• Six “layering reality” tracks already in the Junto, including one from first-timer @Banabila: http://t.co/kel3Tiwn #
• Listening to the Haywire soundtrack will either make your day feel far more dramatic than it is, or illuminate how banal it is. #
• Nice. Or, truly random: Oaomsr Undeh. RT @Whybray: @disquiet What about an anagram? Human Rodeos? Horseman Duo? #
• I Bau down to you. RT: @taylordeupree: @disquiet Random Haus. RndmHs. #
• Sitting in a row. RT @otologist: @disquiet Random Harper Penguins? #
• Wanted to call my generative publishing company Random House, but apparently it’s already taken. #

• Beauty of @solrezza‘s http://t.co/wWdNv8OM is she used Tumblr to “curate” her own work: a “Tumblr album,” a cabinet of personal curiosities. #
• Thought I was proud my urbanbaby ate seaweed and dried bean curd, but sleeping through that fire engine siren just now really made my week. #
• Tom Vu installation at Sonoma State: http://t.co/Oc8Cmzeb #
• Junto No. 5 announced: http://t.co/XdRJsrQ9. Deadline: Feb 6, 11:59pm wherever you are. Theme: musicality of everyday life. #
• Oh, the 5th Disquiet Junto project has a new “bonus” level, involving video. No deadline for video, just a post-project idea. #
• Disquiet Junto Project 0005 goes out in a few minutes. #
• Pretty varied taste, too. RT @ooray: @disquiet the Anonymous family is quite rich and powerful. I think that everytime I go to the symphony. #
• The problem with listening to DJ Krush’s greatest hits is I have to update my @ThisIsMyJam profile every five minutes. #
• When I see a building or exhibit where one of the donors is Anonymous, I like to think that all that hacking has gone to good use. #
• The OS X 10.7.3 update is almost exactly the same size as the Björk app. #conspiracy #
• OS X v10.anything is the DC Comics of operating systems. #
• If you do PR and use a database in which “pop culture” is as granular as it gets, neither you nor the db are doing their job. #
• This, though, is pretty great: @sfj‘s public in-progress Google Doc of his favorite albums of 2012: https://t.co/ILqZbSbC. #
• Certainly @sfj jokes when he says “Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion?” Right? #
• One of those days when every sent email feels like it could be the start of a recent Paul Auster novel. #
• It’s cellist @zoecello‘s birthday. Listen to her “Seven League Boots,” the title likely referring to how layered it is: http://t.co/T1uO6wGx #
• I guess this Facebook thing puts the takes-over-whole-issue-of-Juxtapoz thing in context. #
• Internet brought down after enthusiasm of it being brought back. RT @wcraghead: Over twitter. RT @xyzr_kx: Accompanied by a rousing cheer. in reply to wcraghead #
• With the net back up, library got quieter, as everyone dove into email/etc. RT @xyzr_kx: @disquiet hopefully accompanied by a rousing cheer. #
• “Attention library patrons, the Internet is back up.” #
• Still thinks IMAP is magical. #
• Recommended. RT @NodeBeat: NodeBeat for Android now free on http://t.co/nmtGNraw. Please help us by clicking the ‘like’ button on the page. #
• Home pages for the first 4 Disquiet Junto projects:
  http://t.co/UJcROhHO http://t.co/cTWdqFfx http://t.co/hSbQDOUh http://t.co/OQ7DRcDI #
• Tab I had open to @techdirt for hours suddenly launched a “rich” ad with Hawaiian music. Had no idea where the sound was coming from. #
• RIP, artist Dorothea Tanning (b. 1910). Need to dig out Victoria Carruthers’ essay on her, Cage and Stockhausen. (via @freynorris) #
• Tags are in between. RT @tommoody: movement: designated by participants (via manifestos, etc); genre: designated by outsiders (critics, etc) #
• News I can use. RT @DETXL: @disquiet Berlin metro puts up signs: “Ein Handy ist kein Lautsprecher!” (Your cell phone is not a loudspeaker!)” #
• .@nofi rocks, or whatever the ambient equivalent of rocks is, for compiling this Twitter Junto list of his. in reply to nofi #
• The sign in the bus says “No Radios,” suggesting that MP3 boomboxes are approved, perhaps even encouraged. #
• RIP, artist and Destroy All Monsters alum Mike Kelley (b. 1954), whose work is in the collection of anyone who owns Sonic Youth’s Dirty. #
• Next Junto joint TBA in approx 24hrs. Many projects lined up. Sorting order/details. Send your email to be added to list. #
