When just that happened, when 58 different musicians participated, the question was what came next. First came an email announcement list, so that rather than having to check the Info tab on the Junto’s Soundcloud.com page, members of the Junto could have each assignment delivered to their inbox (if you’re interested in being added to the list, send a request to marc@disquiet.com). Then came an FAQ, which is housed on the Info tab. And then, with some consideration, came the second assignment.

The first assignment had asked the participating musicians to produce their own samples, in this case of the sound of ice in a glass. For the second assignment, the more traditional approach of using a shared sample was employed. But instead of one sample, there were two. These are the instructions to the second assignment:

Create an original piece of music under five minutes in length utilizing just these two samples:

Fog Horn: http://www.freesound.org/people/schaarsen/sounds/69663/

Train Whistle: http://www.freesound.org/people/ecodios/sounds/119963/

You can only use those two samples, and you can do whatever you want with them.

Deadline for finished tracks is midnight (wherever you are) on Monday, January 16.

When posting your finished track on Soundcloud, be sure the include the following two sentences, in order to abide by the Creative Commons license:

Fog horn sample by Schaarsen: http://www.freesound.org/people/schaarsen/sounds/69663/

Train whistle sample by Ecodios: http://www.freesound.org/people/ecodios/sounds/119963/

The suggestion of a fog horn sample was not a surprise to anyone who had spent more than a day or two observing my twitter.com/disquiet feed. I live in the Richmond District of San Francisco, where we are serenaded, when the climate is right, by deep fog horns that sound like Zeus left his phone on vibrate (and dozens of other haze-induced similes). Fans of contemporary classical music will associate that sound with the field recordings that form the basis for the Fog Tropes of composer Ingram Marshall, and Marshall’s masterwork was indeed very much an inspiration for this project. As for the train, it had no particular consequence sonically, except that the sample I located seemed aesthetically compatible with the fog horn sample. Instead, the train was intended as a cultural contrast, the implied rhythm suggesting rock’n'roll against the classical element of the fog horn. None of this was described in the assignment. It merely informed the dimensions of the project as it was being developed in advance of its announcement. No, the real crux of the assignment is this portion of the instruction: “You can only use those two samples.” If all the participants were to share the same source material, then the real challenge was to see how they would make that source material their own, and how better — in the spirit of constraint — than to limit their palette to that source material?

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, January 12, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 16, as the deadline.

View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0002-duet. As of this writing, there are 50 tracks associated with the tag.

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.

(Oddly apt photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/j33pman/5245441632. It was attached to the Junto entry “Bumpy Ride” by Doug Laustsen, aka douglownote.)

When the excellent Kikapu netlabel announced a return from extended hiatus, there was reason to be excited. One of the earliest netlabels, it was in existence from 2001 to 2008. In an interview here after the label was shuttered by its founder, Brad Mitchell (aka the musician Pocka), he said the idea of closing it down had been on his mind for close to two years. Mitchell is an innovative musician and proprietor who considers things thoroughly. He isn’t one to bring the label back lightly. And now, four years after closing, Kikapu is back — albeit at kikapu.org, a new URL. Its first release speaks of its newfound energy and adventurous spirit. The release, a single MP3, is in fact a fully original score to a 1928 silent surrealist film by Antonin Artaud and Germaine Dulac: La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman). The music is by Roto Visage, who was apparently hired by Transflux Films to create the score, though the project was shelved. He recorded two versions, this being one of them. In addition to providing the MP3 for free download, Kikapu shows the full film with the audio synced. It’s a dense and haunting score, with a voluble mix of orchestral and noise-based approaches, putting front and center the dread inherent in the film’s eerie goings-on.

More on Roto Visage, aka Jason Popejoy, at rotovisage.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.

Tracks posted at freemusicarchive.org.

And though in the past it was generally the case that a video existed to sell a song that existed to sell an album, in this case “Dare-Gale” is one of two tracks off Glimmer that Ghostly has made available for free download. The other is “Seiden Stille,” which is more rangy in form, with orchestral washes, deep dips and asides, and eerily dramatic pauses.

The visible “Seiden Stille” player only has a “buy” link, but there’s a download link on the track’s soundcloud.com/ghostly page.

More on the album, including two additional videos, at ghostly.com. More on Jacaszek at jacaszek.com.

The “sinfonietta” tag on Soundcloud.com doesn’t get a lot of love. At this moment, the tag brings up just one track, but it’s a doozy. “Sinfonietta” is one of a half dozen tags selected by Alarm Will Sound, the adventurous chamber ensemble, in association with a recording of their performance of the composition “Step!” The piece of music, by Liza White, was taped last summer at Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, and is heard here in a crisp five and a quarter minutes. It opens with suspended strings and arhythmic accents from horns and percussion, before the crux of it hits: a hard, almost robotic, ever surprising shuffle. (For the record, this is a website where “robotic” is a compliment.) The strings and horns are extensions of, compatriots of, the drums, the whole thing syncopated like Leonard Bernstein or Alex North at their most rhythmically vibrant and succinct.

