Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 204
February 2, 2021
That Concert Questionnaire
Memories and impressions change. These are mine right now.
First concert — Depends how it’s defined, but I imagine it’d be Simon & Garfunkel in Central Park in Manhattan in 1982 when I was a sophomore in high school.
Last concert — I’m assuming this means live and in person (not streaming online), so it was Mit Darm (Suki O’Kane and Edward Shocker), sharing the bill with the duo of Steve Adams and John Hanes at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco on January 30, 2020.
Worst concert — Hard to say. I think of a particular Juliana Hatfield show at the Cattle Club in Sacramento as a turning point for me, where I just couldn’t take that much verse chorus verse ever again. But that’s me, not her.
Loudest concert — Yes at Madison Square Garden on the 90125 tour. (Fun fact: a young Steven Soderbergh directed the live film of that tour.) None of us could hear the next day, which messed up a concert our high school choir was due to perform. A decade or so later I wrote a comic about the experience that was drawn by Justin Green and published in Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine, where I was an editor at the time. (Amid the “loudest” category I’m not counting concerts that were so loud that it was assumed you had to put in noise blockers simply to attend.)
Seen the most — Probably John Zorn, even though it’s been decades. I saw him a lot in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.
Most surprising — Not sure, but finding myself sitting behind John Cage during a performance of his toy piano works during a Bang on a Can marathon was a surprise, even more so when he fell asleep.
Best concert — I’m having trouble answering this one. “Best” isn’t something I take naturally to. Derrick May and Juan Atkins at a rave in Oakland always comes to mind when this topic comes up. Maybe Charles Gayle at a squat in the East Village in 1988 or 1989? Hard to say. Maybe Billy Childish with Thee Headcoats in England in the early 1990s (I showed up just at the end and caught maybe a song or two of encores, but they were awe-some!) Probably Talking Heads at Forest Hills during high school on the tour that became the film Stop Making Sense.
Next concert — I don’t have any tickets pending, that’s for sure. I’m guessing it’ll be whatever is playing next at the Luggage Store Gallery or the Center for New Music here in San Francisco when the pandemic breaks.
Wish I could have seen — This is a big category. Not really sure where to begin. I do wish I’d seen Rage Against the Machine live.
Femi Fleming’s Ambient Noise
Settle in as Femi Fleming gets this live improv rolling. There’s time to don headphones, and you might as well follow the cue of the musician, seen doing so at the start. That’s before potting up some loops of pleasingly garbled voices, which soon enough are overlapped, one atop another, into a syrupy drone. Employing a mic admirably suited to CB radio activity, there’s some deep intoning, layering human hum amid the hum already accrued. From there on in, the pattern is set: a whir of whirling dervishes, a tornado of microsonics, a noise performance that involves repeated employment of gritty textures but ultimately bends toward atmosphere.
Video originally posted at Femi Fleming’s YouTube channel. More from Fleming, a student at RISD who records as Sadnoise, at instagram.com/femifleming.
February 1, 2021
Christian Carrière’s Sacred Space Exploration
If the sonorous spaciousness of this track by Christian Carrière has a heavenly resonance to it, there’s a specific reason for that impression. Not only was the audio recorded at a church, but the recording process entailed exploring the characteristics of that space itself. The location is in Montréal, Québec, at the Église Sacré Coeur, which is approaching its 150th anniversary. Carrière explained to me via email that his project originated in 2019 as an consideration of “the acoustics of sacred spaces,” the plan being to use, as he described it, “the pure tones generated by my polyphonic no-input console.”
A no-input console is one in which the sound emitted is nothing but the inherent noise fed back through the console itself, resulting in unique, often alien-seeming tonalities, such as the ones heard here. Carrière has been at this a long time. Here’s a video, dating back nearly a decade, of him performing some of “Fratres” by Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer, using a no-input mixer:
The tones heard in “Sacred Acoustics T004” are externalized in the heart of the Église Sacré Coeur on a system of speakers, and then the sound is recorded, capturing the echoing effect that the architecture gives shape to. Explains Carrière, “The idea was to tune the tones of the console to the resonant frequencies of a given space, thus emphasizing — and playing with — its inherent acoustical properties.” The sounds are glorious, pulsing and swelling and sinuous like an otherworldly choir.
Track originally posted to Carrière’s SoundCloud page. More from him at christiancarriere.com.
January 31, 2021
Don’t Mind the Gap
Slight gap between episode two and three, but these have been some years. Let’s put them behind us.
