600

I included the following message in this week’s email to the Disquiet Junto music community:

And like that, 600 weeks have passed. Back at the start of January 2012, I was sitting in a cafe on Valencia Street in San Francisco with a friend. We were both getting some work done, but this idea I had been pondering was suddenly coming into shape, and rather than try to push aside the idea, I attended to it. Only a few weeks earlier, I’d completed a group music project called Instagr/am/bient, in which 25 different musicians swapped Instagram photos and treated the one they received as the cover for their next single, which they proceeded to record. I wanted to try something that nudged that disparate-yet-communal idea even further: on the one hand, more open, in that participation didn’t require much if any decision-making on my part, but also more constrained, in that the creative concept was a little more narrow, a little more specific. I came up with an idea — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — and I posted the brief instruction as a call for entries with a short deadline, less than a week.

I needed a name for this undertaking. I borrowed the word “Junto” from the club that Benjamin Franklin formed in 1727 for “mutual improvement,” a concept the wording of which fascinated me. I appended “Junto” to “Disquiet,” which since 1996 had been the name of my website, the word borrowed from the English translation of a book by Fernando Pessoa. I let folks know about this “Disquiet Junto” on Twitter, and waited to see if anyone would even take note of the concept, let alone join in. They did join in, so I did another project the following week, and the one after that. And now, 600 weeks later, we have nearly 2,000 subscribers to the Disquiet Junto email list and every week people make music based on these composition prompts — prompts that are, not infrequently, proposed by members of the community themselves.

This week’s project was going to be a big round number. I wanted something special for it — not that every week the Junto doesn’t feel special to me in some way — and so I asked Marcus Fischer, long a friend of and occasional participant in the Junto, if he could wrangle some shared source audio of his own creation that Junto members could work with. Other sounds of his were the focus, in fact, of the fourth Disquiet Junto project, back at the end of that first month of 2012. I’m a big fan of shared-sample projects. Two shared-sample groups, the Iron Chef of Music and the Stones Throw Beat Battles, were among the inspirations on my mind when I posted that first Junto project. As I mention in this week’s project instructions, shared-sample projects have a unique attribute: there will be an underlying quality — a tonality, a texture, a commonality — to all the disparate works that are produced from the foundational material. Listening to the variations as they surface will be its own special source of pleasure. Having everyone work with the same sources this week felt appropriate, not just because the sounds themselves originated from an especially talented and generous member of the Junto, but because that resulting sonic commonality would serve, for a moment, to highlight the notion of community we’ve accomplished as a group.

And that covers it. I can’t wait to hear what people do with these shared samples. 

And whether you’re new here or started participating a long time ago, whether you just get these emails to read them or you join in almost every week, I want to say thank you. Thank you, truly, for your time, creativity, and curiosity.