Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 266

June 27, 2019

Staring Down the Future

I’m committed to my sonic stare-downs with robocalls. These are the steps:

Pick up the phone.
Say nothing.
Listen intently to the call’s background static for the ghost in the machine, for some sense, some signal, of the system on the other end as it cogitates its next move.
Rejoice when it almost inevitably hangs up.
Put another notch in belt.
Sometimes ponder if this is a Roko’s basilisk scenario.
Sometimes ponder if there is a correlation between which particular textures of background static trigger Roko-anxiety, and if that’s some sort of ESP equivalent of a Turing test.

We’re so conscious of self-learning algorithms and of nascent digital sentience these days, I do wonder if the phrase “ghost in the machine” has much traction any longer, or if the phrase is shifting to mean something slightly different from what it once did.

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Published on June 27, 2019 19:37

Disquiet Junto Project 0391: Front Page

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 Monday, July 1, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 27, 2019.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0391: Front Page
The Assignment: Make music that fills in where the news trails off.

Step 1. Select a news article from a prominent, local-to-you newspaper or news website. The article should originate from the day when you begin this project.

Step 2. Select a sentence from the article, likely the first sentence but any sentence will do.

Step 3. Record yourself or, perhaps better, a machine reading that single sentence.

Step 4. Create a short piece of music to initially accompany and then supplant the sentence being read. Include the recording from Step 3 at the start, but have it glitch and fracture toward the end of its run time, so that the full reading of the source text isn’t completed. Have the music then continue after the reading is over, filling the void that the truncated sentence has left behind. Continue the music for as long as you see fit.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0391” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0391” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0391-front-page/

Step 5: Annotate your track 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 Monday, July 1, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 27, 2019.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0391” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Consider setting 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 391st weekly Disquiet Junto project — Front Page / The Assignment: Make music that fills in where the news trails off — at:

https://disquiet.com/0391/

June 26, 2019

This Week in Sound: Commercialized ASMR + Rooster Politics + …

Soft Machine: Arielle Pardes (who interviewed me a few weeks ago for a Wired article about generative music apps) writes this week about the commercialization of ASMR (“videos created to encourage the ‘brain orgasm’ that can come from listening to gentle whispers or watching people touch soft objects”). “Brands capitalizing on the interest around ASMR,” she writes, “often do so with a wink, as if to suggest that they, too, are in on the joke.”

Playing Chicken: There is a special beauty to the conflict in which people who supposedly prize the supposedly idyllic country life go to war against people who actually live in the country and, you know, have animals. A crowing rooster has “become a symbol of a perennial French conflict — between those for whom France’s countryside is merely a backdrop for pleasant vacations, and the people who actually inhabit it.” (Related: Why is it that we say a rooster “crows”? What is it, in turn, that crows do?)

16 Coaches: I will never tire of linking to stories about the sounds associated with Japanese trains. Here’s an interview with Hiroaki Ide, who in 1989 worked on the sounds for the JR East railway company: “This, Ide says, is important if the sound of a bell is to work successfully as a departure melody. He likens this to a Buddhist concept called chudo, or the ‘middle way,’ which attempts to strike the right balance between a harmonious sound and one that catches people’s attention at specific moments.”

Let’s Buzz: A writer goes in search of quiet in New York City, and comes to recognize the attractive power of volume, though the word “noise” gets beat up along the way: “The human roar of the metropolis is why so many of us gravitate to it.”

Blipverts 2.0: Among various technologies being initiated by NBCUniversal to appeal to advertisers is something referred to as “Must Hear” TV: “audio cues that play as a program fades to commercial and are meant to hold the viewer’s attention.”

Holy Crap: “After Facebook banned posts featuring the cover of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 album, the social media giant say they’ll be restoring posts that were previously removed.” The album in question is Houses of the Holy, the image by Aubrey Powell, co-founder of the storied design firm Hipgnosis.

Czech Marks: “This November, the Prague Philharmonic will perform the third and final movement of ‘From the Future World,’ an AI-completed composition based on an unfinished piano piece by the famous composer Antonín Dvořák, 115 years after his death. Emmanuel Villaume will conduct.” (via Jeff Kolar)

Make It So: Engadget makes the case for voice-controlled computing.