Checkout the Disquietude podcast at (presumably) most major services (if you can’t locate it, let me know) and at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
Current Favorites: Interior Landscapes, Live Tape Drones
A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them. (This weekly feature was previously titled Current Listens. The name’s been updated for clarity’s sake.)
▰ Matt Madden’s three-minute “Tme No Radar on Emit” is a mix of atmospheres, most of them misty and somber, artfully so. A repeated line hints at a foghorn’s signal, some white noise at rough weather. That it’s guitar and a ventilator, according to Madden’s own description, just adds to the sense of being transported.
▰ Listen as a dense drone emerges from Femi Fleming’s January 25 live tape performance. What begins as ringing and mottled grows turbulent and orchestral as time passes.
▰ Live Ateliers Claus captures a pair of rangy performances by Gaël Segalen. A French sound artist, Segalen, who also goes by IhearU, is heard here moving between hyperreal urban noise, Fourth World rhythms, and dramatically processed field recordings.
Gaël Segalen – live ateliers claus by Gaël Segalen
▰ A set of field recordings by Jeremy Hegge from a summer journey during 2019, one that took him from Chongqing, China, to Hong Kong, to Xinjiang, to Kazakhstan. The tracks are labeled by time of day (morning, afternoon, night), helping to set the context for insects, frogs, and street noise.
January 30, 2021
Disquietude Podcast Episode 0003
This is the third episode of the Disquietude podcast of ambient electronic music.
The goal of the Disquietude podcast is to collect adventurous work in the field of ambient electronic music. What follows is all music that captured my imagination, and I hope that it appeals to your imagination as well.
All six tracks of music are featured with the permission of the individual artists. Below is the structure of the episode with time codes for the tracks:
00:00 theme and intro
02:01 Dance Robot Dance’s “Tangents”
09:43 Jeannine Schulz’s “Beacon”
14:50 Orbital Patterns’ “Found in the Fog”
22:15 Alan Bland’s Boulder siren field recording
26:58 Heymun’s “Ambient Cello & Strings on the OP-1”
29:31 Kin Sventa’s “Octatrack Saxophone Drone”
35:56 track notes
40:01 outro
41:39 end
Thanks for listening.
Produced and hosted by Marc Weidenbaum. Disquietude theme music by Jimmy Kipple, with vocal by Paula Daunt. Logo by Boon Design.
. . .
All the music here happens to be by solo musicians. These consist of Kin Sventa, based in San Francisco, where I also happen to live, working with saxophone and electronics; Dance Robot Dance (aka Brian Biggs), of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Heymun, based in Sydney, Australia, who did a reworking of a preexisting track special for this podcast, which was very generous of her; the prolific Jeannine Schulz, who was one of my favorite artists whose work I first came to experience in 202; Orbital Patterns, aka Abdul Allums of Rochester, Michigan; and Alan Bland, who provided a field recording from near where he lives in Boulder, Colorado.
All the music heard here is instrumental, which is to say there is no prominent vocal part – or at least there’s no intelligible vocal part – and thus it’s suitable for background listening. It’s all ambient, which is to say it’s also suitable for close, concentrated listening. That dual sense of potential uses, both inattentive and attentive, both background and foreground, is the hallmark of fine ambient music.
As for me, my name is Marc Weidenbaum, and I’m the host of Disquietude. You can learn more about the material in this episode of the Disquietude podcast at disquiet.com/podcast0003.
And now, on to the music — after which I’ll explore the sounds in a bit more detail, with a little information on the musicians and some observations about their recordings. Thank you.
I’m going to take a few minutes to work through the tracks
The first of the six tracks heard here was “tangents,” one of three pieces on Brian Biggs’ recent release Sine Cosines Tangents, a beautiful set of gently glitching, quavering tracks he recorded under the name Dance Robot Dance. By day, and likely by evening, as well, Biggs, who is an old friend of mine, is an accomplished children’s book illustrator. Elsewhere on the release he works in the sounds of the local police department. These hover just below the surface on occasion, in the form of just-shy-of-intelligible police scanner recordings.
Listen to the full Dance Robot Dance album: https://dance-robot-dance.bandcamp.com/album/sines-cosines-tangents
After Brian’s piece we headed from Philadelphia to Hamburg, Germany, which is where Jeannine Schulz calls home. The track heard here is called “Beacon.” “Beacon” is ebb and flow ambient, with a steady throb setting the pace, to which thick, soft tones attach themselves, the whole thing vibrating with a peaceful, sing-song quality. At times a field recording of waves can be heard, and the ease with which those natural sounds coordinate with the synthesized material is a tribute to the keen, patient ear that Schulz brings to the music. “Beacon” is the closing track on her album Tides, which was one of a slew of releases Schulz put out last year. I’d never heard of Jeannine Schulz prior to 2020, and now I listen to her music all the time.
