Italian sound artist Emiliano Pennisi (aka Avenir) develops software instruments that range from complex drum machines (Assembly-7) to geographically determined environment generators (Interfera) to “unstable” noise sources (Vortessa). This example video features an instance of Envion, another Pennisi project, which he describes as an “ecosystem … designed for algorithmic and procedural composition, musique concrète, and experimental sound processing.” The Envion system allows for numerous opportunities to select presets and work on freely available internet-based audio samples. The example here explores “lowercase” music, in the spirit of the late Steve Roden, with an emphasis on extremely quiet and subtle sonic signatures. A hallmark of Pennisi’s work is that it is as visually striking as it is sonically. To get a sense of Envion’s potential, here’s another piece composed with it, an homage to Autechre:
Henke Goes Back in Time
To 2004 and 1989
Robert Henke’s new album, Signal to Noise – Volume II, is all about time, or more to the point, can be experienced as an expression of, a reflection on, time. To begin with the tracks are all drones, lengthy extensions of tone for its own sake. They aren’t just held notes. No, as drones, they are dense, ever-shifting totalities in constant sonic flow. The longest of these is nearly 13 minutes, and the shortest is more than half that. There is well over an hour of music on this album of just seven tracks. In addition, this second set of Signal to Noise reaches back in time, doubly: first to 2004, when Henke’s first Signal to Noise album was released, and second to 1989, when the instrument on which this music was made, the Yamaha SY77 FM, was introduced to the market. This is meditative music that is, itself, a meditation on these various interwoven concepts: immersive listening, harmony and texture as artistic ends unto themselves, the long influence of ancient machines, and the through lines of individual artistic legacy.
The Bandcamp embed code isn’t working, so check out Signal to Noise – Volume II directly at roberthenke.bandcamp.com. The record was released on Thursday, May 7, 2026.
Disquiet Junto Project 0749: And a Three (3/3)
The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio.
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.
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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.
A full list of the three sequential “trios” projects is being updated in this read-only Google spreadsheet.
Disquiet Junto Project 0749: And a Three (3/3)
The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio.
Please note: While this project is the third of a semi-annual three-part sequence that unfolds over the course of three consecutive weeks, starting two weeks ago, you can participate in any or all three of those weekly parts.
There are two versions of the instructions for this week’s project — one very short, the other very long, should clarifications prove useful. (You can do three tracks this week, if you’d like, just be sure to read the longer set of instructions if you elect to.)
. . .
Very short version (roughly 25 words): Select a track from last week’s duet project (disquiet.com/0748) and add a third part dead center between the left and right stereo channels to complete a trio.
. . .
Very long version of the instructions (roughly 650 words):
These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully.
Please note: While this week’s project is the third part of a three-part project sequence, you don’t need to have participated in either of the first two parts to participate in this third part.
Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the third in a sequence that encourages and rewards asynchronous collaboration. This week you will be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0748). Note that you are finishing a trio: you’re creating the third part of what two previous musicians began, filling the space between them. Please keep this in mind.
Step 2: The plan is for you to record an original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to a pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by numerous musicians to choose from, 76 at the time of publishing this post (note: my counting got screwy so the numerical order doesn’t exactly represent the order in which the tracks appeared, but the count is correct). There is a full list of them in this read-only spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iJtMDvWflHxFgkCYCKiHKCtBuVBdf4b6RoJMLBAKQ-8/edit?gid=0#gid=0
(Note that it’s possible another track or two will pop up, and some may disappear. Things are fluid on the internet.)
To select a track, you can listen through all those and choose one, or simply look around and select, or you can come up with a random approach to sifting through them.
It’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece (more on this in Step 5 below).
Step 3: Record a piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and it should be placed dead center between the left and right stereo channels. When composing and recording your part, do not alter the original piece of music at all. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.
Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it may be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.
Step 5: In normal circumstances, Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. However, as with the preceding project that led up to this one, you can contribute more than one track this week. You can do up to three total this time. For your first, you can choose any track from the duets, no matter how many times others may have employed it. If you choose to do a second or third, please do a track no one else has used yet (it’s understood that between when you select a duet track and finish your trio, someone else may have popped up and used it, which is perfectly fine). Throughout the project I will keep an updated list in the Google Drive document of what has been utilized:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iJtMDvWflHxFgkCYCKiHKCtBuVBdf4b6RoJMLBAKQ-8/edit?gid=0&pli=1
You’ll note that in the spreadsheet, almost every track has two URLs. The first URL is where the given track appears online, so you can download it and add to it. The second URL is the place on the llllllll.co message board where the project discussion took place. It is strongly encouraged that you look at that discussion link for the track you select, because many of those posts include additional contextual information there, such as BPM, key, and instrumentation.