Morse Majeure: Google has been accused by Genius of stealing the latter’s lyrics database. What raised the media-tech company’s awareness? Old-fashioned Morse code:

Peep Show: A “renter-friendly” doorbell has been announced by Ring. It goes in your peephole.

Customer Service: Can a technology have a future if it isn’t a conduit for commerce? That’s the question lingering around voice shopping:

DAW Inspiring: Install pirated music-production software, and end up with a bitcoin miner running in the background on your laptop. (via rbxbx)

King Missile: Things that go 15x the speed of sound are anxiety-provoking.

/ / A GOOGOL OF BLOGS
My paean to the benefits of blogging lead to a great amount of correspondence this past week, and I want to say thanks to everyone who shared the article, and who wrote in about the topic. I had planned to write a little follow-up this week, but frankly there was so much of a response, I need to still consume it all. I will say, if you have a blog that is focused on sound and/or music, please let me know. Blogs will have an increased presence in the This Week in Sound newsletter as the weeks proceed. A few blog favorites from the past week (or so):

Westy Reflector on a more harmonious urban automobile experience.

Kira Grunenberg on the effort that went into the effortless music of Christopher Willits’ new ambient album, Sunset:
http://throwthediceandplaynice.com/20...

Trevor Cox on the unique “fluttering reverb” of a railway tunnel.

Ethan Hein on the music theory behind why it’s difficult to tune a guitar.

Starthief on the uncanny valley in synthesized impressions of physical instruments.

And this last one isn’t a blog. It’s a zine in the form of a PDF, which is an awesome medium unto itself (perhaps it’ll be the blogging of 2020, when the hemlines shift again.) The zine is called Plurletariat and it’s about socialism in dance music. It opens with a great quote from Ayesha A. Siddiqi: “Debating fascism is a precious waste of time. Bass might be a more effective strategy of drowning it out.” (via Iain on the Disquiet Junto’s Slack)

This is lightly adapted from an edition first published in the June 23, 2019, issue of the free weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound.

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Published on June 26, 2019 09:16

June 25, 2019

The Machine Intelligence of Autechre’s Confield

Having published a book in the 33 1/3 series, I occasionally get inquires from writers who want to propose 33 1/3 books of their own. My advice is generally the same: pick an album with a sizable audience, an audience that can be expected to want to read something detailed, and be sure to have a point of view on the topic. Less frequently does the individual actually go ahead and write the proposal. Joel Ebner completed his proposal for a book he intended to write about Confield, the 2001 album by the British electronic duo Autechre. When the proposal was rejected, I suggested to Ebner that his sample chapter might find a home on Disquiet.com, and he said yes immediately.–Marc Weidenbaum

“There is this notion that electronic music is not human because it is artificial. I think it is intrinsically human. I haven’t seen or heard of any other species who use computers. They are uniquely human things.”
–Sean Booth, 2018

After a moment of hushed digital static, Confield begins with the sound of a beat accelerating, the very notion of linear rhythm multiplying towards infinity, the laws of basic arithmetic graduating into exponential functions.

For the next two minutes, “VI Scose Poise” tests the limits of a single type of sound — iterations on a stuttering, metalloid pulse which gets stretched and reconfigured into dizzying arcs of free rhythm: the sounds circle one another like electrons, jockeying for headspace, unexpectedly changing direction and velocity; dueling meters fall in and out of phase with one another before colliding, combining, and disappearing; new pulses emerge from nowhere, deformed by the pull of sinusoidal shifts in frequency and pitch, seemingly pulling away at the fabric of time.

It’s a bracing start to a spectacularly strange record, a statement of purpose announcing the fact that Confield is a very different kind of album than we might have been expecting.

