Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/yasuoakai. More on Yasuo Akai at thefirstpersonpronountowear.blogspot.com. More on Chris Lynn at framingsounds.wordpress.com. For lack of a visual, the above image is a still from a forthcoming Super 8 film by Lynn.

Marcus Fischer, the accomplished musician based in Portland, Oregon, generously agreed to provide the constituent parts of one of the tracks off his latest album, Collected Dust, which was released this month on the Tench record label. The track, “Nearly There,” was the second-to-last entry in a year-long daily creative project he undertook from January 2009 through 2010.

Fischer’s music is elegant and elegiac, and its gentleness belies its complexity. As the project began, it was clear that it would be interesting to see how people worked with the material. How much would they make it their own, or how much would they attempt to extend what they perceived Fischer had begun. There was, at a psychological level, the additional awareness that individual who was the source of the sounds was active on Soundcloud and would, almost certainly, be checking in. That proved to be the case in one particularly unexpected way — but before we get to that, here are the instructions that were provided to Junto members:

“Nearly There” is a track off Marcus Fischer’s new album, Collected Dust, released this month on the Tench label.

Fischer has provided 10 constituent parts of the track in the following downloadable Zip file:

http://mapmap.ch/disquiet/junto_MFischer.zip/

Each participating Junto member will contribute an individual remix of the track, using as much or as little of the original as they choose.

Title: Your track should be titled “Nearly There (Disquiet0004-mfischer TBD Remix)” where the “TBD” is between one and three words of your choosing. (It could, for example, be your name or a descriptive phrase.)

Tag: Please associate the tag “disquiet0004-mfischer” with the file.

Source Material (i): No, you don’t have to use every file that Fischer has provided, just as many as you would like.

Source Material (ii): Yes, you can add sounds beyond those provided.

Length: The length of your remix is up to you, but under 10 minutes seems wise. For reference, the original track is a little over six minutes long.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

License: Per an agreement with Fischer and with Tench, any track submitted for this Junto should be associated with the following Creative Commons license with your track: “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).”

Information: When you post the track, please include these three links:

http://mapmap.ch/
http://www.tenchrec.com/TCH05.html/
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Additional Background:

The track “Nearly There” is not just an example of Marcus Fischer’s Collected Dust album. It originally appeared as the penultimate entry in the 365-day creative project he presented online, and material from it was part of the final entry in that same year-long series. That marathon creative experiment of Fischer’s was a big influence on the development of the Disquiet Junto, this idea of setting a significant challenge to oneself as a means to stoke creative output. “Nearly There” was recorded on “lapharp + ebow looped using the monome 128 w/ the wonderful MLRv application,” explains Fischer. The two tracks, for the curious, can be heard here:

http://unrecnow.com/dust/2374/
http://unrecnow.com/dust/2380/

And there’s more information on Collected Dust at the Tench website:

http://www.tenchrec.com/TCH05.html/

As the project’s deadline neared, Fischer himself joined in, remixing his own music:

In addition, there was a pleasant surprise when the accomplished sound artist Stephen Vitiello participated. He has exhibited at MASS MoCA, The High Line, The Project, the Bienale of Sydney, the Whitney Biennial, and PS 1/MoMA, and released music on such labels as 12k, New Albion, and Sub Rosa.

The fourth Junto led to a great conversation, in the project’s Discussion tab, about what exactly a “remix” is. It started off with a query from Brian Biggs, aka dance-robot-dance.

In the process, Ted James posted this audio piece as a response. It opens with him talking about what a remix is, until his talking becomes source material for a beat:

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, January 26, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 30, as the deadline.

View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0004-mfischer. As of this writing, there are 59 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.

(Image adapted from the photo that accompanied the version of “Nearly There” that appeared on Marcus Fischer’s unrecnow.com website as his 365-day project was reaching its end.)

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.)

The significant majority of them made their tracks available for free download. They posted them in the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, and used the tag “disquiet0001-ice” to distinguish their entry: including it in the file’s title and adding it as a tag. Soundcloud is a great service, but it doesn’t allow set creation within groups, so the only way to easily access the files associated with a given Junto project is by searching for a tag. I’m looking into ways to collect the files related to a specific Junto project, but in the meanwhile a search return is the best method.

The idea of using an ice cube in the glass had several points of inspiration. For one thing, given the long-running precedent of the Stones Throw Records Beat Battles, which meet once a week and use a shared sample as the starting point for competition, there was reason to distinguish the project; requesting that Junto members create their own sample, rather than employ the same exact source material, seemed like a good way to accomplish that. But, in a nod to the Beat Battles, I wanted a touch of hip-hop, and the sound of ice cubes heard in the Alkaholiks’ classic “Hip Hop Drunkies,” produced by E-Swift and Marley Marl, has long been a personal favorite (the song, which features a cameo by Ol’ Dirty Bastard, is from the 1997 album Likwidation; the instrumental is on youtube.com). In addition, the contact-mic experiments of musician Joe Colley came to mind. And, of course, there is Erik Satie’s furniture music, which is classical music’s strong precursor to what we now call ambient music: what could be a more casual everyday domestic sound than ice clinking in a glass?