Listen to the full Jeannine Schulz album: https://jeannineschulz.bandcamp.com/album/tides
Then came “Found in the Fog.” Opening with the scattery noise associated with wind on an exposed microphone, before fading into what appears to be backward-masked strings, “Found in the Fog” was the first video of 2021 from the musician who goes by the name Orbital Patterns. His full name is Abdul Allums, and he’s based in Rochester, Michigan. The camera moves around his studio as the piece plays, a glimpse of a synthesizer here, a standalone music-computer there, a guitar pedal, a laptop. (Also, note that at least one of the modules heard, visible at the two-minute mark, is from the Instruō musical instrument company, out of Glasgow, Scotland, whose founder was the subject of an interview I posted recently on Disquiet.com.) It all comes together with Allums’ trademark seesawing ease, a loping quality that is as mellow as it is mysterious, as casual as it is reclusive.
Watch the Orbital Patterns video: https://youtu.be/DrEl5H8XwVc
Following the synthesizer piece by Orbital Patterns was a field recording by Alan Bland, and it’s something I’ve played on repeat for hours at a time since he first posted it to his SoundCloud account. Listen as the echo of test sirens in Boulder, Colorado, “seem to play sustained chords for a few minutes,” as described by Bland, who lives near where the audio was taped. He knows how much I miss the weekly Tuesday noon siren here in San Francisco, and his recording provides some solace while we locals wait for our siren to return to duty, hopefully at the end of 2021.
Check out the source track: https://soundcloud.com/morgulbee/emergency-warning-system-test-boulder-colorado
Then was a piece by Heymun. You can almost see the clouds break when Heymun’s work gets underway. I first experienced it as a live video in which her small synth emits massive clouds of cello and other unidentified strings, plus vast choruses of consonant-free singing. Those clouds are artificial, needless to say, and gloriously so. They are striated digitally, and they flow according to algorithmic winds. When I sent a request for the audio to include in this episode, Heymun, who is based in Sydney, Australia, sent me a special mix, as she put it, in which she added some extra layers of vocals.
Watch the Heymun video: https://youtu.be/XyvvSXe4G_g
At the end was a gorgeous live performance of saxophone being reworked in real time (layered, pitch-shifted, looped) by Kin Sventa, who is based in San Francisco, California. I first witnessed this as a video on YouTube. When he sent me the audio file for inclusion, he wrote, “You can hear me at the beginning hitting record on the camera, adjusting, clapping to sync the audio and inhaling.”
Watch the Kin Sventa video: https://youtu.be/jlXxK3Y2VCI
It’s been nearly four years since I produced the second episode of this podcast. It would be an understatement to say a lot has happened since then. I’m hoping to continue to produce the podcast going forward. We’ll see how this one comes together, and how it is received.
And that brings to an end this episode of the Disquietude podcast. I want to thank all the musicians who approved the inclusion of their recordings. Thanks as well to Brian Scott of Boon Design for help designing the logo, and to Max La Rivière-Hedrick of Futureprüf for technical support. Thanks also to folks on Twitter, the Disquiet Junto Slack, the Lines discussion board, and elsewhere who were encouraging when I mentioned at the start of 2021 that I might bring back Disquietude.
The opening and closing theme music of the Disuietqude podcast is by Jimmy Kipple, who’s based in England, and who was acting on some vague directions I provided. Kipple has his own podcast, which is called “patzr radio” (that’s p a t z r). The voice heard in the theme belongs to the musician Paula Daunt, who recently moved back to Portugal after a long stretch in Japan. She’s saying the word “disquiet” in Portuguese. I won’t mangle it by trying to say it myself. That word is a nod to the late Futurist poet Fernando Pessoa, whose Book of Disquiet provided the name of my long-running website, Disquiet.com, back in 1996 when I first launched it.
Thanks for listening. The next episode should air in about one month.
What Twitter Hears at 2am (California Time)
Neatly three dozen people replied to a tweet of mine while I was deep asleep. This was by design. I set a tweet to appear at 2:00am on Friday morning, and checked the results when I woke. I’ve sent variations on this tweet in the past, but never with such a strong result.
The tweet read:
I’m asleep. This is an automated tweet at 2am, California time. Please reply, if you have a moment, and let me know what you hear right now. Thanks.