Either by design or by default, Autechre spent the early part of their career pushing against the boundaries of techno, electro, and hip-hop while still following many of the basic rules of those genres. That’s especially true with respect to beat: for all of the rhythmic innovations found in their earlier work, Autechre’s still tended to parse their arrangements of kicks and snares into quarter notes, eighths, sixteenths, and so on — ever more granular, but quantized. Increasingly, they put the deterioration of those interlocking cogs on full display, but cogs they were, fixed in place and turning in unison — a machine corroding over time, slowly.

The opening of Confield does away with all of that. Instead, what we hear transforms the repetitive, rotational gear-grinding of Tri Repetae and Chiastic Slide into a study of complex systems, the sounds of neural networks and telecommunication hubs. Booth and Brown seem especially careful about how they open each of their albums; though it’s unclear what their intentions are here, if they had had any hopes of disruption, then their efforts were a success. The effect — both as an isolated listening experience and with greater respect to their evolution as producers — is jarring.

At the 1:57 mark — nearly a third of the way through the song’s seven-minute runtime — an electric piano enters the frame. With a spare, minor pentatonic line, the piano instantly balances the shock of “VI Scose Poise”‘s rhythmic calculus, providing reassurance that Confield still contains the DNA of Autechre’s earlier recordings. As the track progresses, however, “VI” once again starts losing its balance: the melody begins to mutate, modulating between three- and four-note phrases, adding one-off flourishes, changing rhythmic emphasis. What’s more: the piano, too, seems unwilling to conform to a strict tempo. Instead, it follows its own pace, speeding up and slowing down at will, imparting an expressiveness typically associated more with classical composers like Frédéric Chopin than with contemporary electronic artists. (The technical term for this style of playing is tempo rubato, or “stolen time” in Italian.)

It’s easy to miss just how unusual this is. Before Confield, nothing in their body of work had approached melody in this fashion before. Even if the melodic tone of “VI Scose Poise” bears more than a passing resemblance to Tri Repetae-era classics like “Overand” and “Vletrmx21,” the rhythmic sensibility of the piano gives us something far looser than those tracks — it implies a degree of freedom that we associate not only with a humanistic style of music but literally with human performers.

Rethinking the full arrangement with this in mind reveals something interesting: it’s not just the melody that moves through the song with a more naturalistic sense of phrasing — everything here is acting and reacting, conversing, evolving. With both beat and melody given the latitude to behave on more human terms, the song presents us with music that sounds at once more unsettled and at ease, resulting in an uncomfortable paradox: though we are generally welcoming to melodies which offer the lilting romance of jazz or classical, it’s profoundly strange to hear percussive sounds operating with this kind of freedom. That’s especially true when so much of what we’ve heard of Autechre’s past work had been predicated on metronomic forms like techno, electro, and hip-hop. “VI Scose Poise” is the uncanny valley of electronic music — we expect our beats to operate with the pulse of machinery; when the resemblance gets too much like people it freaks us out. Moreover, the piano is never allowed any space to be heard on its own. We spend nearly a third of the song’s intro with those dizzying, electromagnetic anti-rhythms, and in the last twenty seconds of the track we get one more solo from this aspect of the arrangement. The melody, for its part, is only heard with respect to the other, responding to a chattering rhythm that acts of its own free will; the resulting interaction between the two, though often beautiful, is ultimately disruptive for the piano, disruptive for us.

At the time of this writing, computer processing power is roughly one-twelfth the speed of the human mind. (It is estimated that the human brain processes information at roughly one exaFLOP — a billion billion calculations per second. In June 2018, the U.S. Department of Energy’s supercomputer, the Summit, reached 122.9 petaFLOPs, where one exaFLOP is equivalent to one thousand petaFLOPs.) It’s estimated that computers will have intelligence on par with humans by 2029. We aren’t there yet, but it’s ironic that Autechre shows us not just a metaphor but literally a product of our path toward that landmark.