• Disquiet.com now testing comment-spam protection that also filters out individuals without basic math literacy. #
• What percentage of free-download cover-version MP3s are posted by musicians who complain about piracy? 20%? 50%? More? #
• For the record, codecpolitics dot com is available. Cc @stringbot #
• Sound Through Barriers is an exhibit curated by C. Reider at Ft Collins’ Art Lab. Entries call due Feb 6. Info at soundthroughbarriers.com. #
• Man there is some great stuff going on at the wolf. in Los Angeles. I need to get there in the near future. #
• Glad to be the 2nd backer of @idontlikewords‘s ur2.la app-raising http://t.co/qE9yIHbq campaign. in reply to idontlikewords #
• Been some time since I’ve had the dishwasher, clothes dryer, & stove fan on simultaneously. It’s like the domestic Gigantour. #
• Major thanks to @nofi for making a Twitter list of Disquiet Junto participants: https://t.co/Fh4Asy2k #
• These Disney / Darth Vader billboards seriously look more like prank culture-jam mash-ups than actual advertisements. #
• RIP, King Stitt (b. 1940), reportedly Jamaica’s oldest living DJ. (via @themusicsover) #
• I don’t want a cheezburger. I want an un-degraded term for an idea that spreads like a virus and experiences quick evolutionary change. #
• Noon siren on sunny Tuesday. #
• No. It would be great if someone would. RT @nofi: Has anyone made a Twitter list of all the @disquiet #junto contributors? #
• Thanks for this. RT @benjamindauer: Made fresh round of listens/comments on @mapmap remixes for Junto project. http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 #
• Love it: “pushing forward, never backtracking.” RT @stringbot: short turnaround means always pushing forward and never backtracking. #junto #
• In just 4 weeks of existence: 188 tracks, 88 contributors, 169 members, 54 discussion entries, numerous comments/plays: http://t.co/anQFre9l #
• 55 tracks in response to Junto #4 communal remix of new @mapmap album. We may see a few more by 11:59pm but either way an amazing showing. #
• The http://t.co/aRVwzSif covered the Remedios Varo event I assisted on. My reflections on sound/scent/surrealism here: http://t.co/pPe3naIP #
• “voltage made audible”: Gino Robair’s sole instrument this coming Thursday at the Luggage Store in San Francisco. #
• Seriously thinks, initially, that every “drone” story he comes across is about experimental electronic music. #
• Bunch of recent http://t.co/xdF6qCg1 comments suddenly ended up trashed, but they’ve been revived. If you see anything missing, lemme know. #
• About 12 hours left for Disquiet Junto #4 Amazing turnout, at least a dozen new contributors, 48 entries so far: http://t.co/anQFre9l #
• Woke to the 45th Disquiet Junto entry in Marcus Fischer remix project. Noted that the 43rd is from Fischer himself: http://t.co/anQFre9l #
• That’s the spirit. RT @stringbot: Bouncing this @disquiet Junto abomination, for better or worse. #
• Making chili and listening to the Junto remixes of @mapmap, including a surprise entry by Stephen Vitiello: http://t.co/anQFre9l #
• Already 34 remixes of @mapmap in the Junto, day and a half to go: http://t.co/anQFre9l. Bonus: interesting discussion of nature of a remix. #
• Check out Discussion tab for something along these lines. RT @nofi: Thinking of my remix of @mapmap as more of a reworking or repositioning. #
• I wrote a short story about the Spanish/Mexican surrealist painter Remedios Varo: http://t.co/55NRHQuO #
• At least six first-time participants in this week’s Junto remix project: http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 #
• Orchestral. Just listened in car. RT @mapmap: fantastic submission from @TheValiska for the @disquiet junto project: http://t.co/sKWRM2NO #
• My (nearly) 17-month-old enjoyed a pork bao, garlic seaweed, and dried bean curd so far today. #

The Junto, named for a society Benjamin Franklin formed back in the 1720s, is a newly formed association for communal music/sound-making. As of 2:30pm Pacific Time on Saturday, February 4, the group, which is housed at

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

has had its 200th track uploaded, from a total of 90 actively participating members. Above is a screenshot of those 90 members, out of a total of over twice that many who have joined.

