Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 432
January 4, 2014
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
"Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it." http://t.co/ebeTjqHF7E. The 1st @djunto of 2014, 105th overall. ->
OK, now that I've posted the first Disquiet Junto project of the new year, I go back into social-network slumber until Monday, January 6. ->
January 2, 2014
Disquiet Junto Project 0105: Ice for 2014
Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com 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.
This project was published in the evening, California time, on Thursday, January 2, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 6, 2014, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0105: Ice for 2014
Happy new year! This week’s project is as follows:
Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.
Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single sentence as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series on the first Thursday of 2012. Revisiting it a year later, on the first Thursday of 2013, provided a fitting way to begin the new year. Now, at the start of the third year of the Disquiet Junto, it is something of a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a weekly habit. It’s beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.
Deadline: Monday, January 6, 2014, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 4 minutes in length.
Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, 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.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0105-ice2014” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:
More on this 105th Disquiet Junto project (“Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/01/02/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Photo associated with this project found via Creative Commons at:
January 1, 2014
New Year Dub
One of the beauties of SoundCloud.com is the casual nature of much of its content. Musicians upload not only finished recordings but works-in-progress, which serve as windows into their creative process, arguably providing a more intimate, fluid, and digitally natural listening experience that do sites whose structure is more clearly modeled on the brick’n'mortar system of a traditional record store. Often as not, these experimental, mid-process SoundCloud-housed tracks are brief, in the one-minute range, though in the realm of electronic music, they are only short on first listen — they are then adapted by fellow musicians (unfolding into myriad remixes), or simply set on loop.
A one-minute dub track, such as Kyle TM’s “New Year Dub,” easily turns into a half-hour of trance-worthy listening. In fact, while many short pieces on SoundCloud merely make for repeat listening, in this case it’s Kyle TM’s intent: “Meant to be looped,” he writes in a brief accompanying liner note. The piece has a familiar dub reggae rhythm, tweaked with a squeaky, delectably sour, further-off-the-beat percussive, like a screw is loose somewhere in the sound system.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/kyletm. More from Kyle TM, who’s based in Greer, South Carolina, at thekyletm.tumblr.com and twitter.com/thekyletm.
December 28, 2013
Disquiet: 15, 10 & 5 Years Ago This Week (2013.52)
This would be roughly the week of December 23 through December 29.
5 Years Ago (2008): A feature collected this site’s readers’ favorite albums of 2008. … The quote of the week collated material from Fringe, among it: “Was I humming? I thought it was in my head. … Nothing sings like a kilo volt. Unique pitch. Nothing else in nature quite like it.” … The image of the week was the cover to the then new edition of a Penguin paperback of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. … The week’s Downstream entries included some 8-bit Christmas music, a raucous drone by Growing, Esther Venrooy’s saw-toothed wave forms, jazz remixes from Silences Sumire (aka Thomas Faulds and Charles Gorcyznski), and foghorn-tronic material from Stray Ghost.
10 Years Ago (2003): My favorite albums of 2003, in a post this week, included Quartets by Boxhead Ensemble (to this day a major favorite — I briefly considered pitching it to 33 1/3 instead of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II), Systems/Layers by Rachel’s, and So by So (aka Markus Popp and Eriko Toyada). … I must have been taking an end-of-year break, because there were no Downstream entries.
15 Years Ago (1998): Nothing this week.
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
Note: I’m taking something of a social-media break through January 6, 2014.
Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco: http://t.co/FrVmKgO1Mx ->
New @djunto project begins later today. (Email alert: http://t.co/pavSZXDG7u.) Now I'm returning to my end-of-year social-media hibernation. ->
December 26, 2013
Disquiet Junto Project 0104: 2013 in 60 Seconds
Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com 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.
This project was published in the evening, California time, on Thursday, December 26, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 30, 2013, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0104: 2013 in 60 Seconds
This week’s project is a sound journal, an audio history of the past year. You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2013. You will then select one 5-second segment from each of these audio elements. Then you will stitch these dozen 5-second segments together in chronological order to form 1 single 1-minute track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.
These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should preferably of your own making, and not drawn from third-party sources.
Deadline: Monday, December 30, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be 60 seconds long.