One of the critical moments of their early career was their inclusion on the 1992 Warp compilation Artificial Intelligence. According to Autechre, Warp label founder Rob Mitchell’s title for the series was a provocation — neither fans nor detractors got the joke, instead taking the series title as a commentary on the intellectual brilliance of the music, the people who made it, and those who enjoyed it. With decades of hindsight, it’s possible to extract something more serious from Mitchell’s title, and also recognize that our interpretation excluded the one variable of the equation hiding in plain sight: the intelligence of machines. Maybe it was simply too obvious at the time — after all, the term “artificial intelligence” literally refers to the cognitive function of computers — but we are now living in a reality where the notion isn’t simply an outlandish concept for an abstract future; it’s actually on the horizon. If that’s true, then the linearity of Autechre’s earliest recordings might be just a bit too perfect, a projection that captures the spirit but not the intricacy of a technologically advanced society. By comparison, “VI Scose Poise” reminds us that if machines are rapidly mirroring human thought and behavior, then the unfolding relationships between people and computers are bound to be messy, beautiful, and very, very complicated.

Joel Ebner (twitter.com/joel_ebner) is a musician, artist, and designer. Formerly a writer for Pitchfork, his music — made under the names Avvenir, Contretemps, Modal Voices, and City States — has been featured by Popmatters, Impose, and Spotify’s Fresh Finds playlists. He lives in Chicago with his wife and their Shiba Inu, Bowie.

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Published on June 25, 2019 16:06

A Feast of Collaborations

CRXSSINGS (fundraiser for City Plaza) by various artists

Crxssings is the title of a massive new album of collaborations, 34 tracks in all featuring a variety of interactions between pairs of musicians. Many are remixes, while many others appear to be more directly interactive. Just check out the lineup:

Shelly Knotts x Jan St. Werner, Ipek Gorgun x Mira Cali, Aaron Dilloway x Lucrecia Dalt, Laura Luna Castillo x Leyland Kirby, France Jobin x Anne Guthrie, Mads Emil Nielsen x Jan Jelinek, Alessandro Bosetti x Yannis Kyriakides, Seth Graham x Yves De Mey, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma x Le Révélateur, Mark Fell x Jim O’Rourke, Christina Vantzou x Jasmine Guffond, Kreng x Celer, Bjarni Gunnarsson x BJ Nilsen, Jerusalem In My Heart x Black To Comm, Klara Lewis x Lawrence English, Gabriel Saloman x Machinefabriek, BEAST (aka Koen Holtkamp) x Chuck Johnson.

What makes the listings especially promising is how the ordering of the participants appears in sets of pairs, suggesting that, for example, where musician A is listed as having been remixed by musician B, a different track flips the relationship, with musician A remixing musician B. What brings all the musicians together is a cause:

All the funds generated by the sales of this album will be donated directly to City Plaza Hotel, a squatted refuge located in the heart of Athens, Greece, organized for and by migrants from Africa and Asia. These funds will support their struggle to provide material needs for those fleeing economic, environmental, political and military disasters in their home countries. At City Plaza Hotel residents work together in ways that center their own agency, dignity and solidarity with each other. One early, pre-release highlight is “Not to Decide is to Decide (Remixture),” a reworking by Jasmine Guffond of unidentified tracks by Christina Vantzou. It’s a gloriously slow-moving mass of heavily textured strings.

Album available at crxssings.bandcamp.com. The release date is July 1. As of today a half dozen tracks are already available.

In the wait for the full release, one thing the collection brings to mind is an early album, dating from 1996, on the Lo Recordings label titled Lo Recordings Vol: 2 Collaborations, featuring such heady combos as Mike Flowers Pops and Funki Porcini, David Toop and Bedouin Ascent, Scanner and David Cunningham, and Lol Coxhill and Paul Schütze. It’s on streaming services, but the listings for Collaborations seem in some cases to not credit both artists. Metadata remains something of a nightmare.

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Published on June 25, 2019 16:01

June 24, 2019

This Is a Third Test

We’ll see how this test goes. Like the previous ones, it’ll get deleted.

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Published on June 24, 2019 18:37

Two Free Hours of Early Autechre

Listening to these early Autechre recordings is like the start of the old movie Gremlins, when those little fuzzy beasts are still all cute and friendly. You know, before the various rules are broken and they turn into frightful, feral, and even more memorable itsy bitsy monsters. The rules, if you don’t recall: no bright lights, no water, don’t feed after midnight.