According to composer White, who participated in a discussion about the festival at alarmwillsound.com, the jazz feel is deserved from step routines:

The musical material in this piece is derived from step team routines, which use combinations of stomping, clapping, speech, and patting different parts of the body in a choreographed way to execute collective rhythm. Step is related to hip-hop, which I’ve always been interested in. The piece is also about race relations the way I’ve experienced them. So its use of step routine material is both a musical influence and an extramusical one.

The step routine, filtered through jazz tradition, then funneled through chamber instrumentation, arrives at the ear with an ecstatically herky jerky feel. The result suggests the way jazz has been sampled by turntablists and other breakbeat musicians, bits and riffs cut up and reassembled with an intense verve. The image up top, from coverage of the festival at newmusicbox.org, shows White rehearsing with the group.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/alarm-will-sound. The JACK Quartet is due to perform a new string quartet by White this spring. More on her at lizawhitemusic.com. More on Alarm Will Sound at alarmwillsound.com.

There has likely been less commercial music discussed on Disquiet.com in 2011 than in any previous year since the site’s launch, almost exactly 15 years ago, in December 1996. This relative absence wasn’t intentional. It doesn’t even particularly reflect my daily listening habits. But it does, in retrospect, reflect my imagination. I listen to enormous amounts of commercially released music, much that is sent to me for promotional purposes, much that I hear online, and much that I myself purchase. My email inbox is overrun with inbound, unsolicited, but often welcome, invitations to listen to the commercial music for free (un-commercially, as it were, though in the end, the whole act of promotion is itself a commercial enterprise).

Yet still, there is something about a commercial record that felt inherently stolid in 2011 — not all commercial records, and not the music specifically. The music can be dynamic, adventurous, but the enterprise can still feel rote or calculated or misguided, or some combination thereof.

I spent a lot of time listening to, and thinking about, and interacting with, the music than emanates from generative sound apps (those based in Internet browsers, and those that come in the form of mobile-device apps). I spent a lot of time listening to, and thinking about, the music that emerges from various outposts of the “free music” movement/phenomenon (from netlabels in particular, and also general Creative Commons work, as well as work that is released for free with no apparent tie to or, perhaps, even knowledge of either of those philosophically informed communities). I spent a lot of time listening to commercially released music, but rarely this year did I think about it with the energy that I did my other listening.

All of which is in no way intended to diminish the 10 (or 12) commercial recordings listed below. Nor is it my sense that following list could easily be swapped out with two or even four more lists of fascinating sets of 10 albums from the past year. These were selected because any other such lists would still have some sense of absence. The music here touches on a variety of approaches, which is part of what makes it feel whole. There is voice-infused music, and sound art, and something not too distantly related to dance music, and noise, and elegant ambience, and contemporary classical, and remixes — and more. There are small-scale recordings, and recordings for which institutional financial support was necessary. In two cases two albums are listed, because they are by the same artists and were released this year and feel of a piece with each other. (And it at least one of the two cases, they were subsequently packaged together by the releasing record label.)

All of which is to say, in a year when I didn’t write about much commercial music, when it came time to list my 10 favorites, the list expanded to 12. They are listed here in alphabetical order by musician. Yes, “musician,” singular. One thing that struck me when I completed this list is that all these albums are, with the exception of the ECM remix collection, solo records.

Julianna Barwick‘s The Magic Place (Asthmatic Kitty): Julianna Barwick is a choir of one. She makes music in which layer upon layer of her singing, vaguely druid in its tonal quality, form slow cascades of seemingly wordless invention. The effect is both meditative and cathartic. Other elements make themselves heard, including a minimalist piano that sounds like Harold Budd at work on one of Tom Waits’ detuned barroom favorites. This is music that could all to easily lapse into treacle, but it shows restraint, not in its ambition, but in its affect. … More on Barwick at juliannabarwick.com. Listen to the album in full at juliannabarwick.bandcamp.com. More on the record at asthmatickitty.com. There’s also a collection of remixes, Matrimony Remixes, which I cannot recommend; the beats just make all the songs sound like the closing music to a Disney animated film.
 