This has all occurred in just under one month — the Junto was launched on January 5, 2012. Many thanks to all the participants and listeners. A great start to the 2012.

More on the project here: “The Disquiet Junto.”

(1) a consideration of white noise in the work of Phil Julian (“A Variety of Noises, White and Otherwise”), (2) a “Sneak Peek at New Disquiet.com Project: Disquiet Junto,”, (3) the fuzzy beats of Would-Be Messiahs (“Hairshirt Industrial”), (4) a work for dual wind chimes by Josh Davison, aka Stringbot (“Chimes and More Chimes”), (5) Alarm Will Sound performing a syncopated work by Liza White (“When a Chamber Ensemble Sounds Like a Jazz Ensemble Sounds Like Breakbeat”), (6) a pair of tracks off Michal Jacaszek‘s Glimmer (Ghostly), (7) “Russian Post-Turntable Turntablism” by Mizontiq, and (8) “Sketch of a Drone / Drone as Sketch,” on a piece by Pacers that at times sounds like a church organ being tuned by an especially patient and exacting workman. Also: not (9) one but (10) two automated selections of what has happened in the previous week at twitter.com.disquiet.

The most popular searches (searches that didn’t yield null results) were: harold budd live, junto, autechre, best of 2010, In the Echo of No Towers, souns, mark harris, saito koji, Kahlen, weir, would-be messiahs, airport, brian eno, Carrie Underwood, compilations.

The Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963) depicted surreal visions in which the mythological and the quotidian intertwined in enchanting ways. She created fascinating documentation of her explorations of the terrestrial and the otherworldly, a place where sight and sound, scent and taste, sense and fantasy collaborated and contrasted toward a tantalizingly ephemeral end.

This month I had the pleasure of concluding work on a project with Julio César Morales and Max La Rivière-Hedrick that celebrated various facets of Varos’ work and life. Titled La Alquimia de los Sueños (which translates as The Alchemy of Dreams), it was commissioned by the gallery Frey Norris in San Francisco to coincide with an extraordinary Varo exhibit running there through February 25. The project took the form of a dinner, a kind of meal-as-art, held at Engine 43 in San Francisco’s Excelsior neighborhood. There were six courses, each associated with a different magical spell and drawing on the surrealist recipes that Varo had created with her close friend, Leonora Carrington. There’s a January 29 story about the event at nytimes.com (“Break Brick, Break Bread, Break the Mold”).

I. The Sound of Dreams

As for my role, among other things I had the pleasure of interviewing Mexico-born sound artist and musician Guillermo Galindo, who lives in San Francisco, about his participation in the project. As seen up top, in a pair of photos by Andria Lo, he performed at the dinner — not only his own mix of sounds, but also deep shuddering bass lines that drew from Varo’s interest in resonance and vibration. What follows is an excerpt of the full interview, “The Sound of Dreams,” which can be read at engine43.org:

Weidenbaum: Regarding the relationship between Tarot and the collective unconscious, can you talk a bit about specifically the role of sound in dreams?

Galindo: I have found that for most people it is difficult to remember the sound, or sounds, of their dreams. Most people, including me, have an easier time remembering music: music that accompanies the dream, music that is played by someone or, in my case, composition ideas that appear by themselves or performed by myself or someone else. As in real life, dream components have sounds: an explosion, someone walking in high heels, the sound of the rain etc. Having said this, I do think that sounds have their own significance in dreams — a significance not necessarily attached to the visual or narrative elements of a specific dream. In other words, I believe that sounds in dreams do have their own specific symbology.

Weidenbaum: Are there parallels between food and sound you’d like to discuss?

Galindo: I had a Chinese music student who, in order to reconnect to her homeland memories, recorded the sound of herself cooking of Chinese dishes, which she would cook one day each month. Then she would present random photographs of the dishes with the audio of the cooking sounds. Different foods have different textures of sound when one cooks them. This provides information about their physical nature and about the chemical reaction that they have when mixed over the fire with other elements. I think that the purest and most enjoyable “food” sound is the sound of water. I think that the sound of the water falling into a glass is a vital element when enjoying a good drink of water, not to mention the “clink” of the wine glasses, the sound of silverware, or the sound of clay, wooden, or ceramic plates and bowls.

