The first Disquiet Junto project was launched on the first Thursday of 2012, January 5. I had no idea if anyone would participate. In the end, 58 different musicians each uploaded, as directed, a single track in response to the assignment: “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.”
The significant majority of them made their tracks available for free download. They posted them in the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, and used the tag “disquiet0001-ice” to distinguish their entry: including it in the file’s title and adding it as a tag. Soundcloud is a great service, but it doesn’t allow set creation within groups, so the only way to easily access the files associated with a given Junto project is by searching for a tag. I’m looking into ways to collect the files related to a specific Junto project, but in the meanwhile a search return is the best method.
The idea of using an ice cube in the glass had several points of inspiration. For one thing, given the long-running precedent of the Stones Throw Records Beat Battles, which meet once a week and use a shared sample as the starting point for competition, there was reason to distinguish the project; requesting that Junto members create their own sample, rather than employ the same exact source material, seemed like a good way to accomplish that. But, in a nod to the Beat Battles, I wanted a touch of hip-hop, and the sound of ice cubes heard in the Alkaholiks’ classic “Hip Hop Drunkies,” produced by E-Swift and Marley Marl, has long been a personal favorite (the song, which features a cameo by Ol’ Dirty Bastard, is from the 1997 album Likwidation; the instrumental is on youtube.com). In addition, the contact-mic experiments of musician Joe Colley came to mind. And, of course, there is Erik Satie’s furniture music, which is classical music’s strong precursor to what we now call ambient music: what could be a more casual everyday domestic sound than ice clinking in a glass?
The deadline was set for the following Monday, January 9, at midnight. In subsequent Junto projects the deadline would be moved back a minute, to 11:59pm, since some people weren’t sure if “midnight Monday” meant the midnight with which Monday began or with which it ended. Given that simple assignments are at the heart of the Junto, the fact that something as basic as “midnight Monday” was up for interpretation was an important lesson unto itself.
View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0001-ice.
Visit, listen to, and consider joining the group at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto.
A full list of Junto projects is housed on Disquiet.com.
(Image of ice cubes in a glass comes from “Mystic Cubes,” the Junto entry by Mystified.)
Much of the Mizati album ydna, released late last year, is a collection of slight elements aligned in unlikely combinations, among the most delectable of such combinations being those that mix emotionally remote piano lines with slender fragments of electronic percussion. There’s something special to how the piano here is almost inhuman in its simplicity, and how that spare quality allows for a camaraderie, a kind of cold simpatico, with the far more mechanized beat. The track titled, simply, “G” may be the highlight, its chords spaced apart to such an extent that they often decay fully before a new one enters in — an effect that is amplified, so to speak, as the close nears, when the decay fades into a drone that never quite seems to end (
Among the many good things that have come from the increasing prevalence of drone-based music is a clarification, a realignment, of the word “industrial.” Thanks in addition to the rise in field recordings as broadly produced and consumed sonic media, the word “industrial” has ceased meaning simply a pounding nightife nihilism akin to an ersatz jackhammer beat, and come to mean a sonic aura akin to or actually resulting from a mechanical process. And that why it is a term that can be applied to much of Colliding Textures, a four-song release by Mon0 on the great Test Tube netlabel. The album’s initial two tracks, “Cathedral of the Lost” (
The so-called “long read” is a symptom of our time. It isn’t called the “considered read,” because anything, long or short, can be read with determination and attention. And it isn’t called the “long write,” because for one thing short pieces can take longer to write than do long ones, and for another phrases like “long read” are more likely to take root as common utterance if they flatter the audience.