Recent interview with me at freemusicarchive.org on Creative Commons, Disquiet Junto, and more • Projects: Instagr/am/bient + LX(RMX): Lisbon Remixed • Key Topics: #sound-art, #classical, #generative • How to Submit for Review • Elsewhere: Twitter (Disquiet + Junto), SoundCloud (Disquiet + Junto).

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

tag: forum-digger

The Disquiet Junto Project List

Association for communal music/sound-making on Soundcloud.com. [Update: July 20, 2012]

[ January 27, 2012 / Department: projects / Comments: 5 ]

The Disquiet Junto is a group I founded on Soundcloud.com. The purpose of the group is to use constraints to stoke creativity. Each Thursday evening I post a clearly defined compositional assignment, and members of the Junto are to complete the assignment by 11:59pm the following Monday. The initial Junto assignment was made on January 5, 2012, the first Thursday of the new year.

The inspirations for the group’s existence are numerous. There are the weekly Beat Battles sponsored by Stonesthrow, and also hosted at Soundcloud.com, in which dozens if not hundreds of participants craft instrumental hip-hop beats from a shared sample. There is the tradition of Oulipo, whose embrace of creative constraints is personified by one of its co-founders, the author Raymond Queneau. Several comics artists with whom I have worked, including Matt Madden, have bonded under the banner of Oubapo, and there is, in fact, a related musical tradition, which goes by Oumupo. (I was reminded that the Iron Chef of Music projects at kracfive.com were also an influence on my thinking. They were for many years a big part of the Downstream department here.)

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.” In Franklin’s honor, the third Disquiet Junto project explored the glass harp, an instrument he experimented with in the development of what he christened the armonica.

The idea for the Junto arose after the completion of a Disquiet project at the end of December 2011. That project, Instagr/am/bient, was more loosely curated than other such projects I had commissioned, beginning in 2006 with Our Lives in the Bush of Diquiet. Instagr/am/bient proved quite popular, with over 20,000 listens and almost 4,000 downloads in its first month, and this success suggested to me that I experiment with an even looser format — the irony being that this “looser” format is, in fact, dedicated to constraint. Much to my surprise, the very first Junto project resulted, in four days, in 56 original pieces of music by as many musicians. The assignment was to record the sound of ice cubes in a glass and to make something musical of that recording.

If for the musicians involved, the Disquiet Junto is an experiment in creative constraints, for me it is as much an experiment in what I would describe as “community organizing as a form of curation.”

Visit the group — and, better yet, sign up and participate — at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto. There’s also an email announcement list for the group. If you would like to be added to the suscription list, you can join up here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.

This page serves as an index of the assignments. They are listed here in reverse chronological order. The tag for each assignment links to either a post on Disquiet.com about the project, or to a search return on Soundcloud that yields the tracks in that project:

69: disquiet0068-deriv The Assignment: Make music from field recordings of earth, water, air, and fire. Start: 2013.04.25 … End: 2013.04.29

68: disquiet0068-deriv The Assignment: Combine three songs from the first release of the new deriv.cc netlabel. Start: 2013.04.18 … End: 2013.04.22

67: disquiet0067-odysseymachine The Assignment: Compose music for a phrase from Homer’s The Odyssey. Start: 2013.04.11 … End: 2013.04.15

66: disquiet0066-nonofi The Assignment: Collaborate posthumously with the late Jeffrey (Nofi) Melton. Start: 2013.04.04 … End: 2013.04.08

65: disquiet0065-pianoverlay The Assignment: Compose music atop a randomly assigned segment of a pre-existing track by Jared Brickman. Start: 2013.03.28 … End: 2013.04.01

64: disquiet0064-halflive The Assignment: Compose a piece to align with, from memory, 60 seconds of everyday sound. Start: 2013.03.21 … End: 2013.03.25

63: disquiet0063-gregorianorianian The Assignment: Make a new piece of music based on an echo-laden re-recording of Gregorian chant. Start: 2013.03.14 … End: 2013.03.18

62: disquiet0062-lifeofsine The Assignment: Make music using just three sine waves. Start: 2013.03.07 … End: 2013.03.11

61: disquiet0061-textinstagrambient The Assignment: Record a single for which the cover would be the image suggested by a @textinstagram tweet. Start: 2013.02.28 … End: 2013.03.04