The deadline was set for the following Monday, January 9, at midnight. In subsequent Junto projects the deadline would be moved back a minute, to 11:59pm, since some people weren’t sure if “midnight Monday” meant the midnight with which Monday began or with which it ended. Given that simple assignments are at the heart of the Junto, the fact that something as basic as “midnight Monday” was up for interpretation was an important lesson unto itself.

View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0001-ice.

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.

(Image of ice cubes in a glass comes from “Mystic Cubes,” the Junto entry by Mystified.)

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.

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.

Davison’s sole stated regret? That he had but a mono microphone at this instance: “I wish I had a stereo mic with me, this is two sets of wind chimes. I was standing in between them.”

The saying goes that a broken clock is right twice a day. The thing about a fully functioning clock is that it means different things at different times of the day. The noon bell, for example, is a midday alert. Even if the noon bell also happens to signal, say, a Latin mass, it provides a secular timekeeper for everyone within earshot. Other times might be synchronized with things other than the nearly universal 24-hourly intervals: religious events (services) and semi-secular ones (weddings) generally fall off the strict hour/half-past regularity. Even when slight, discrepancies in timing can feel significant, or at least meaningful. In the neighborhood where I live, the noon bell rings each Tuesday just after a noon siren calls out across the city (actually a network of sirens, all slightly off sync). The noon church bells always start slightly after the alert ends (the siren consists of two parts: an alarm, and then a spoken announcement). It’s unclear if the alert comes early or if the bells late, but they long ago reached some sort of sonic armistice.

The great Touch Radio podcast noted the end of 2012 with an extended recording of bells (MP3), recorded in the belltower of St. Mary’s Church, Walthamstow. They were no doubt intended to signify the close of a year, but they were, in fact, if the data in the RSS feed is correct, released eight days prior, and in fact recorded a full month prior. The bells rang any number of times between November 30, when they were recorded, and January 1, 2012 — and thanks to the podcast MP3, they will continue to be heard into the future, each time signally something slightly different: coinciding with an event, looking ahead to one, or bringing to mind something from the past.

And, for that matter, the bells find themselves occasionally excepted from timekeeping duties, and listened to for their sonic properties. There is a particularly eventful sequence at around the eight-minute point when decay and overlays combine to create illusions of more bells than are in fact ringing — the reverberation almost takes on the appearance of backward masking, which is ironic given the association of backward masking with Satanism.

Track originally posted (“With thanks to Denis Hewitt & Ewan Marshall”) at touchradio.org.uk.

An Introduction to Instagr/am/bient:

Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?

Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards. They are pieces of music whose relative brevity—all are between one and three minutes in length—is designed to correlate with the economical, ephemeral nature of an Instagram photo.

The result of the 25 musicians’ collective efforts is an investigation into the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. What parallels exist, for example, between the visual filters that Instagram provides users to transform their photos and the sound-processing tools employed by electronic musicians?

In many cases here, the musicians employ sonic field recordings as source material for their music. In the case of both their photos and their compositions (photography in one case, phonography in the other), documents are altered to emphasize their atmospheric qualities: to eke a modest art out of the everyday.

Thumbnails of the 25 Images:

The full collection is also streaming at soundcloud.com/disquiet.

The 25 MP3s are downloadable for free individually and as a Zip file at archive.org.

Download a 58-page PDF with full-page reproductions of the images and additional information on all the participating musicians: PDF.

A Disquiet.com Project
Commissioned by Marc Weidenbaum

Design/Boondesign.com
Cover Photo/Brian Scott

This project in no way intends to imply any formal association with Instagram.

Sometimes the best rhythmic tracks are hiding in plain site. New York’s Myroslaw Bytz caught nearly a minute of MTA Escalator at Times Square on Monday at 5am. It’s a slow, gangly beat, like a chain being pulled a long distance, or like some old gears shuffling in place. Sisyphus wears a reflective orange vest.

It’s a rhythm that suggests itself as metronomically precise but that, in fact, soon reveals itself to be a slurry mass of inaccuracies, a wonder of mechanical imprecision. The presence in the recorded track of a rote municipal announcement, apparently spoken by a woman, provides a keen parallel to the soundbite shout-outs of standard dance music. In place of 4/4 beats and diva proclamations, we get the mundane chaos of public transportation.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/bytz. More on Bytz at mbytz.com and twitter.com/mbytz.

(Photo via the Creative Commons and flickr.com.)