Disquiet

This was last updated on 2013.04.25. New and edited information is marked with a delta symbol (Δ).

Q: What is the Disquiet Junto?
A: The Disquiet Junto is a group based on Soundcloud.com where musicians respond to weekly, fast-turnaround assignments to compose, record, and share new music. The idea is to use restraints as a springboard for creativity.

ΔQ: How long has the group been around?
A: The first Junto project began on the first Thursday of January 2012, and the series has continued weekly since then.

ΔQ: Is there a list of all the projects?
A: Yes. Here: “Disquiet Junto Project List.”

ΔQ: Is there an email list for announcements?
A: Yes. To subscribe and unsubscribe, go to: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.

ΔQ: How does the group work?
A: A project is announced each Thursday — usually in the afternoon or early evening, California time — and it is due the following Monday by 11:59pm (that’s 11:59pm wherever you happen to be). You upload your track to your Soundcloud account. Then you associate it with the Junto group. And you include the appropriate tag with the track, as delineated in the project’s instructions, and include that tag in the name of the track (the tag is the word “Disquiet” followed by a four-digit number followed by a hyphen followed by a keyword, such as “Disquiet0003-glass” — again, the number and keyword are provided as part of the assignment). Be sure to click the “Add to group” button below your track’s waveform, and select the Disquiet Junto group.

ΔQ: Why isn’t my track showing up in the Junto group?
A: Read the previous question and follow those directions. If that doesn’t work, get in touch with the group’s founder and moderator, Marc Weidenbaum, at marc@disquiet.com.

Q: Should I provide any additional information?
A: Yes, please. Please include with your uploaded track some description of both (1) the compositional approach you had undertaken, as well as (2) the equipment and process you employed to achieve it.

Q: Do I need to participate every week?
A: Gosh no. There is no intent to pressure anyone to do any more than they have time for.

Q: Do I need to do this alone?
A: These can be group projects, certainly. You needn’t work by yourself, though that appears to be the most common approach by Junto members. (And there will be some projects in which collaboration is actively required.)

Q: What is a “junto”?
A: The word comes from the name of a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in Philadelphia during the early 1700s as “a structured forum of mutual improvement.”

Q: What is “electronic music”?
A: Anything you want it to be. Drones, beats, drones with beats, abstract, melodic, tuneful, discordant, phonographic, synthesized. Go for it.

Q: Does my track have to be “ambient”?
A: No, not by any means. That mode, broadly defined, will likely be a not uncommon approach for participants, but it won’t be the only one.

Q: Is there any restriction on length?
A: Not necessarily. It depends on the project. Some will stipulate length. Others won’t.

Q: Do I have to set my track to be downloadable?
A: You don’t have to, but it would be appreciated. Also, some assignments may involve remixing previous project entries, and if your track isn’t downloadable, it won’t be easily remix-able.

Q: Can I post more than one track for a project?
A: No, please. Just focus your efforts on one track. (That said, there may be occasional Junto projects for which you will be asked to do more than one track, but that will be part of a specific assignment.)

ΔQ: How can I communicate with other Junto people off of Soundcloud?
There’s a lot of Junto activity on Twitter. There is also a discussion tab at the group’s Soundcloud page. There will likely be a forum added to Disquiet.com in the near future.

Q: Are those really the only questions?
A: So far.

Q: What if I have more questions?
A: Get in touch with Disquiet Junto founder Marc Weidenbaum, at marc@disquiet.com.

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◼ Bill Forman interviews deep-listening legend Pauline Oliveros at csindy.com:

Q: I’m wondering what advice you might have for people who think of more experimental music as, you know, quote-unquote difficult. What sorts of things should they be listening for, in order to better appreciate it?

A: Well, I think the best thing to do would be to get something that disturbs them, and play it over and over again, until they’re no longer disturbed.

Q: You’re not gonna get many people to do that.

A: Well, you know, it’s up to them. But the experience is worth it. Because you find out quick that the more familiar something becomes, the more interested you are.

◼ New York’s MoMa is doing a big sound art show later this year. “Soundings: A Contemporary Score” will run from August 10 through November 3, per nytimes.com. The show’s curator, Barbara London, made a comment in the New York Times piece — “Sound has come into the limelight” — that is either synaesthetically coy or, more likely, a prime example of how sound continues to labor in the, shall we say, shadow of the visual.

◼ The following conversation appears in a flashback between the title character in the CBS TV series The Good Wife (Julianna Margulies‘ Alicia Florrick) and her deceased client, Matthew Ashbaugh, played by John Noble, who played Walter Bishop on Fringe. Like Bishop, Noble’s Good Wife character has an emotional and obsessive association with recorded sound. He carries with him little speakers that play back the same Bach piece over and over:

Florrick: “You travel with your own soundtrack?”

Noble: “Yes. Don’t you?”

The episode was titled “Death of a Client” and first aired March 24, 2013.