60: disquiet0060-audiobio The Assignment: Record something about yourself and your music/sound in your own words and voice Start: 2013.02.21 … End: 2013.02.25

59: disquiet0059-vwls The Assignment: Make music from three randomly assigned vowels. Start: 2013.02.14 … End: 2013.02.18

58: disquiet0058-endlesscommons The Assignment: Celebrate the Creative Commons by remixing three tracks from the Endless Ascent netlabel. Start: 2013.02.07 … End: 2013.02.11

57: disquiet0057-phonemetransmit The Assignment: Use sounds from the Phonetics Lab Archive at UCLA to depict emotions. Start: 2013.01.31 … End: 2013.02.04

56: disquiet0056-matteroftime The Assignment: Use sounds from the Phonetics Lab Archive at UCLA to depict emotions. Start: 2013.01.24 … End: 2013.01.28

55: disquiet0055-twoscrews The Assignment: Combine two Nils Frahm solo piano pieces into one. Start: 2013.01.17 … End: 2013.01.21

54: disquiet0054-audiotextual The Assignment: Create an original musical score for the day’s news. Start: 2013.01.10 … End: 2013.01.14

53: disquiet0053-ice2013 The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it (redux). Start: 2013.01.03 … End: 2013.01.07

52: Disquiet0052-bumpcc The Assignment: Celebrate the Creative Commons by remixing three tracks from the Bump Foot netlabel. Start: 2012.12.27 … End: 2012.12.31

51: Disquiet0051-audiojournal The Assignment: Create a 2012 audio diary with a dozen five-second segments. Start: 2012.12.20 … End: 2012.12.24

50: Disquiet0050-morsebeat The Assignment: Encode a word or phrase in Morse Code and employ that as a track’s rhythm. Start: 2012.12.13 … End: 2012.12.17

49: Disquiet0049-deckduet The Assignment: Make a track, 50% of which is the sound of a tape cassette deck in motion. Start: 2012.12.06 … End: 2012.12.10

48: Disquiet0048-libertederive Celebrate the Creative Commons license that allows for derivative works by remixing music from the Three Legs Duck netlabel. Start: 2012.11.29 … End: 2012.12.03

47: Disquiet0047-partymuted Turn the muffled voices of a distant party into the foundation of a recording. Start: 2012.11.23 … End: 2012.11.26

46: Disquiet0046-silentballot Investigate a recording of the voting process for its “sonic fingerprint.” Start: 2012.11.15 … End: 2012.11.19

45: Disquiet0045-sherlocksawyer Combine material from the public domain adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Tom Sawyer. Start: 2012.11.08 … End: 2012.11.12

44: Disquiet0044-sandy2012 Transition from storm to calm using field recordings from Sandy 2012 Start: 2012.11.01 … End: 2012.11.05

43: Disquiet0043-dazzledmachine Make mechanical roars from the sound of a retail space. Start: 2012.10.25 … End: 2012.10.29

42: Disquiet0042-naivemelody Use your oldest and newest instruments in recording an original track. Start: 2012.10.18 … End: 2012.10.22

41: Disquiet0041-dirtyminimalism Produce an original piece of music that fits the genre “dirty minimalism.” Start: 2012.10.11 … End: 2012.10.15

40: Disquiet0040-kirschnerplus1 Turn a Kenneth Kirschner piano/viola duet into a trio. Start: 2012.10.04 … End: 2012.10.08

39: Disquiet0039-remixingnowaki Combine three tracks from the Nowaki netlabel into one. Start: 2012.09.27 … End: 2012.10.01

38: Disquiet0038-asrealasitgets2 Create from scratch what appears to be a field recording of a large department store. Start: 2012.09.20 … End: 2012.09.27

37: Disquiet0037-asrealasitgets1 Record sound from a large retail space, preferably a department store. Start: 2012.09.13 … End: 2012.09.17

36: Disquiet0036-cstillconcerto Turning something “classical” into something “abstract expressionist,” in tribute to Clyfford Still. Start: 2012.09.06 … End: 2012.09.10

35: Disquiet0035-becksongreader Make music from a sample page of Beck’s Song Reader sheet music. Start: 2012.08.30 … End: 2012.09.03

34: Disquiet0034-theradius Use the theme song of the Radius broadcast as the source of an original composition. Start: 2012.08.23 … End: 2012.08.27