And this is a screenshot that Galindo provided to me of the software setup he utilized when playing live, in addition to a pair of Kaoss Pads and at least four iPods. (It is of higher quality than the casual camera shot I posted on Twitter the night of the event.)

Here, from a post-event summary, is a list of the sounds he developed for each of the courses:

0. XECATL (simulated gigantic ice flutes) independent white noise frequency bands oscillating randomly in chaos.

1. Introduction of 50 Hz.low frequency modulated by 260 Hz. and 2.5 Hz. LFO simultaneously resulting in sudden architectural shaking.

2. Harmonic content evolving from Erik Satie’s Gnossienne #1 as if reproduced by echoing crystal feathers.

3. Multiplication of Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater as if sang by a bleeding heart.

4. Intermittent triple drone in Eb and recurring patchy electric glitches emanating from pure electricity controlled by light boxes. Agustin Lara’s Veracruz emerges from the minuscule speaker of a transistor radio.

5. Modulated low frequency enters the 20 Hz realm as if entering subsonic levels. Low frequency joins polyrhythmic mass reaching a climax buildup made of electronic glitches and samples of heavy metal distorted guitars doubled with baritone sax reaching 120 bpm plus tempos. The sonic storm breaks into total silence.

II. A Brief Fiction

In addition, I served as managing editor on the project, working with the various participants on their written contributions. And I wrote a short story, “Sitting for a Dream,” that is an imaginary scenario inspired by the fact that Mexico City cardiologist Dr. Ignacio Chávez commissioned what yielded the 1957 Varo portrait “Retrato del doctor Ignacio Chávez.” This is an excerpt from the story:

She took his hand in hers and silently led him through several chambers, each its own little world. One was dark and painted like a jungle. Another was covered, walls and ceiling, in billowing cotton tarps that filtered the daylight. He entered the final chamber by himself. Varo stood on the far side, directly opposite the doorway through which he had just walked. She, too, wore a lab coat, her hair pulled back. The room was almost empty. In the center there was a medium-size wooden frame suspended from the ceiling by pulleys. On either side facing the frame was a single chair. He walked toward the frame, and as he approached, so did Varo. He realized she was mimicking him, but not in a rude way. If anything, it was flattering to be the subject of such attention. He walked toward the closer of the two chairs. She approached the other, copying his gait, adjusting her posture to match his.

When they reached their chairs, they both sat down, looking at each other through the frame, as if at a painting. She gave him a little smile, which he acknowledged by removing his hat. In turn, she pulled from her coat pocket a deck of cards. She selected one card, seemingly at random, and turned it toward him. It showed an old sage with a stick, and below it, in English, was written “The Hermit.” She then pulled another card, this one in Spanish. It read “El Corazon.” It was his turn to smile. He recognized it from the lotería. The next card was “La Pera,” and he recalled the tree from the ill-fated mural she had proposed. She saw the recognition in his face, and her shoulders relaxed. Then his shoulders relaxed. Somehow, he found himself now imitating her, unintentionally but naturally. Varo reached under her chair and lifted a small goblet. Taking the hint, Dr. Chavez did the same. Again, he found himself mimicking her — how simply she had cast her spell.

This is the painting that inspired the story, which is readable in full at engine43.org:

III. Notes on Scent

One especially fascinating element of the event was smell. Each course was accompanied by a scent developed by Mirjana Blankenship (of captainblankenship.com), and these scents built one upon the previous as the evening proceeded. The terms for these elements of a collective scent, I learned from Blankenship, are musical: they are “notes.” The deepest is the “base” note, and then there are “heart” and “top” notes above, and they all “decay” over time, much as a struck chord might. The explanation reminded me of an essay by Brian Eno from the magazine Details back in 1992 (“Scents and Sensibility”), in which he described the parallels and intersections between his experiments in smell and sound. Blankenship’s scents (presented in the elegant bottles shown below) were not to be experienced in their own olfactory anechoic chamber. Quite the contrary, they were selected and constructed to mix with the scents inherent in the meal, including the rich smoke that emanated from the hearth in which meat was roasted, and the burnt sugar that resulted from pistachio pralines made on site just moments before they were served (see the very bottom of this post). By intending to mingle rather than command attention, Blankenship’s scents were like the famed “furniture music” of Erik Satie that is understood as a strong precursor of ambient music — sounds that Galindo included in his performance.

More on the exhibit and the gallery at freynorris.com. There’s a wide range of coverage of the La Alquimia de los Sueños event at engine43.org.

I previously participated in A Sors, a project the duo developed, with Norma Listman, for the Warhol Initiative.

(Photos by Andria Lo of andrialo.com.)

The Bource Supremacy: Oscar 2012 nominations were announced today, and the ones in the “Music (Original Score)” category seem to serve as a retrograde industry analgesic to the groundbreaking win last year by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for their work on The Social Network. John Williams, whose name is synonymous with old-school, was nominated for not one but two films (The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse). Howard Shore was nominated for Hugo (like Tintin, an animated film). The remaining two scores are Ludovic Bource‘s for The Artist and Alberto Iglesias‘ for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Not only are all five scores orchestral (or large-scale chamber), but as if to emphasize their old-schoolness they’re all associated with movies that take place in the past. (Iglesias also did Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che, which means he has become the go-to composer for Cold War atmospherics.) The moribund aura hovering around this sort of antiquated approach is emphasized by the nomination of just two songs in the “Music (Original Song)” category. The caption to this situation is: The Academy didn’t get excited about much this year. Fortunately, Drive and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (two of the year’s most sonically conscious films) were acknowledged in, respectively, the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing categories. Full list at oscar.go.com. I’ll be posting my favorite scores of 2011 shortly.

Pedal Power: Yes, there is “A Blog about Hand-Made, Analog Effects Pedals.” The name says it all. Well, the site’s subtitle does. The name of the site, blog.8302.net, is a little more opaque, and according to its author, Barcelona-based Arturo Castillo, the four-digit number signifies nothing in particular. Typical posts feature such language as “Quite often I get asked about the difference between overdrive, fuzz and distortion,” or pay homage to filmmakers (note the last 30 seconds of a video posted in earlier this month). As the videos on his site, as well as his descriptions of pedals, might suggest, Castillo recognizes the equipment as tools for sonic invention unto themselves as much as for traditional employment in the service of guitars. If you prefer your pedal coverage in tidy bursts, Castillo is also at twitter.com/8302net. The pedal blog parallels Castillo’s online shop at, you guessed it, shop.8302.net.

Unmute the Commute: “If an escalator was lubricated to within an inch of its sonic life, it would have much less of one,” writes Peggy Nelson at hilobrow.com. She’s pondering the ramifications and cultural context of a piece by Chris Richards at washingtonpost.com in which he pays close attention to the sounds of public transportation, and in the process interviews Emily Thompson, author of the indispensable book The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Richards’ stated and implicit question (“Could this be music?”) is one that is almost frustrating in its obviousness. The affirmative answer is self-evident to, certainly, the majority of readers of this site, and Richards himself cites, of course, the now almost ancient if not fully canonized teachings of John Cage. And yet the question still, in a paper as widely read as the Post, seems to need to be stated as some sort of fresh observation yet to become conventional wisdom. What event, what milestone, would — will — move us beyond having this question repeated? (The New York Times tread on this terrain last year in its “Arts of Summer” coverage.) Nelson, for her part, brings admirable philosophical force to the discussion: “For a thing to function is for it to be in use. And in its use is its constant failure. And in that failure are gaps that force different activity, and allow for different perspective. This is true for cities as well as escalators. And for music. And for us.”

Fantastic Voyage 2012: The sciencemag.org website reports that a “nano-ear” is being developed that “can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing.” This falls under the category of “acoustic microscopy.” The creative and diagnostic potentials are mind-boggling. What confuses me is that I haven’t seen the development mentioned on several bioacoustics and field-recording lists to which I subscribe. It may be just a result of an interesting needle of information being lost in a news-feed haystack, but I wonder if there’s an unfortunate myopia in those areas that focuses on sonic observation of the more immediately visible world. (Tip from Paolo Salvavione, salvagione.com.)

Is “Free” a Gender?: First at actsofsilence.com and then at uncertainform.com, fellow free-culture traveller David Nemeth ponders the statistical gender patterns inherent in electronic music. He quotes Tara Rodgers’ book Pink Noises: Women on Elec­tronic Music and Sound (“Another artist remarked that her entree into the world of elec­tronic music felt as if she had landed on a planet where some­thing had hap­pened to make all the women disappear”) and documents the numerous incongruities. In brief: there are a lot more men than women represented in the free/netlabel scene. In the process, Nemeth notes that one of my recent projects, the Instagr/am/bient compilation, has but one woman among its 25 participants. I fully agree with Nemeth that it’s unfortunate, and as Rodgers suggests, even eerie, the extent to which it appears that men outnumber women in electronic music, and in the free-music subset of electronic music. In his follow-up post, Nemeth says he has decided to cover one female artist a week at minimum henceforth. I’ll just note two things at this stage of the discussion: first, that the next major Disquiet.com curatorial project, due for release shortly, has three women among its eight (or nine, depending on how you count them) contributors: Kate Carr, Paula Daunt, and Marielle V. Jakobsons; second, that the majority of music I write about is made by people with willfully peculiar monikers, and it’s only late in the process of reading up on them as artists that I learn who is behind that moniker and if it’s a man or a woman.

Digital Commerce Watch: In a promising development, the record label Stonesthrow now offers a $10/month subscription fee for digital versions of “all” its releases. It’s a pretty solid deal: 320kbps MP3s, no DRM, month-to-month billing, and apparently some set of “exclusive” materials: stonesthrow.com.

This space will be used to occasionally collect information about Instagr/am/bient: 25 Sonic Postcards, following its launch at 6:03pm Pacific Time on Wednesday, December 28. Within 48 hours, it had been listened to over 4,000 times on soundcloud.com and downloaded over 500 times at archive.org.

Coverage:

¶ Peggy Nelson at hilobrow.com wrote a considered, thoughtful piece about the project on the last day of the year. It opens:

Imagine receiving a postcard in the mail. Ok, back up: remember the mail? Remember postcards?

Right, now imagine them. On one side, an image: a faraway place, an iconic sign, people smiling, a sunset. Perhaps someone has even scribbled on it, adding their own moustaches, thought bubbles, or other postal graffiti. “Having a wonderful time,” it inevitably says, “wish you were here.”

Or, does it? Turning it over, ostensibly to read, you find instead that it — sings.

¶ Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz at called it a “lovely collection”: boingboing.net. One of the commenters correctly guessed the subject of the cover photo. Another compared a track to the music from this video game: visitproteus.com.

¶ One of the more unexpected outcomes of the Instagr/am/bient project: being listed as an example of what Soundcloud.com is all about in coverage of the company’s new round of venture-capital funding: readwriteweb.com

¶ The mothership, instagram.com, mentioned it under “Around the Community” in its The Week in Instagram section.

¶ Over at coveringterrain.wordpress.com, the project is described by Jim Gerlach in a context alongside the Seattle Art Museum’s Record Store listening room (seattleartmuseum.org) and Stelios Manousakis’ network-art exhibit at the Jack Straw Media Gallery (jackstraw.org).

¶ Now this is crowd sourcing: A listener named Jon Dowland made a revised version of the archive.org edition of Instagr/am/bient to upgrade the quality of the embedded images: archive.org. Update: more on his process at his site, jmtd.net.

¶ Among the places the project has also been discussed, leaving aside numerous passing mentions on Twitter and elsewhere: at synthtopia.com (on its facebook.com page, Synthtopia called it a “must download”), at the message boards of elektron-users.com, at hubski.com (where the idea of adding lyrics was talked about), and at freemusicarchive.org.

Posts by Participants:

¶ Linda Aubry Bullock, at shadowselves.net, writes of her contributions to the compilation:

‘My Instagram was used for Track 12; the music, “Some Found Things”, is by Warren Craghead III. My track is #21, called “Near Cedar”. The photograph was taken by Christopher Bissonnette.

My Instagram was taken in early 2011 in Jamaica Plain, MA at a service station late one evening. The piece that I composed for “Near Cedar” was a recording of traffic (as I waited near Cedar Street) combined with a processed vocal track.

I imagined the lighter patterns at the center of the photograph as periods in time, and in the composition they’re the repetition of the door chime of the bus. The vocal track in the background was inspired by the dark areas of the photo. In another track I filtered the sound of the bus brakes, which corresponds to the horizontal white area at the top of the image.

I recorded the traffic and bus using the iProRecorder app on my iPhone, and the voice element consisted of several heavily processed tracks, using VoiceLive Touch. I used Audacity for the final mix.’

