Refresher Course Set 1: Eno, Krush, Proto-Post-Classical

This website, Disquiet.com, has thus far accumulated 7,509 posts since I started it in December 1996, and I wrote all but one of them. This will be the 7,510th. According to a handy calculator, that’s 10,157 days as of today, October 4, 2024. This rate of production averages to about 270 posts per year; for the past four or five years, I’ve posted every single day. 

I decided it’s about time I went back and tidied up everything on the website. Over the years, especially during the move from hand-coded HTML, around 2007, to WordPress, weird formatting issues have surfaced, and special characters have gotten swapped somehow for gibberish. I’m going to see if I can do at least 10 posts a day. That could be a lot. If I manage it, the entire site will have been refreshed by December 2026, when Disquiet.com turns 30 years of age, which is also how old I was when I founded it.

Even though the site started in 1996, its contents date back earlier still, since I have ported to it material I published elsewhere. I started writing professionally in the summer of 1988, and there are plenty of pieces from college that I could add, as well.

I got started on the refresh process this afternoon. As of today, the 10 earliest posts on the site have been updated. If you see any significant errors, let me know. They are:

▰ A 1991 interview view both Brian Eno and John Cale about their album Wrong Way Up

▰ A 1992 interview with Randy Greif about his reworking of Alice in Wonderland

▰ A 1993 interview with all the members of Depeche Mode

▰ A piece from 1994 about overlaps between classical and pop music

▰ A piece from 1995 about indie labels getting into classical music

▰ A 1995 interview with Skylab’s Matt Ducasse

▰  A 1996 essay about a piece of comics art by Matt Madden I edited that was about sound

▰ A 1996 interview with DJ Krush

▰ A 1996 review of a compilation of French trip-hop

▰ A 1996 mention of a sound art installation by Christopher Janney

It was a treat to revisit things I had written so long ago. Some are fairly fresh in my memory, like the Matt Madden one, which circulates online with some frequency, and the Depeche Mode, which I added to the website what feels like a few years ago but was actually back in 2012. It’s rewarding to see my commentary about classical music well in advance of what we now think of as post-classical music. In a few cases I was entirely surprised. For example, I remembered DJ Krush recognizing the title to the movie Blade Runner when I said it out loud in an interview that was mediated by an interpreter. I had not recalled that he likewise recognized when I mentioned John Zorn. I don’t know why I didn’t ask him about Zorn at the time. It’s also fun to see how into — obsessed, really — I was with certain artists. There are hints here. Mentioning DJ Premier in the DJ Krush article in 1996 makes perfect sense, but Premier is much more tangential subject in the Janney piece.

Another thing I hope to address is the site structure. The tags could benefit from some refactoring, and the sections have changed over time. For example, a lot of the early record write-ups, such as the French trip-hop one in this batch, were in a section called The Crate, which later became meaningfully distinct from Downstream, which was focused initially solely on freely downloadable music. Now, following the broad reach of streaming, everything goes into Downstream.

Anyhow, I’ll see if I can keep at this. I also plan on going through past work I published elsewhere, notably during my long run as an editor (1989 – 1996) and contributing editor (1996 – 2004) at the magazines published by Tower Records.