33: Disquiet0033-turntable Make music with a turntable but without vinyl. Start: 2012.08.16 … End: 2012.08.20

32: Disquiet0032-sonicvote Treat a chart of U.S. presidential-election polling data as graphic notation. Start: 2012.08.09 … End: 2012.08.13

31: Disquiet0031-onomatch Make music from a recording that is initially considered to be silent. Start: 2012.08.02 … End: 2012.08.06

30: Disquiet0030-nonsilent Make music from a recording that is initially considered to be silent. Start: 2012.07.26 … End: 2012.07.30

29: Disquiet0029-countzero Make music from running water, inspired by William Gibson’s novel Count Zero. Start: 2012.07.19 … End: 2012.07.23

28: Disquiet0028-netlabel Remix one of two tracks of a recent netlabel release. Start: 2012.07.12 … End: 2012.07.16

27: Disquiet0027-texting Make a track by turning the instructions text into sound. Start: 2012.07.05 … End: 2012.07.09

26: Disquiet0026-composting Record the music to a PSA using sounds sampled from your garbage bin. Start: 2012.06.28 … End: 2012.07.02

25: Disquiet0025-skedsong Turn one or two sets of sonic alerts (project 24) into a song. Start: 2012.06.21 … End: 2012.06.25

24: Disquiet0024-alertsuite Make a set of four functional sounds for email, IM, and other alerts. Start: 2012.06.14 … End: 2012.06.18

23: Disquiet0023-palindrone Make an extended drone structured as a palindrome. Start: 2012.06.07 … End: 2012.06.11

22: Disquiet0022-sonicdecay Record an instrument. Then degrade the recording, and make something of the result. Start: 2012.05.31 … End: 2012.06.04

21: Disquiet0021-4seasons Create a piece with one field recording representing each of the four seasons. Start: 2012.05.24 … End: 2012.05.28

20: Disquiet0020-nodebeat Make a piece of music with the NodeBeat app and one other instrument. Start: 2012.05.17 … End: 2012.05.21

19: Disquiet0019-rojiura Treat the provided photograph as a graphically notated score. Start: 2012.05.10 … End: 2012.05.14

18: Disquiet0018-3×3 Make a three minute track from three sounds, alternating their relative prominence. Start: 2012.05.03 … End: 2012.05.07

17: Disquiet0017-transition Make a seamless transition between an original field recording and a provided, preexisting track. Start: 2012.04.26 … End: 2012.04.30

16: Disquiet0016-backforeground Take samples of sandpaper and dice. Make a track with one as foreground and other as background. Start: 2012.04.19 … End: 2012.04.23

15: Disquiet0015-rgbinteract Create sounds from colors, and make them interact with each other. Start: 2012.04.12 … End: 2012.04.16

14: Disquiet0014-oumupo Do a sonic-narrative version of Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story. Start: 2012.04.05 … End: 2012.04.09

13: Disquiet0013-wildup Make new music from a multitrack recording of a Shostakovich symphony. Start: 2012.03.29 … End: 2012.04.02

12: Disquiet0012-cutpaste Use “cut and paste” to combine two 1928 recordings of rural music. Start: 2012.03.22 … End: 2012.03.26

11: Disquiet0011-motoring Record an everyday mechanical rhythm, and make something of it. Start: 2012.03.15 … End: 2012.03.19

10: Disquiet0010-reflect Remix one of the previous Junto project tracks. Start: 2012.03.08 … End: 2012.03.12

09: Disquiet0009-avian Create a cross-species collaboration between bird song and acoustic guitar. Start: 2012.03.01 … End: 2012.03.05

08: Disquiet0008-voice Rework a spoken-word recording of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. Start: 2012.02.23 … End: 2012.02.27

07: Disquiet0007-subtract Create by removing material from an existing field recording. Start: 2012.02.16 … End: 2012.02.20

06: Disquiet0006-cylinder Remix three archival Edison cylinder recordings. Start: 2012.02.09 … End: 2012.02.13

05: Disquiet0005-layer Add sounds to a pre-existing field recording of everyday life. Start: 2012.02.02 … End: 2012.02.06

04: Disquiet0004-mfischer Remix the Marcus Fischer piece “Nearly There.” Start: 2012.01.26 … End: 2012.01.30

03: Disquiet0003-glass Record a live performance for “expanded glass harp.” Start: 2012.01.19 … End: 2012.01.23

02: Disquiet0002-duet Duet for fog horn and train whistle — using only those two provided samples. Start: 2012.01.12 … End: 2012.01.16

01: Disquiet0001-ice Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it. Start: 2012.01.05 … End: 2012.01.09

And this is the initial post I made on Disquiet.com, announcing the project on January 7, 2012: “Sneek Peek.”