¶ Warren Craghead III wrote at craghead.tumblr.com:

I was sneaky and turned in a manipulated drawing, not a photo, but since this is mostly what I post in instagram it made sense. My drawing is from a photo I saw online of a battle in Libya earlier this year. … Christopher Bissonette made a wonderful sound piece for it (listen here).

I got a great and evocative image from Linda Aubrey Bullock to make my sound piece from. … I’m not a musician but I have become fascinated with field recordings and manipulated sound over the part few years. … I’ve especially liked, and drawn from, the work of Aaron Ximm aka Quiet American. He does a great job of keeping a strong connection to the recorded sound while still composing and creating something new and alive; something to rival the original field recording.

I’ve been making simple field recordings and posting them at SoundCloud (my kids playing, a train, some animals). Doing these documentations seemed like drawing in my sketchbook to me – to remember, to aestheticize a little, to try to make something out of them.

For instag/am/bient I looked at the image I was given of a car side mirror, ice/rain and weird light and went out looking for sounds to record that could work with the photo. I ended up with some rain and car sounds, a hum of a powerline and some other mechanical rumbles I found by walking around my neighborhood late at night. I sometimes go on “drawing safaris” and this felt like that. SNEAKY.

I smashed all the sound together and tried to “compose” it. Weirdly, doing that felt natural – like making comics or books. In comics and music there’s a pace and composition over time and that I got. I might be fooling myself, but I think I understood at least the basics of it from all the drawing work I’ve made.

¶ Over at his jonmonteverde.com site, Jon Monteverde (aka XYZR_KX) wrote, in part:

I received a photo (taken by Earsmack, seen below) and in response, I composed a new track called “Fly” under the XYZR_KX moniker. Equipment used: a Commodore 128 with Cynthcart for the main pad sound, a circuit bent Danelectro BLT Slap Echo guitar pedal used as a sound generator for the low rumbling noise near the end, an iPhone running Voice Memo to record the field sound, and a MacBook running Ableton Live for edit and mix.

The picture of a streaking object in the open sky brought to my mind the idea of flying; the sounds evoke the human dream of flight from the perspective of our earthbound state, looking up. In addition, I wanted to hint at a contrast between how effortless flying can seem in nature, and the enormous energy expenditure required to actually put people in the air. “Fly,” in the insect sense, is also a pun on the cicadas in the field recording.

¶ Oootini (born Aidan Reilly) posted at europalanding.wordpress.com:

William Gibson said recently that science fiction is a way of examining the present without having to cope with the reality of looking directly at it. I think Instagram is a bit like this. Except with Instagram we’re not really looking at or thinking about reality. We’re looking at what today might look like if we found it in a beaten up shoebox full of old photographs in the attic.

My assigned image … was taken by Jon Monteverde. It seemed to suggest that cool shivering excitement one feels when offered a vista of a city in the hazy early morning. With this in mind, I built a song around a blackbirds call recorded at dawn from a rooftop in Madrid, Spain kindly provided by Dobroide at freesound.org. Another recording of morning traffic heard from my bedroom window in Dublin, Ireland was also placed very low in the mix, reduced almost to the bare hiss of white noise.

The bell and synth sounds that duel (duet?) with the blackbird come from the amazing Aalto synth created by Madrona Labs.
On top of these sounds various gauzy digital layers were heaped: a digital guitar pedal called the el Capistan that emulates the sound and warmth of old tape delays, a VST called the Glue that mimics the sound of SSL buss compressors, and other such wonders of the modern age. Brave new simulacra of venerable old tools.

Stephen Quinn mastered the track at his Analog Heart studio.

¶ Over at his benjamindauer.tumblr.com site, Benjamin Dauer went into depth regarding process, from a technical and creative standpoint:

Equipment Used: Teenage Engineering OP-1 synth, Strymon El Capistan dTape Echo, Cordoba GKStudio Nylon String Guitar, Tape Recorder, TLAudio Fat Track, MacBook Pro

Inspiration: When I received my ‘assignment’ for this project I knew immediately what I wanted to do. This image makes me feel as though I have arrived early for a performance/presentation of some kind. Not being allowed into the main space just yet, I enjoy the angle of peering around a corner, over a stack of chairs, and seeing/hearing someone talking. I tried to capture some of this feeling in my track – the faint sound of someone’s voice, muted guitar and pads as if musicians were warming up, and other environmental noises. I hope it gives the sense of subdued excitement or anticipation one gets when they’re waiting at a show.

¶ Ted James Butler, who records as Ted James, posted background information on his track at his betteroffted.tedjames.info site:

I contributed a short piece titled “You’re Trying to Focus, but it’s Too Far Away” which featured various field-recordings and my Harvestman modular synthesizer.

In “You’re Trying to Focus, but it’s Too Far Away”, I depict the blurred portion of the image through a “musical” theme that never quite resolves. Like the image, this piece is also framed by field (street, in this case) recordings. Raindrops, footsteps, creaky doors and wind are easy to pick out, yet the brunt of the track highlights the inferred. A mental picture that is never quite clear.

¶ At twitter.com/earsmack, Joe Zobkiw, aka earsmack, shared a shot of his software patch (in Max), and explained (via email) “It was then manipulated in the Elektron Octatrack before a final fretless bass melody was added”:

¶ Jonny Butler, who records as J Butler, provided some background at his site, j-butler.com:

On ‘Sundown’ I used field recordings of fire layered with a series of drones and an electric piano. The drones were created by a lapharp with contact mic, the Exs24 in Logic (using the very basic sine tones in the default patch), and the deep sound was created from a recording I made of a metal bowl.

¶ Smyth, aka Jared Smyth, posted at his site, uprlip.com, a photo of the old-school tape loop setup he used to achieve his piece, and he wrote by way of explanation in a follow-up email: “my whole track was assembled from 1/2″ open reel loops containing digitally pre-processed loops. pretty fun. and the parallels to instagram photography just don’t end.” Also included in the post is a one-minute excerpt of the work-in-progress.

¶ Mark Rushton wrote, at markrushton.com, about how he used an outdated (“$20″) iPhone to take his picture, which served as the source inspiration for Benjamin Dauer’s “In Reference to Time.” Rushton’s musical composition was based on a photo by Oootini. He drew on his own experience with flotation tanks:

I wanted the overall sound you hear to have that same feeling one gets while floating in relatively calm water. It also had to be a total composition. The piece had to have some travel in it. I also like the idea of the music creating an out-of-body experience when it comes to the viewer/listener relationship.

¶ The OO-Ray, aka Ted Laderas, at his 15people.net site, talks about the visual inspiration provided by Naoyuki Sasanami’s photo:

This photo, with its silhouettes and shadows, inspired me to use more discrete transformations such as digital editing and pitch shifting in my piece. The main phrase in the piece is a digitally edited and pitch shifted piano figure, highlighted with several cello tracks treated with a mixture of overdrive and reverberation. Looking at the photo reminds me of those moments right after waking where everything is out of focus and reality snaps into place after a second. I tried to recreate an extended recreation of that transition from dream state to reality, when sunlight floods the room and the day starts anew.

¶ Evan Cordes posted, at flickr.com, video footage of his Pd (or Pure Data) software while he was working on his track:

And over at his pheezy.com site, Cordes explained a bit more about his compositional process:

The New New Chromelodeon II’s are programmed in Pure Data (Pd) after Harry Partch’s specifications in Genesis Of A New Music. The traffic is recorded from a rooftop in Emeryville, CA.

The Instagram photo is read by Pd and each byte of the image file translates to one of the eighty-eight keys on the New New Chromelodeon II. Two recordings at different, relational tempos are made of the sequence of keys played according to the image file. A three-minute- long sequence is taken from each of these recordings and mixed with the sound of traffic.

¶ At the boondesign.com blog, graphic designer Brian Scott (who designed the PDF booklet, including the set’s cover and back cover, and who contributed his own Instagram photo as the cover shot), wrote about the design process:

Instagram has become one of my daily rituals, a way of sharing moments with friends and documenting my obsessions: typography, food, architecture. The immediacy and restrictions are part of Instagram’s inherent charm. …

Via Twitter, Weidenbaum invited 25 musicians to create “sonic postcards” that are in fact musical responses to each other’s Instagram photos. The resulting recordings are moody and addictive, much like Instagram itself.

Regarding our process, we had the benefit of designing while listening to the music, and while we debated many cover options before selecting the HWY 101 split overpass, the feeling of driving at night while musically intoxicated may have influenced our thinking.

Keep an eye on this page for future post-release coverage of Instagr/am/bient. And get the full set for free at disquiet.com and soundcloud.com.