When I first made that joke on Twitter earlier today, I accidentally typed “fuzzy beats” instead of “fuzzy beasts.” The error was, no doubt, Freudian, for the beats comprising these early Autechre recordings are, indeed, fuzzy. They’re fuzzy like an adolescent’s chin. A few years would pass before the Autechre, the duo of Sean Booth and Robert Brown, would gain the electronic-music equivalent of a full beard. Before they showed their true, feral side.

What early Autechre recordings, you may be asking? This past weekend the duo was part of the three-day residency in which the Warp Records label took over the British online radio station NTS (nts.live). Autechre shared two hours of audio dating back to 1989 and up through 1993. Subsequently the audio, in the form of a single zip archive that weighs in at well over a gigabyte (it contains two separate .wav files, each exactly an hour long), was posted for free on Autechre’s page on Bleep, which is Warp’s long-running digital-audio storefront.

To access the tracks, go to autechre.bleepstores.com and scroll down to the bottom, which at the moment means directly below the five thumbnail images, vaguely reminiscent of Joseph Albers’ covers for Enoch Light’s Command Records label, representing the elseq 1-5 collection from 2016. The link goes to an Autechre page on WeTransfer, which provides push-button access to the audio.

The music is almost entirely vocal-free, with some occasional spoken and sung samples, notably on the first of the two tracks. The emphasis is beats, here in the form of contrarian glosses on hip-hop and various club styles. You’ll recognize the period drum machines, but you’re hearing them in a slightly different context. To a degree, that context is far more recognizable in hindsight, in that at times you can hear antecedents of the harsher, stronger, more abstract Autechre to come, notably a favor for metallic percussion, and the deep pleasure of putting those thudding rhythmic elements through a sequence of filters. In this period, Autechre wasn’t quite breaking rules yet, but they were sure getting ready to.

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Published on June 24, 2019 16:16

Cyberdeck 2019

My [social network named for birds]’s locale is set to Tokyo, where I am not, so that the “trends” are unintelligible to me.

I refer to companies by concisely describing their logos.

I use a VPN.

Life has become a mundane cyberpunk novel: on the run from algorithms.

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Published on June 24, 2019 12:22

June 23, 2019

The Chernobyl Effect

The first few years I taught my sound course, I found it interesting to observe which topics each new semester were natural to fold into the syllabus of the previous semester: a fresh employment of sound in product design, a further development of domestic surveillance amid the Internet of Things, a new advertising campaign aimed at pricking up consumers’ ears. Hildur Guonadottir’s excellent score to HBO’s Chernobyl mini-series provides a very different source of pedagogical intrigue: which once-abstract topics have, along the way, become normalized.

This is because as time has gone on, it’s become even more interesting (to me, that is) to observe which once-new (“new” to students, that is) topics have become familiar, even commonplace. And then, in turn, to probe how such familiarity alters the subjects at hand.

Each semester in my sound course I have taught, side by side, the scores to two very different thrillers, both of them set on submarines: Jeff Rona’s for the movie Phantom and Robert Duncan’s for the TV series Last Resort. Both scores draw from submarine field recordings as source audio for the music. The composers recorded sounds of the antiquated environments, capturing claustrophobic room tones and banging on equipment, and then tuned those tracks and turned the resulting sounds into digital instruments.

The similarities and differences between the Phantom and Last Resort approaches to submarine source audio are highly teachable, surfacing (pun!) various matters, such as how they extract sound, as well as the inherent musicality of everyday listening.

Of particular value during class discussion is the manner in which this approach manages to blur the distinctions between the diegetic (i.e., sounds with an on-screen source, like machinery and conversation) and the non-diegetic (i.e., sounds external to the action, such as score and voice-overs). And better yet: how the end results differ between films, despite the shared approach.

That last bit is important, because if the end results were the same, if Phantom and Last Resort sounded the same, the aesthetics would be reduced to something causal, and the technique to a matter of mechanics.

The films, however, do not sound similar at all. Duncan’s Last Resort is very much a classic, epic, retro-orchestral vibe, whereas Rona’s Phantom is more ethereal, bearing a Fourth World influence, perhaps from his time as a collaborator with Jon Hassell. Even more interestingly, the old-school music of Last Resort serves a story set in the present, whereas the highly contemporary, even futuristic, music of Phantom serves a story set way back in Cold War. As a result, in class discussion we can talk about how the approach of sampling the environment serves varied narrative needs, about expectations of genre norms, and about how the composers’ (and directors’) proclivities come into play.

There are mini-documentaries on both Phantom and Last Resort, and they’re worth watching for the parallels and divergences. Here’s the Rona/Phantom:

And here’s the Duncan/Last Resort:

They’re valuable to watch in tandem, great in the classroom as concise encapsulations of the technique.

Now, however, thanks to the well-deserved acclaim for Guonadottir’s work on Chernobyl, by the time next semester of my sound course begins, come February 2020, the students will be all “Oh, like Chernobyl,” when the subject arises of using place as source audio for the creation of music and atmosphere. Of course, I won’t know until class begins where students’ thoughts are, what they’ve collectively and individually taken as the new normal, versus what they see as “gimmick” (skepticism is a common response, and can be a healthy one), versus what they are, in fact, not familiar with. No doubt, though, I’ll show or assign in class something like this interview with Guonadottir, where she talks about working with Chris Watson to capture the sounds of one nuclear reactor in order to tell the story of another, much as Rona and Duncan did with submarines:

At a structural level, this “score” segment of my course usually occurs during the third week, toward the end of the sequence on “Learning to Listen” (it’s a three-part course: weeks four through 10 are “Sounds of Brands,” which is also the title of the course, and weeks 11 through 15 are “Brands of Sounds”). Perhaps I’ll move this part earlier, or perhaps it’ll make sense to move it later. I don’t know yet. Certainly, though, the praise for Guonadottir’s Chernobyl score will encourage other composers to adopt the process, and alert non-specialist newspapers, magazines, and blogs to composers also doing such things. Which is to say, there will almost certainly be even more material (call it the Chernobyl effect) to slot into discussion by next year. It’s a long eight months between now and the next semester. I have time to plan, and to listen.

Just as a side note, because Twitter can be an excellent place if you tweet the Twitter you want and work to avoid the rest, when I first explored these topics on Twitter, I ended up in conversation with Rona himself. Among other things, he described the compositional process as exploratory: “I think with my score, and I’d like to think it’s similarly true with the others, is that the genesis of it is a ‘what if’ process. I had no idea what it would sound like to sample a submarine and use it as the primary ‘instrument’ of a score. And as it happened it worked. That’s not always the case. I took it as a challenge to my process to use the various sounds I could get and somehow come up with a way to make them not only musical, but cover a fairly broad range of emotions.”

Asked if he’s explored approaches that haven’t panned out, he replied, “Literally every score I’ve done begins with an experimental phase with several casualties prior to the one path chosen.” He also drew an interesting connection between the mechanical source audio of Phantom and one of his solo albums: “Certainly the project that showed me a different way to find that musical path on any given project. My solo album Projector is done very similarly to Phantom in that it relies heavily on manipulation of organic sounds – in this case field recordings of the upper Amazon river.”

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Published on June 23, 2019 15:18

June 20, 2019

Disquiet Junto Project 0390: Pace Quickens

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, June 24, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 20, 2019.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0390: Pace Quickens
The Assignment: Take an old song (or field recording), and make it faster, and add then something.

Step 1: For this project you’ll be reworking either a field recording or an old piece of your own music. The slower the better, as far as the original recording is concerned. Reading through these instructions first may aid in your selection process.

Step 2: Choose a field recording or and old piece of music of your own. (Define “old” as you like. “Preexistence” is the main factor.)

Step 3: Speed it up considerably (at least by a third, maybe by more).

Step 4: Add one or two new elements that proceed at the piece’s new pace.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0390” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0390” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0390-pace-quickens/

Step 5: Annotate your track 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:

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0390” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 390th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Pace Quickens / The Assignment: Take an old song (or field recording), and make it faster, and add then something — at:

https://disquiet.com/0390/

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