Information: Please, when posting your track on SoundCloud, list the source of each of the 12 elements.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0104-audiojournal2013” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
Linking: When posting your track, be sure to include this information:
More on this 104th Disquiet Junto project (“Create a 2013 audio diary with a dozen five-second segments”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2013/12/26/disqui...
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Photo associated with this project found via Creative Commons at:
December 22, 2013
One Prayer Bowl Ringing
The sound of one prayer bowl ringing is quite a bit more than the familiar lulling waveform when that ringing is sent through myriad processing routines. This is why while Jason Charney’s “Pratītya,” named for the Buddhist concept of “pratītyasamutpāda,” veers from its opening ring tone, that which follows — overtones, and cicada chatter, percussive tweaks — always seems rooted in the source audio.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/jasoncharney. More from Charney, who is based in Ohio, at jasoncharney.com and twitter.com/jcharney.
December 21, 2013
Disquiet: 15, 10 & 5 Years Ago This Week (2013.51)
5 Years Ago (2008): This week I was in Tokyo, where I came upon a book titled Art Space Tokyo: An Intimate Guide to the Tokyo Art World. I was headed to a concert at the club Super Deluxe, so I didn’t but a copy, which was unfortunate because it quickly went out of print and sold for hundreds of dollars in the second-hand market. Later, in 2010, the book was a successful early Kickstarter project for a reprint and iPad edition, which finally appeared in mid-2012. There’s a free browser-based version, too. Anyhow, my quote of the week in mid-December 2008 was from the book. This is Roger McDonald: “This sense of physical impermanence makes Tokyo something like a huge, ever-evolving John Cage composition, whirling itself through chance procedures and the interventions of its inhabitants/users.”
The image of the week, a 1940s listening device shown in this post, was found via the musician and sound artist Steve Roden’s ephemera-rich blog. … In the Downstream department of legally free downloads: C. Reider reworking nine other musicians’ work, mischievous Morse code from Sublamp (aka Ryan Connor), the collaboration of James Blackshaw and Jozef Van Wissem, and Jonathan Coleclough’s amplified sounds. Many of those offsite links have, inevitably, since expired.
10 Years Ago (2003): I did a holiday gift guide this week, with recommendations based on category (a broader concept than genre), such as “quietly deceptive” (Doron Sadja’s A Piece of String, a Sunset) and “historic” (James Tenney’s Selected Works 1961-1969). … In the Downstream departent of legally free downloads: a Nurse with Wound tribute album, some “songwriting as sine wave” by Sophrosyne (aka Jason van Pelt), various live recordings by Christopher Willits, and video by Keith Fullerton Whitman (then still better known, perhaps, as Hrvatski). Many of those offsite links have, inevitably, since expired.
15 Years Ago (1998): No posts this week 15 years ago.
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
Note: I’m taking something of a social-media break through January 6, 2014
Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco: http://t.co/FrVmKgO1Mx ->
December 19, 2013
Disquiet Junto Project 0103: Tinsel Song
Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com 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.
This project was published in the evening, California time, on Thursday, December 19, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 23, 2013, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0103: Tinsel Song
This week’s project, the 103rd, is based on last week’s, the 102nd. The instructions are as follows:
Step 1: Select three different works from last week’s project, as collected at this URL:
https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/...
Step 2: Label them Source A, B, and C.
Step 3: Create an underlying foundation for a song by creating a loop-able segment structured as follows: four beats of Source A, four beats of Source B, four beats of Source A, four beats of Source C.
Step 4: Let that loop repeat twice before introducing any additional elements.
Step 5: Continue to loop the segment and augment/distort/filter it as you so desire, and introduce any additional material, toward the goal of creating an original piece of music.
Bonus Round: If you are inclined, create a chorus for the song by holding Source B for an extended period of time, and create a bridge by holding Source C for an extended period of time. Again, feel free to augment/distort/filter them.
Deadline: Monday, December 23, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your track’s length should be between 1 and four minutes.
Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, 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.
Title/Tag: Include the term “disquiet0103-tinselsong” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: Please consider employing a license that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:
More on this 103rd weekly Disquiet Junto project (Make a song based on last week’s “sonic tinsel” project) at:
http://disquiet.com/2013/12/19/disqui...
Source audio from these three tracks:
[insert links to SoundCloud page for the three source tracks]
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Image associated with the project adopted from one found via Creative Commons at:
