Scratch Pad: No Metadata, No Music

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ Having a newsletter about a specific topic is a virtuous circle. I process material that interests me in a way I wouldn’t otherwise. In turn the audience drawn to that material sends me additional items I might not have otherwise known about. Then I share some of those as well. Round and round.

Several times this week people sent me:

sentences from novels I’ve never readreferences to scientific journals I didn’t know existedsummaries of podcasts I’ve not listened toanecdotes from their own lives

Now I have another issue of the newsletter to prepare.

▰ When you share an album for review consideration, here is a mind-blowing and underutilized concept: put your bio and liner notes inside the ZIP archive along with the music and the album cover.

▰ Acting on my urge to say: social media is fine but if you’ve got a focus for your interests, do yourself a favor and start a blog, even if all you do is collect your social media posts there and sometimes expand on one or another of ’em. Blogs are like ecological sentinels, the bees of the internet.

▰ “If you would like to hold without music, please press star.”

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▰ This is pretty great. Nonesuch has nicked the Criterion Closet idea, and on top of showing the musicians pull their favorites, it also has playlists with examples of the audio. Nicely done. Four so far: pianist Tigran Hamasyan, multi-instrumentalist/singer Vagabon, pianist Timo Andres, and guitarist Mary Halvorson.

▰ Folks popping up in the Google Drive spreadsheet for the current, three-part sequence of Disquiet Junto projects, looking for tracks to turn from solos into duets, which may later become trios

▰ I love New Scientist’s take on the advice column

▰ For the moment I’m going to assume that the seeming increase in quantity of music releases (gauged by my overstuffed email inbox) and the rise of generative AI tools is a coincidence (or even me seeing patterns that aren’t there), but the parallel is striking

▰ Happy to report I was considerably less brain-dead when it came to 7th chords in guitar class this week. Bonus for the moment when my teacher played a sequence of notes and I, instinctively, played it back — Close Encounters of the Third Kind style — as a form of communicating my semi-sentience.

▰ Finding myself following the twisting paths of cables in modular synth videos to confirm they’re real and not, like the gloopy fingers common to AI-generated imagery, a tell of hallucinogenic forgery

▰ No Metadata, No Music — take it from this former Tower Records employee