Jefferson Friedman‘s Quartets (New Amsterdam): The collection contains two complete string quartets and a pair of remixes. The quartets (which date from 1999 and 2005) are alternately fierce and pastoral, and they distinguish themselves with the extent to which the instrumentalists are treated as equal partners, and the extent to which the arrangement is the music: theme and melody rarely stand out above the musical interplay. They are performed here by the Chiara String Quartet, for whom they were composed. The Matmos remixes are some of the duo’s strongest recent work, especially the closing track, “Floor Plan Mix,” which achieves a spectral quality in its distillation of the source material. … More on the musicians at jeffersonfriedman.com, chiaraquartet.net, and brainwashed.com/matmos. Listen to the album in full at chiarastringquartet.bandcamp.com. More on the album at newamsterdamrecords.com.
 
Grouper‘s A I A : Dream Loss and A I A : Alien Observer (Yellow Electric): Between their titles and approach, these are at least companion collections and more like parts of a whole (think how with the final two thirds of the Star Wars or the Lisbeth Salander trilogies, neither half is particularly satisfying without the other). Grouper is Liz Harris, and her two 2011 full-length releases, though available separately, deserve consideration as a whole, not simply because their titles and covers suggest them as halves of a pair, or entries in a series, but because they similarly eke songs, or song-like formations, from quiet accumulations of vocals and supporting sounds. There is a lot of freak folk, or “drone folk,” out there in drone world. These recordings are closer to “drone singer-songwriter.” … Both albums are sample-able at the boomkat.com music retailer, among other places: Alien, Dream.

Tim Hecker‘s Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky): Hecker took source recordings he made of a pipe organ in Iceland and then went to work on them. Each glitch is a synapse-firing crisis of faith. Each echo maps the architecture of the place. Each mass of synthesized material fills the empty church in your mind. The cover shows a piano being pushed off the edge of the building, which makes for a colorful (or, in this case, black-and-white) polemic. There is tension in this music for certain, but it’s more likely to instill in experimental musicians the desire to explore pipe organs than to dispose of them. … More on Hecker at sunblind.net. The music is sample-able at boomkat.com, among other retailers.
 
Jacaszek‘s Glimmer (Ghostly): In traditional terms, this is the prettiest album on this list. It is built from harpsichords and string sections and other classical instruments, which in combination lend it a storybook quality. It’s less fragile than it is dainty, but the daintiness is undergirded with filmic tension, like something out of the Quay Brothers at their most romantic yet mischievous. And the “traditional” instrumentation is just part of the sound design, mixed in with all manner of knocking and general acoustic haze. … More on the album at ghostly.com, where it is also available for streaming. More on the composer at the somewhat out of date
jacaszek.com.

Eli Keszler‘s Cold Pin (Pan): Based on a massive sound-art installation by Keszler, the album comes in two parts: a recording of his invention (“14 strings ranging in length from 25 to 3 feet are strung across a 15 x 40 curved wall, with motors attacking the strings, connected by micro-controllers, pick-ups and rca cables”) and a recording of Keszler performing freely improvised jazz alongside the sculpture with Geoff Mullen, Ashley Paul, Greg Kelley, Reuben Son, and Benjamin Nelson. The artwork is impressive, and the album is a model for documenting site-specific installations. … More on the album (including sound and video) at pan-act.com. More on Keszler at elikeszler.com.
 
Israel Martinez‘s El Hombre Que Se Sofoca (Sub Rosa): Six tracks of resplendent noise. The pieces range from deep washes of grey haze to jittery and anxious scattered samples. Melodic and cinematic washes give way to harsh deadspace. The impact is true to the title’s depiction of suffocation. A major album by the Mexican sound artist and musician, who is also a co-founder of the adventurous record label Abolipop. … More on the album, including two sound samples, at the record label’s website. More on Martinez at israelm.com and abolipop.com.
 
Andy Stott‘s We Stay Together and Passed Me By (Modern Love). Two albums of closely related yet disparate takes on club music. At its essence, this is the most minimal of minimal techno, but it seems more interested in exploring aridity than dankness, a rare and particularly welcome variation in this arena. … Listen to Together and Passed at their respective Soundcloud set pages.
 
Amon Tobin‘s ISAM (Ninja Tune). It was almost as tempting to list this album under “best scores of 2011″ as it was to list Kid Koala’s own recent Ninja Tune release (a soundtrack for a graphic novel he wrote and drew) simply as a commercial album. ISAM, in essence, is a recording of the music to Tobin’s audio-visual concert performance of the same name. It is brash and moving and, more than anything he has done previously, free of riffs intended and required to signal affiliation with a particular techno genre. … More on Tobin and the release, including streaming music and video and a free download, at amontobinisam.com.
 
Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer‘s Re: ECM (ECM): The repeated use of the “re” prefix on this album — every one of the 17 tracks on its two halves — suggests that someone at the company still thinks of remixing as a purely post-production undertaking, rather than part of the artistic process. But still, it is a good thing that the estimable ECM label let DJs Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer wander through its back catalog, unearth samples, and render from them sonic tapestries. The music, with its constant presence of dust formations, has the texture of affectionate archival research. (It’s very close in spirit to Bill Laswell’s Panthalassa stroll through Miles Davis’ work.) … Discussion and music at youtube.com. More on the record at ecmrecords.com

The polar extremes of the holiday season are remarkable for their seeming incongruity, perhaps most notably in terms of psychic ambience: on the one hand, a manic consumerism; on the other, a sense of reflection and hushed anticipation. Guy Birkin ponders the latter by taking existing seasonal recordings, a pair of them, and forming from them something new, something singular.

Both of his chosen source documents are explicitly seasonal. There’s a church choir and there’s a brass band. The congregation sings “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and the band plays “Once in Royal David’s City.” The choir is accompanied by a pipe organ. The brass band, on the other hand, is accompanied by various externalities: that recording was made from a distance and is infused with everyday noise. The resulting work, which Birkin titled “Christmas Ambience,” is very much an extended take on the latter approach to sound, in which context seems to submerge text, yet where the result is an aura with more meaning, more feeling, than the text might have ever had on its lonesome. It’s a slow, solemn piece, yet it seems to glisten in its seeming stasis:

Bikrin also provided some explanation for how he accomplished his piece:

The recordings were pitch-shifted and stretched with FFT, then layered together and the process repeated. The original version of this track was over 18 minutes long, but the most interesting section was its beginning in which the choral and brass sounds are barely audible above the background noise. It took quite a lot of work to simplify the track and concentrate only on the most ambiguous sounds.

Track originally posted for free streaming and download at soundcloud.com/notl. More on Birkin at twitter.com/guybirkin and aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com.

The radiodiaries.org series outdid itself today. Apparently 75 years ago, on November 23, 1936, two men sat down and had their solo performances documented in audio recordings. These men were Robert Johnson, the legendary blues guitarist and singer, and Pablo Casals, the pathbreaking cellist and master interpreter of Bach. They never met in person, but certainly did meet at the crossroads of antiquity and technology.

Their stories are not parallel, but in some ways that lack of a parallel is part of the story. Casals was famous, while Johnson was unknown. Casals was three decades Johnson’s senior. Johnson was recorded on the fly, shoehorned between other quick sessions — he himself reportedly waxed two separate renditions of eight songs in a single hour — while Casals took his seat in one of the premiere recording studios of the day, the Gramophone location in London later made famous by the Beatles’ Abbey Road. (The radio program refers to the studio as Abbey Road, but it wasn’t named that until after the Beatles recording. I am currently reading Geoff Emerick’s memoir of his work with the Beatles, Here, There, and Everywhere, and he confirms the naming chronology.) Casals completed two of the Bach cello suites in his allotted hour. Johnson would be dead in two years, and following a period of fame his recordings would be largely forgotten until the early 1960s, while Casals would almost make it to his 100th birthday — the latter’s recordings would never go out of print, or style, but his versions helped rescue the suites from their previous popular standing as mere exercises.

And both sessions continue to this day to be among the most revered. They seem archaic by today’s standards, so deep is the imprint of recording technology, the hiss and static and other noises that one learns to listen through, but that at their time were nearly invisible (“inaudible” doesn’t do the trick) to their audience. The Radio Diaries episode (MP3) speaks with a variety of informed parties who help us listen back through history, including blues musician Honeyboy Edwards, who knew Johnson, and cellist Bernard Greenhouse, who studied with Casals (both Edwards and Greenhouse died this year). Also heard are Paul Elie, who reportedly introduced the coincidental date to the producers of Radio Diaries, and musicians Scott Ainslie and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. (Elie introduces himself as the author of Sound About: Reinventing Bach, and to my knowledge it has not yet been published.) There are great descriptions of the nature of recording at the time. Greenhouse reflects on the unforgiving nature of wax, which doesn’t allow for splicing and correcting. Also mentioned is how Johnson consciously tailored his songs to the short length of the available technology.

And to tie it all together, Brendan Baker contributed a “mashup,” combining two of the 1936 recordings, imagining the duo as if playing side by side. The term “mashup” suggests a kind of violence, a yoking together, when in fact the result is fittingly lovely and reflective (MP3).

More on the episode at radiodiaries.org.

Track originally posted at split-notes.com. Skiks is a pseudonym of composer/percussionist Bruce Hamilton, more on whom at alonetone.com/skiks and spectropol.com. It’s the ninth release on the Split-Notes netlabel, which focuses on legally free downloads of microtonal music. Compulse is the first Split-Notes release to be featured on Disquiet.com.