◼ The global engineering consultancy Arup has launched arupconnect.com, a website-as-magazine about its endeavors. Arup has a large acoustic practice, with a particular emphasis on performance spaces. In a post from late last year, Anne Guthrie, who works in the New York office, explores the idea of “acoustics for musicians,” which is predicated on the observation that much work by acousticians focused on the needs of the audience, at the expense of the needs of the performer: “Today, acoustic technology is faster and more complex, allowing us to recreate the entire experience of playing in multiple halls in a single room. In Arup’s SoundLab, several acousticians — including Iain Laird in Scotland and Terence Caulkins, Kathleen Stetson, and me in New York — have been working to develop a system where musicians can come into the lab and play in any hall or room in real time.”

◼ Amon Tobin has posted an example of the nearly hour-long audio that the recent shows on his ISAM tour have been playing before the curtain rises. It’s streaming-only, over at soundcloud.com/amon-tobin. Found via amontobin.com/news. In a note, Tobin explains that Jamie Harley (“long time friend and collaborator in sound”) has been mixing this music live:

◼ C. Reider has launched a new netlabel, focused on supporting work that employs a Creative Commons license allowing for derivative works. Great URL, too: deriv.cc.

◼ Over at newyorker.com, Ian Crouch explores the “dunnhhh” sound that is in so many movie trailers these days. Correspondence on Twitter between critic Geeta Dayal and Echo Nest’s Brian Whitman rightly questioned some of Crouch’s language, in particular the phrase “accursed bass drone.” One thing Crouch doesn’t mention is how sound in the Prometheus trailer linked the film back to the original trailer for Alien.

◼ The One Hello World project by Jared Brickman, whose hour-long ambient piano work served as the basis for the 65th Disquiet Junto project, has been awarded a 2013 Webby for “net art.” This is the One Hello World project’s summary: “Leave me a voicemail and I’ll write music behind your narrative. Call it a soundtrack to your thoughts.”

◼ The great io9.com website has posted crazy images from the Japanese album of the Lost in Space soundtrack and, separately, asks, “Why do so many electric things hum?”

◼ Also via i09.com, this is (streaming-only, no download) an “auditory representation of the Big Bang” by physicist John Cramer, who “produced the audio by mapping sound frequencies to the changes detected over time in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation”:

◼ SoundCloud had a pretty funny April Fools joke in the form of “the dropometer” (blog.soundcloud.com):

◼ If you use SoundCloud and have an about.me page, they now play together well. Unfortunately, for the time being, if you also have a blog whose feed you want to include, as I do at about.me/marc.weidenbaum, then you have to choose between that and a SoundCloud embed.

◼ And this is pretty nifty. The official help page on soundcloud.com about the Groups functionality uses the Disquiet Junto as a visual. (Thanks to Guy Birkin for letting me know.)

• Birthday party for three-year-old? Slide whistles! http://t.co/8qHTDT2nvV ->
• Got my ticket to see @robert_henke and company Sunday night in San Francisco: https://t.co/79VCS7y1TF ->
• Six years after moving my site to WordPress I realize there is a dashboard plugin to display a list of scheduled posts. ->
• 50+ @djunto acts broke a 1-hour @JaredBrickman track into parts & added their own music. Then he pieced it together: https://t.co/lnkO4JT0Nq ->
• So glad you could make it. MT @ambienteer: My contribution to this week's poignant @djunto project with @nofi: https://t.co/dyolJ29o1L. ->
• Thanks to @kenmistove for coding the browser-based tool that sorted out which @djunto musician would do which @JaredBrickman segment. ->
• Name a dog: "To help the puppy distinguish its name from ambient noise, choose something with a sibilant consonant": http://t.co/7T9zDOzHMk ->
• I always play the "Who's the most dangerous person in the café?" game in my head. Today: giddy guy in red CERN T-shirt working on a netbook. ->
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• Weird. My automated weekly Twitter aggregator decided, all on its own, to post on Sunday rather than Saturday. ->
• The week’s @djunto has 31 pieces, with two full days to go. Here's a helpful 320kbps MP3 of the massive AIFF source: http://t.co/Fg8T8FPXQD ->
• It was darker before the dusk this evening, the storm breaking at land’s end, sky overhead stormy but in the distance lit by the waning sun. ->
• RIP, Robert Zildjian (89), of the namesake centuries-old Turkish cymbal-making family; founder of rival Sabian Cymbals. ->
• I get Bcc'd on soul-retrieval SKU requisitions. RT @Le_Berger: @disquiet It's like you have a direct link with the grim reaper or something. ->
• RIP, composer and educator Edward Charles Mattila (b. 1927), via @jcharney ->
• Very sad. Learned via @vuzhmusic that Jeffrey Melton (@nofi), who participated in many @djunto projects, including the first, passed away. ->
• Here's something I wrote about @nofi in 2011: http://t.co/w5wnsFc9mT. And here's more of his sounds: https://t.co/csnM59i7bI. ->
• Man, @naotko has reminded me that the late @nofi was the compiler of the main @twitter list of @djunto participants: https://t.co/QzF3jON9pe ->
• "I did not believe I could be so sad to learn someone I'd never met passed away." From a fellow admirer of @nofi. ->
• Indeed. MT @happypuppyrecs: sad to learn of @nofi's death. at least his musical creations will be available for us to remember him with. ->
• It's not that it's odd that I am saddened by @nofi's death despite having never met him; I am sad in part because I never met him. ->
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