I chose to send it at 2am, thinking since that was 5am on the East Coast, therefore in the United States a relatively smaller percentage of the population would be awake and online. I wanted to optimize for people elsewhere on the planet to reply. There were some local insomniacs in the mix, nonetheless.
Below are the results, in the order they appeared in my Twitter feed. Where individuals’ locations were identifiable, I include them parenthetically. Some folks actively named their location. When I do this again in the future, I may ask people to say where they are, and I may send it at 1:30am. The final of these appeared 24 hours after the rest of them.
▰ The cat snoring.
▰ The washing machine downstairs. Light rain. Traffic on the road outside. Birds shouting about sex/boundary disputes.
▰ Tinnitus (Sydney, Australia)
▰ Rain
▰ A tap running (Berlin)
▰ it’s noon in london, zone 2. i hear the white-noise generator i use 24/7. i hear a lack of truck reversing signals, shout-talking. not even any bangs and crashes from above. i can hear low-level traffic noise outside & know that its been raining from the swishing sound of tires. … windows open, add seagulls, a distant siren and a few human voices (London)
▰ HEPA and fridge duet.
▰ Coffee machine and rain
▰ The air purifier trying to keep us safe.
▰ Tinnitus, a washing machine, a sleeping dog and the next door but one shooting hoops. (Manchester)
▰ Tinnitus. Breeze. (Istanbul)
▰ It’s half past noon here in Berlin. I hear clicking coming from the radiator and muffled radio voices from across the hallway.
▰ Cat complaints (Hudsonville, Michgan)
▰ Rain (Loomis, California)
▰ 10:00am GMT. Birdsong, chickens scratching for food. The creak of my footsteps on the shed floor. New Madlib x Four Tet album on low volume. (Nottingham, England)
▰ The gentle rumble of slow traffic in the distance, the occasional drops of water dripping from a leaky gutter, birds calling to one another, my partner chopping fruits for her porridge in the kitchen, and now my fingers typing on the keyboard. (Bristol, England)
▰ It is a little after 5a, and I just woke up. I also have no idea who you are, but @brainmage reached out, so now I am. I hear ‘Chicks on Speed’ on my spotify (Philadelphia)
▰ My computer fan. Waiting for a student to log on and present their work for their mid-year assessment. (Staffordshire, England)
▰ It’s 11:32 a.m. here and I’m wearing headphones while not listening to anything. I hear my fingers on the keyboard and a faint ringing in my ears. Nothing else, which is nice. (Glasgow)
▰ Beethoven Sonata 29 – Adagio Sostenuto (headphones ‘cos the fam’s in bed). Outside: a ton of crickets on this warm damp night. We had a month’s worth of rain today! (Melbourne, Australia)
▰ The sound of me eating a sandwich. And the tram 7 passing on the tracks in front of my apartment. (Brussels, Belgium)
▰ traffic
an electrical hum that i think is the fridge
upstairs neighbours doing something that’s resulting in some kind of scratching dragging sound
my own v faint tinnitus
birds (small corvids im pretty sure)
a dog barking (medium to large)
a car door closing (maybe blue? [Thinking face emoji])
▰ sounds of cars passing by in d distance, soft taps of my fingers on d touchscreen keyboard of my phone, quiet airflow in d buildings ventilation system, movement now and then from my upstairs neighbors, my soft breathing, and quiet pondering bubbling in my stomach. all so gentle (Sweden)
▰ Dishwasher and howling wind. (Connecticut)
▰ The gentle pulse of my wife’s CPAP machine. (Shepherdstown, West Virginia)
▰ Watching a movie just after 11pm, sounds of cars on a highway in Utah coming out of the Genelecs and a cat chirping for attention (New Zealand)
▰ Sound of hearing system in my house. Ears ringing. (Charlottesville, VA)
▰ It’s 11.19 AM on Friday morning. The hum of my laptop’s fan is slowly winding down after disconnecting from the day’s first Zoom meeting. Outside, silence, cut across the middle by bus tires on water, then silence again. And birds. (Biel, Switzerland)
▰ the whirring univent fan in my office
▰ Got it at 10:30 EST. We were out of power for 4 hours tonight, so I’m hearing lots of waking up- radio, kitchen timer, me and the kid watching LOL music videos (Gainesville, FL)
▰ computer hum, radiator tinkles, wind, cars in the distance (Boston, MA)
▰ 6:38 AM – the buzzing of my heater, my stomach rumbling, my fridge humming, and that’s it! Love how quiet and still it is.
▰ It’s Friday, 01/29/21 2:48 AM PST. Water dripping rhythmically from a gutter just outside my bedroom window. (San Francisco, CA)
▰ I hear the sound of Reverse Osmosis by Kevin Drumm playing through laptop speakers (a dense spectrum of harmonic frequencies); the tapping of my fingers on the laptop keyboard writing this; cars passing at the end of road infrequently; the family next door shouting at each other. (Nottingham, UK)
▰ 10am, Friday. Sounds: My kids playing at the end of the house, radio 4 (talk radio) from the other room, a distant aeroplane and the occasional bird chirping… There is also a low hum from our biomas unit. (Norfolk, Europe)
▰ dim humming of fridge in the distance (California)
▰ I’m a day late – but it’s the morning and I hear bread being kneaded… slapping hard against the mixer bowl, the slight wavering whine of the motor accompanying!
The full thread is at twitter.com/disquiet.
twitter.com/disquiet: Heinlein, Hein, Miles, Cortini
I do this manually each week, collating the tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet (which I think of as my public notebook) that I want to keep track of. For the most part, this means ones I initiated, not ones in which I directly responded to someone. I sometimes tweak them a bit here. Some tweets pop up on Disquiet.com sooner than I get around to collating them, so I leave them out of the weekly round-up. It’s usually personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud, especially these days, when a week can feel both like a year and like nothing whatsoever has happened or changed.
▰ When you recognize yourself in a book you haven’t read since you were in junior high school:
“that look of painful, unseeing concentration found only under a pair of earphones”
–Robert A. Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo
▰ By and large, I don’t know about the future of newsletters, as this detail of my inbox evidences, but I enjoy putting out This Week in Sound (tinyletter.com/disquiet). It’s a helpful way for me to (as it turns out) process my inbox, and leads to good conversations with readers.
▰ This image is by Ethan Hein. It’s from two years ago, and it exhibits the chain of interactions among asynchronous collaborators in series of connected Disquiet Junto projects. We’re doing the same sequence right now: We begin with solos, which become duets, and then trios.
▰ In today’s post. Looking forward to it. And, no, my eyewear is self-evidently not as cool as Miles Davis’.
▰ It’s been one thing to have musical collaborators all over the world. It’s a whole other thing, in our golden age of streaming, to be able to discuss each other’s local television series offerings.
▰ I did two episodes of the Disquietude ambient podcast in 2017, and then recognized the world had broken and I needed to moderate my activities. I think I’m getting it going again. I have material mostly sorted. One musician even made a special version of her track I requested.
▰ My tablet’s facial recognition seems to recognize my face better when I give it a quizzical “Don’t you recognize my face yet?” look, versus my normal vaguely blank everyday face look. I’m sure this is not a good feedback loop to enter into.
▰ When you get to “Black Satin” and you have this sense of relief, both the familiarity of what’s playing, and the realization of what you’ve just emerged from 20 minutes of. I’m spending the afternoon On the Corner.
▰ 2020: interest in complex oscillators
2021: having an oscillator complex
▰ I was using an app the other day, and when I swiped through to a subsequent page it paused and the screen briefly showed:
[suspenseful orchestral music plays]
And then the next screen popped up. I couldn’t reproduce this. It must just happen when the app unexpectedly pauses.
▰ Major thanks to Łukasz Langa (twitter.com/llanga) for summing this up, putting into helpful words a big part of what I think of as the Disquiet Junto music community’s combination of mutually supportive and self-directed. What Langa is referring to is that folks shouldn’t be hesitant to post something. The Junto isn’t about finished work. It’s about getting started.
▰ It has been so long since I wrote a letter by hand other than a thank you note that I’ve found myself typing it and then transcribing it. Even this is a thank you note, just a slightly longer one than normal.
▰ YouTube radicalization is real. I’ve been practicing 12-bar blues on guitar to live recordings of 80 bpm shuffle beats, and the algorithm just suggested a 70 bpm video. At this point I’ll be in an Earth cover band by spring.
▰ Arguably years of experience help, but sure, OK
▰ Tracks selected for the Disquietude podcast. And last night, with a usefully pre-bedtime sleepy voice, I recorded the intro and the post-music track explication. Now I just need to edit it. Looks like there will, four years on, be a third episode of the Disquietude podcast.
▰ Step 1: Modular synthesizer.
Step 2: Modular synthesizers are expensive. VCV Rack is free.
Step 3: I really need a new, powerful computer dedicated just to VCV Rack.
