Nearly 25 years ago over the course of three days, in April 1973, reportedly some 60 musicians on “no less than ten synthesizers” and various other instruments filled six acres of the San Bernardino National Forest in California with music. Other Minds guru Charles Amirkhanian was there at the time, interviewing the involved composers and recording snatches of the music, heard in this archival document echoing and overlapping amid the trees (MP3). There are jazz performances, radio improvisations and much philosophizing about the nature of music — and about music amid nature. Participants included Richard Bunger, Barry Gott, Jacques Bekaert, Nicolas Slonimsky and Dane Rudhyar . More info at archive.org and otherminds.org.
The new album Unit of Resistance by Raz Mesinai’s Badawi is welcome not only because it is Mesinai’s first new collection since he started branching into film (Sorry, Haters; Romántico; the forthcoming Burning the Future: Coal in America), but also because the album’s guest line-up is the clearest delineator of the how so-called, once-upon “illbient” begat today’s so-called “dubstep.” In addition to Mesinai himself (also known to record his heavily dub-influenced music as Badawi), there’s a mix by DJ Spooky, a key illbient figure. More recent dub-drenched electronic contributors include Kode 9 and DJ/rupture. Up for free download, courtesy of releasing label ROIR, are two very different Resistance tracks. “Market Place” is from Badawi Quintet; it’s a raging piece of acoustic trance, all roiling drums and searing woodwind (5 Most Recent Posts
Current Activities
June 8, 2013: A panel discussion on comics and music will include a focus on some of my work. This is at HeroesCon in Charlotte, North Carolina: disquiet.com, heroesonline.com.
July 6, 2013: A series of projects involving metronomes and the Walhalla at the direction of artist Paolo Salvagione in the vicinity of Regensburg, Germany: disquiet.com, (in German) theater-regensburg.de.
New: There are now three Disquiet-collated “carousels” on SoundCloud streaming sets of ambient, beat-based, and “other” tracks: disquiet.com. Think of them as fluid, iterative podcasts.
Ongoing: The film The Children Next Door (2012), on which I served as music supervisor and collaborated with Taylor Deupree on sound design, is currently touring festivals. It won a special jury prize at DOC NYC and has also played at the Denver and Hamptons festivals. Directed by Doug Block, produced by Lynda A. Hansen. More at thechildrennextdoor.com.
Ongoing: The Disquiet Junto series of weekly communal music projects explore constraints as a springboard for creativity and productivity. There is a new project each Thursday afternoon (California time), and it is due the following Monday at 11:59pm: soundcloud.com.
Down the Pike: Concerts in the Disquiet Junto series are in various stages of planning for London, England; Portland, Oregon; and elsewhere.
Way Down the Pike: Currently writing a book about Aphex Twin's landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, for the 33 1/3 series.
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fashion for women: "Hello! This is my first visit to your blog! We are a collection of volunteers and starting a new..."
Jenn: "Very interesting track with some great background beats. "
Matthew Dean: "Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, great post Marc!!! "
Larry Johnson: "With the artist’s permission, I uploaded a remix here: https://soundcloud.com/l-a-..."
