to the kitchen occasionally rattles for no apparent reason, and sometimes it rattles because of an earthquake, and when it rattled just now for six or so seconds straight, it was pretty clearly the latter. (8:30am Thursday, August 13, 2026)

▰ That feeling when you open the homepage of a webcomic you like a lot, the one with what it describes as “irregular updates,” just to see, again, if maybe it’s been updated, knowing it’ll probably never again be updated but the page provides no assurances one way or the other.

Disquiet Junto Project 0763: 3 Pedestals

The Assignment: Make music with three sounds.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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 0763: 3 Pedestals
The Assignment: Make music with three sounds.

There is just one step for this project: Make music with three sounds: one you love, one you dislike, and one you consider to be neutral. The individual sounds should, over the course of the piece, maintain roughly equal prominence, though one or another may be more at the forefront at a given time.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0763” (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-0763-3-pedestals/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up for you. How long do you choose to maintain the balance?

Deadline: Monday, August 17, 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 763rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Lunch Break — The Assignment: Make background music to read to midday — at disquiet.com/0763.