Disquiet Junto: Musicians Invited to Join Communal Creative Restraint Group • Projects 1, 2, 3, 4
Free MP3s: Shoegaze Punk • Piano Minimalism • Reclaimed "Industrial" • Topics: #sound-art, #classical
How To: Submit for Review • Elsewhere: Twitter, SoundCloud (Disquiet & Disquiet Junto), Facebook

Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Tag Archives: copyleft

Crosstown Traffic (MP3)

Free MP3s: A cellist serenades the AM airwaves

[ January 21, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

A traffic report intrudes on Joe Merolla‘s solo cello performance. The intrusion is expected. Merolla’s piece bears the title “Sinfonia di Violoncello e AM Radio,” which of course in Italian means that it’s a work for cello and AM Radio. The fact that the title is in Italian lends it a certain futurist je ne say quoi, appropriate to the work’s embrace of everyday noise and its grounding in classical music. The discordance of the cello part seems play various roles here. It is, at its core, an aesthetic decision, a form of playing that distinguishes the material from the traditional repertoire through an embrace of noise, noise being the calling card of futurism. (The word “traditional” is employed here with some trepidation. At this point, there’s enough of an avant-garde history that it serves as its own tradition.) It’s also a reflection of the noise of the radio. And the cello appears to move amid the radio, responding to unexpected surfacings. In any case, the traffic announcement is an especially welcome element here, because it serves as a kind of chance play-by-play for the work itself, which is focused on intersections and crisscrosses.

Tracks posted at freemusicarchive.org.

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Dustmotes’ Inaugural Podcast (MP3)

Free MP3: Beats that veer toward ambient

[ January 20, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The Soundcloud.com platform has many strengths. Key among them is how the fluid nature of postings on the service leads to a specific situation that few if any other music-hosting services have approached. It’s one in which a truly fluid sensibility is easily associated with the postings. In other words: a musical sketch — a rough draft or a work-in-progress — makes sense on Soundcloud in a way it does less so, say, on cdbaby.com or in iTunes. Those latter two systems emulate the tradition of the recording as document, as self-enclosed entity. Soundcloud allows for such a thing, with its “sets” feature, but the default mode on Soundcloud is a reverse chronological list. It’s just a thread of whatever the musician uploaded most recently (the majority of Soundcloud accounts appear to be associated with individuals, though bands and organizations house there efforts there, too). Which is why it makes all the more sense that Dustmotes, the ace turntable-textured beatmaker, has launched a new podcast series hosted on Soundcloud. The six-minute inaugural entry is a suite, a medley, of found and homemade bits, filtered through Dustmotes’ trademark old-school-yet-of-the-moment, veering-toward-ambient approach to what could be broadly described as instrumental hip-hop. Which is to say, it’s downtempo, and it’s promising. Looking forward to the sophomore effort.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/dustmotes. More on Dustmotes, aka Paul Croker, at dustmotes.net.

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Sneak Peek at New Disquiet.com Project: Disquiet Junto

[ January 7, 2012 / Department: downstream / Comments: 2 ]

This post wasn’t intended to go live until Tuesday, and there was a chance it wouldn’t be written at all. Yesterday saw the launch of a new communal music project associated with Disquiet.com. It’s called “Disquiet Junto” and it’s hosted over at soundcloud.com.

Here’s how it works: on Friday, which is to say yesterday, January 8, I posted an assignment, an “idea” for a piece of music. A deadline was set for this coming Monday, January 9, at midnight, by which time anyone who wanted to participate would post their own original track that acted on the assignment. The first assignment is:

“Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.”

It’s only Saturday evening as I type this, and there are already 51 members of the group, and as of three hours ago a total of 18 completed tracks have been posted, many though not all available for free download. I didn’t know if I’d ever write this post, because I didn’t know if anyone would participate. But participating they are — not only responding in sound to the assignment, but listening to and commenting on each other’s tracks. Collectively, the 18 tracks have been listened to almost 600 times in barely 24 hours, and there are over 70 comments, most from one contributing musician to another. Here’s a stark contrast: the recent Disquiet.com music project Instagr/am/bient has been listened to almost 17,000 times since its launch a week and a half ago, and there have been a total of 31 comments.

The variety of responses to “Disquiet Junto 0001″ is just as thrilling as the number of responses is. The idea of making music from the sound of ice in a glass has yielded a very short story from Mark Rushton, some detailed phonography from Mike Bullock, a lovely mix of buggy whirring and gentle melodic phases from My Fun, and subdued funk from Open Heart Sound, just to point out a few.

I have many ideas for things to do as part of Disquiet Junto, and will roll them out in coming weeks. I also have much more to say about where the project comes from, culturally and sonically and socially, but for the moment, let’s let the assembled musicians’ excellent contributions speak for themselves.

Check out the Disquiet Junto page at soundcloud.com.

PS: The word “junto” comes from the name of a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in Philadelphia during the early 1700s as “a structured forum of mutual improvement.” I learned of it while reading, recently, the Franklin biography by Walter Isaacson, who penned the recent Steve Jobs bio. I highly recommend the Franklin book, and Isaacson’s book on Albert Einstein. I have not yet read the Jobs one.

Update: With a little under 40 hours to go before deadline, there were already 24 entries by as many musicians.

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The Psychic Ambience of the Holidays (MP3)

[ December 18, 2011 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

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.

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Operating on Operating Systems (MP3s)

[ December 12, 2011 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

What will happen when our computers are always on, or instant on, or so ubiquitous that we think of them less as objects, as accessories, or even garments, and more like soap or aftershave? Will we hang on to vestiges of their earlier days, much as we today add noises to electric cars in the name of comfort, safety, and security? If so, we’ll look back to work like that of Jeff Kolar, whose Start Up/Shut Down is, indeed, made of the noises of computers doing just that. His description is as precise as his working materials:

Start Up/Shut Down is a set of short iterations, remixes, and refinements of Window and Macintosh operating system event sounds. This project features remixed material sourced from Microsoft Windows (3.1, 4.0, NT, 95, 98, Me, XP, Vista, 7, 8) and Macintosh OS (10.0 Cheetah, 10.1 Puma, 10.2 Jaguar, 10.3 Panther) operating systems.

He has plumbed the less than recent history of the major two major operating systems for his noises. The result is an abstract play on sounds at once familiar and remote. It’s a bracing listen, and leaves one eagerly awaiting the Linux B-side.

Kolar is one of the people behind the grew Radius podcast and pirate broadcast, a frequent subject of this site’s Downstream department. He corresponded with Disquiet earlier this year about another kind of “start up” sound that serves as the opening theme of the Radius broadcast (see “Entering and Exiting the Electromagnetic Spectrum”).

Both of the set’s tracks are available for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/jeffkolar and at the netlabel notype.com. More on Kolar at jeffkolar.us.

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