cebec: "Great idea! Looking forward to seeing what you put in these repositories! "
disquiet junto
The Disquiet Junto is an ongoing weekly collaborative music-making space in which restraints are used as a springboard for creativity. It's housed at soundcloud.com. Subscribe to the announcement list at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto. There is an FAQ. These are the weekly projects to date: 1: ice cubes • 2: duet for foghorn and steam whistle • 3: expanded glass harp • 4: remixing Marcus Fischer • 5: adding sounds to everyday life • 6: remixing archival Edison cylinders • 7: create through subtraction • 8: rework Benjamin Franklin's autobiography • 9: cross-species collaboration • 10: remix a previous Junto track • 11: everyday mechanical rhythms • 12: cut and paste • 13: remixing wild Up playing Shostakovich • 14: sonic version of Matt Madden's Oubapo story • 15: aural RGB • 16: sandpaper and dice • 17: transition between field and composed • 18: relative prominence • 19: graphic score (photo by Yojiro Imasaka) • 20: use the NodeBeat app • 21: the four seasons • 22: sonic decay • 23: palindrone • 24: a suite of sonic alerts • 25: remixing project 24 • 26: making music from your trash • 27: turm the instruction text into sound • 28: remix a netlabel release • 29: music from water, inspired by William Gibson's Count Zero • 30: sounds from silence • 31: Revisiting a 1955 Yoko Ono Fluxus piece • 32: sonify the 2012 U.S. presidential election polling data • 33: making music with a turntable but without vinyl • 34: Use the theme song of the Radius broadcast as the source of an original composition • 35: Make music from a sample page of Beck's Song Reader sheet music • 36: Reworking Bach into abstract expressionism • 37: The sound of commerce • 38: Make a fake field recording • 39: Combine three tracks from the Nowaki netlabel into one • 40: Turn a Kenneth Kirschner duet into a trio • 41: Dirty minimalism • 42: Record a "naive melody" with your oldest and newest instruments> • 43: Make mechanical roars from the sound of a retail space • 44: Transition from storm to calm using field recordings from Sandy 2012 • 45: Combine material from the public domain adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Tom Sawyer • 46: Investigate a recording of the voting process for its "sonic fingerprint." • 47: Turn the muffled voices of a distant party into the foundation of a recording. • 48: Celebrate the Creative Commons license that allows for derivative works by remixing music from the Three Legs Duck netlabel. • 49: Make a track, 50% of which is the sound of a tape cassette deck in motion. • 50: Encode a word or phrase in Morse Code and employ that as a track's rhythm. • 51: Create a 2012 audio diary with a dozen five-second segments. • 52: Celebrate the Creative Commons by remixing three tracks from the Bump Foot netlabel. • 53: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it (redux). • 54: Create an original musical score for the day's news. • 55: Combine two Nils Frahm solo piano pieces into one. • 56: Make music from the sound of the tick of a clock. • 57: Use sounds from the Phonetics Lab Archive at UCLA to depict emotions. • 58: Celebrate the Creative Commons by remixing three tracks from the Endless Ascent netlabel. • 59: Make music from three randomly assigned vowels. • 60: Record something about yourself and your music/sound in your own words and voice. • 61: Record a single for which the cover would be the image suggested by a @textinstagram tweet. • 62: Make music using just three sine waves. • 63: Make a new piece of music based on an echo-laden re-recording of Gregorian chant. • 64: Compose a piece to align with, from memory, 60 seconds of everyday sound. • 65: Compose music atop a randomly assigned segment of a pre-existing track by Jared Brickman. • 66: Collaborate posthumously with the late Jeffrey (Nofi) Melton. • 67: Compose music for a phrase from Homer's The Odyssey • 68: Combine three songs from the first release of the new deriv.cc netlabel. • 69: Make music from field recordings of earth, water, air, and fire. • 70: Create a single piece of music from two tones and three beats. • 71: Create an original score to the trailer to Christine Knowlton's film about blind sailors. • 72: Make a domestic score from sounds recorded in your own home. • 73: Read a map of the San Andreas Fault as if it were a graphic notation score • 74: Turn applause into music. • 75: Make a 3-part, 18-second suite with the Vine app. • 76: Use the sounds of the room in which you sleep as source audio for a score to you describing your dream.Tags
8-bit android app audio-games chiptune classical comics copyleft demix field-recording film forum-digger free gadget generative i-hop installation ios ipad iphone ipod ipod touch jazz junto live-performance mp3 discussion group netlabel noise reactive remix rock science-fiction score silence site-maintenance sketches of sound software sound-art sounds-of-brands turntablism TV video video-games voice year's besttwitter: @disquiet
- An underutilized TDD/TTY coupler. instagram.com/p/auCgiwLIiT/ 13 hours ago
- Experimenting with @branch. Started discussion about how to manage large library of digital audio: branch.com/b/how-do-you-o… 15 hours ago
- On musician jamming with cicadas: buff.ly/13Zi51g. By Nick Paumgerten, who wrote the great Grateful Dead live-taping story awhile ago 16 hours ago
- Mapping the sound of spaces utilizing only sonic information: buff.ly/13ZhYTp 16 hours ago
- Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco: bit.ly/192G8zW 18 hours ago
instagram: @dsqt
An underutilized TDD/TTY coupler.
Detail of large-scale wire sculpture of Schroeder at the Sonoma State Library.
Welcome music. More soon at Disquiet.com on this marvel of domestic design.
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