▰ The GameStop situation is further evidence that (1) we live in a simulacrum and (2) its CPU is failing.
▰ I used to first type “this seems cool” every time I tried out a new piece of technology that involved data input. Now I type “this doesn’t seem like a hassle.”
▰ Remembering my early experiences with Twitter when all I’d do was post stray sounds I happened to hear.
▰ I do my best to stick to a Kindle Paperwhite on the rare occasion I’m up in the middle of the night. A recent bad night was cured when I played audiobook I’d been listening to but slowed the speed considerably. It … was … so … slow … I … fell … asleep … fast. A friend had recommended listening to audiobooks of ancient history, and that led me to worry I’d find it too interesting, which led me to wonder how to make something seem boring, which led to me slowing it down. I was listening to a spy novel, and it still knocked me out.
▰ Getting retweeted by twitter.com/instrumentBot is the highlight of my day.
▰ Just to confirm, that’s a Bruce Springsteen box set, a Beatles album, and a Wham album on the shelf behind Alessandro Cortini in that new synth video? (The one for the Make Noise Strega.)
January 29, 2021
Shenzhen Tape Archive
This live performance by the China-based musician who goes by mafmadmaf was taped last August in Shenzhen. Over the course of 45 minutes, mafmadmaf mixes bits of sound from a small collection of cassette tapes. As is evident from the footage, each cassette isn’t a full 30 minutes or 60 minutes, but instead contains a brief loop in its clear plastic shell. The loops hold what mafmadmaf refers to as “my motivations, fragments, and field recordings.” They’re select memories extracted from a personal sonic archive. In the live setting, these fragments are set into conversation with each other. Says mafmadmaf, “I mixed them live with massive delay feedbacks, distortions, and subtle EQ rendering, to make continuous sound walls that embrace and crash on us.” The result is an abstract narrative of space music (at times literally, as space-age footage appears throughout), of noises adrift, most in repose, but others in a state of portentous unease.
The recording is also available as a digital release at mafmadmaf.bandcamp.com. Video originally posted at YouTube. More from mafmadmaf at mafmadmaf.com. There’s a new mafmadmaf track, mixing beats and field recordings, as part of the Stomach Dance Vol. 1 various artists collection on the Guangzhou-based Jyugam record label: jyugam.bandcamp.com. The label is run by mafmadmaf and Liu YuXuan (aka ninelo909). Due later this year is a mafmadmaf release titled Ambient Friday.
January 28, 2021
Disquiet Junto Project 0474: Police Action (3/3)
Special Note: You can contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. This week you can do a second one. Please see additional details in Step 5 below.
Answer to Frequent Question: You don’t need to have uploaded a solo in last week’s project to participate in this week’s trios project.
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 1, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 28, 2020.
Tracks will be added to the playlist for the duration of the project.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0474: Police Action (3 of 3) The Assignment: Complete a trio by adding a track to an existing duet by two other musicians.
Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the third in a sequence that encourages and rewards asynchronous collaboration. This week you will be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0473). Note that you are finishing a trio — you’re creating the third part of what two previous musicians created. Please keep this in mind.
Step 2: The plan is for you to record an original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to a pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are well over 90 tracks in all to choose from, 87 as part of this playlist:
https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0473
And these five others. Consider the first to be number 88, and then in sequence to number 92:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeGBItimtPk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5EsCgiKyrs
https://sevenism.bandcamp.com/track/murmurer-lr
https://sevenism.bandcamp.com/track/slow-speckle-semiotics-lr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgRGW07h5J4
To select a track, you can listen through all that (warning: it’s a lot) and choose one, or you can use a random number generator to select a number from 1 to 92, the first 87 being numbered in the above SoundCloud playlist, and the five others numbered as described above. (Note: it’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece.)
Step 3: Record a piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and it should be placed dead center between the left and right stereo channels. When composing and recording your part, do not alter the original piece of music at all. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.
Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it may be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.
Step 5: As with last week, you can contribute more than one track this week. You can do up to two total. If you choose to do a second, you should preferably try to use a duet track that no one else has used yet. The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. After a lot of detailed instruction, that is the spirit of this project.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0474” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0474” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.
Step 4: Post your tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0474-police-action/
Step 5: Annotate your tracks with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Additional Details:
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 1, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 28, 2020.
Length: The length should be roughly the same as the duet track you selected.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0474” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.
Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.
Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).
For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 474th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Police Action (3 of 3) / The Assignment: Complete a trio by adding a track to an existing duet by two other musicians — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0474-police-action/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project is by orangechallenger, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