The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. That, foremost, is the spirit of this project.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0749” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one or two tracks this week (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If you feel inspired to post more than two tracks (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which are the two “main” renditions for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0749-and-a-three-3-3/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. Stick close to the length of the track yours adds to.
Deadline: Monday, May 11, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.
About: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/
License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 749th weekly Disquiet Junto project, And a Three (3/3) — The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio — disquiet.com/0749.
Splinters and Morphs and Recombines
The Junto grows and grows
Spreadsheets can be wonderful. The semi-annual Disquiet Junto music community’s “trios” sequence of weekly projects is now well underway. I love seeing how this all takes shape over time. I waited to post an example until a track from project 0747 (in which musicians uploaded solos) yielded two different tracks in project 0748 (in which other musicians turn those solos into duets), and that just happened with Tay Ploops’ “eerie bean (and a one).” (And it’s now three, added below the day after this post first went live.) I love how charting the activity in a spreadsheet provides a means of tracking the evolution of the music, as it all splinters and morphs and recombines.
- Solo: Source solo track from 0747:
- Duo: A duet built on it — using “three layers of broken hulusi [Chinese woodwind], throat sounds and a bit of low vibration/scraping from a metal object”:
- Another duo: And a different duet built on it — “their serenading is accompanied by a chorus of their own voice. Mangled and processed using modular sampler, filter and delay”:
- A third duo: “I sat down one morning and simply sang along”:
Next week, in project 0749, this week’s duets will reach conclusion as proper trios. First, though, we have 53 musicians’ solos from last week to embroider and complement. And yes, that means we’ve been doing music projects starting every Thursday for 748 consecutive weeks, since all the way back at the start of January 2012. Details (and a full playlist-in-progress) at disquiet.com/0748.
Disquiet Junto Project 0748: And a Two (2/3)
The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio.
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.
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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.
A full list of the three sequential “trios” projects is being updated in this read-only Google spreadsheet.
Disquiet Junto Project 0748: And a Two (2/3)
The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio.
Please note: While this project is the second of a semi-annual three-part sequence that will unfold over the course of three consecutive weeks, starting last week, you can participate in any or all three of those weekly parts.
There are two versions of the instructions for this week’s project — one very short, the other very long, should clarifications prove useful. (You can do two tracks this week, if you’d like, just be sure to read the longer set of instructions if you elect to.)
. . .
Very short version (about 35 words): Select a track from last week’s project (disquiet.com/0747), pan it to the left, and add your own line to the right, leaving room in the center for someone to eventually turn it into a trio.
. . .
Very long version of the instructions (about 600 words):
Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second in a sequence intended to encourage and reward asynchronous collaboration. This week you’ll be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from last week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0747). Note that you aren’t creating a duet, precisely — you’re creating the second third of what will eventually be a trio. What that means is: Leave space for what is yet to come.
Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to a pre-existing track. First, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by numerous musicians to choose from (over 50 as of last count). There is a full list of them in this read-only spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iJtMDvWflHxFgkCYCKiHKCtBuVBdf4b6RoJMLBAKQ-8/edit?gid=0#gid=0
(Note that it’s possible another track or two will pop up in — and some may disappear from — that playlist and the related discussion on llllllll.co. Things are fluid on the internet.)
To select a track, you can listen through all those and choose one, or simply look around and select, or you can come up with a random approach to sifting through them.
It’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece (more on this in Step 5 below).
You’ll note that in the spreadsheet, almost every track has two URLs. The first URL is where the given track appears online, so you can download it and add to it. The second URL is the place on the llllllll.co message board where the project discussion took place. It is strongly encouraged that you look at that discussion link for the track you select, because many of those posts include additional contextual information there, such as BPM, key, and instrumentation.
Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and leave room for an eventual third piece of music. When composing and recording your part, don’t alter the original piece of music at all, except to pan the original fully to the left if it hasn’t been panned left already. In your finished audio track, your new part should be panned fully to the right.
To be clear: The track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track you selected in Step 2 and yours.
Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it will be used by someone else in the third phase of this Junto project series.
Step 5: You can contribute more than one track this week. In normal circumstances, Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. You can do two this time. For the second, it’s appreciated if you try to work with a solo that no one else has used yet. An updated list in maintained in this Google Drive document of what has been utilized:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iJtMDvWflHxFgkCYCKiHKCtBuVBdf4b6RoJMLBAKQ-8/edit?gid=0#gid=0
The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. That, foremost, is the spirit of this project.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0748” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one or two tracks this week (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If you feel inspired to post more than two tracks (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which are the two “main” renditions for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0748-and-a-two-2-3/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. Stick close to the length of the track yours adds to.
Deadline: Monday, May 4, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.
About: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/
License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 748th weekly Disquiet Junto project, And a Two (2/3) — The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio — disquiet.com/0748.