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Stonesthrow Migration from drop.io to Soundcloud (Instrumental Hip-Hop MP3)

[ November 8, 2010 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The Stonesthrow label’s weekly sample melees recently migrated to the sound-file community soundcloud.com from the cloud-storage service drop.io (the latter of which is due to be shut down, following its acquisition by Facebook). It will be interesting to see how, if at all, the backend-technology shift influences the ongoing competitions. For now, it’s difficult to think of a significant downside to the move away from drop.io.

That’s nothing against drop.io; the service had regularly improved its interface over time. But one of the major benefits of the Soundcloud interface is that each participating musician will have a distinct personal page, so if a listener enjoys one track, it will be all the easier to locate other tracks by the same person. When the Stonesthrow Beat Battles were on drop.io, collating the various contributors felt a bit like being a character on the AMC TV series Rubicon, trying to track down information on mysterious figures who post coded missives online and leave a disparate and disconnected approximation of a data trail.

Beat Battle #192 is happening right now, which gives us time to focus on the well-attended #191. For readers just coming upon the idea of a Beat Battle, the way it works is that all the participants have a set amount of time, a little less than a week, to construct a beat (that is, a hip-hop-oriented backing track) based on a shared sound source. For contest #191, that sample was a bit of mellow instrumental pop jazz by Don Julian and the Larks (aka the Meadowlarks), titled “Just Tryin’ to Make It.” With a lightly swinging rhythm and a sweet lead saxophone, the track had numerous sample-able moments. Beatmaking tends to fall into two camps: reworking known music and crate-digging for rarities. The Larks track falls into the latter camp.

To these ears, the winner of #191 should have been Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Tictoc, who took the enjoyably subdued tune and torqued it into a noisily looping monster, somewhere between the skronk symphonies of Glenn Branca and the dense collages of Public Enemy:

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com. Original contest announcement, with link to source audio, at stonesthrow.com.

Speaking of the demise of drop.io, there was a piece by PC Magazine‘s John C. Dvorak (at pcmag.com) about the (much reported but still not yet in effect) demise of drop.io, in which he decried the fragility of a cloud-based Internet ecology: “It’s like a bone yard. Blame the cloud. You’ve basically wasted years of effort saving cool Web sites with bookmarks for no reason.” The piece is worth a reading, though it offers no apparent solution. It also begs the question, are dead links a massive problem? Putting all your data in one basket, as it were, is a problem, but that’s true whether the basket is in the cloud or in your basement server. Either way, it’s an avoidable one; drop.io only had so much impact on the Internet, but imagine Flickr.com suddenly going belly-up. In addition, there’s a mistaken fetish quality to the perceived eternal nature of links; maybe there’s something to be said for data that disappears.

It’s wait and see for now on how the Stonesthrow switch to Soundcloud from drop.io will play out. It seems like a win for participants and listeners, but perhaps the relative loss of anonymity won’t prove to be a boon — maybe the looseness of drop.io-era gave producers reassurance that their copyright-meddlesome habits wouldn’t be easily trackable, and the Soundcloud mode will be less attractive. For now, the Beat Battles go on.

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The Spoils of the Beat Battle

[ January 26, 2010 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Been awhile since the last check-in at the ongoing Beat Battles series hosted by stonesthrow.com, the popular message board of its namesake record label.

The latest, number 151, like all previous Beat Battles, involves tossing up a beat-friendly sample and seeing which battler can push it further along.

As always, among the entries you’ll find both rudimentary cut’n'paste, and some inspired executions — and also as always, once you’ve listened to a handful of the mixes (at least 38 files were uploaded to the arena, at drop.io/battle151), you won’t listen to the original the same way again.

This time around, the source material is a tinny bit of rhythmic simplicity, though it has just enough different segments — old-school beats, Casio-quality congas, some vocoded chanting — to allow for numerous mixing outcomes.

The original is available as a download, but not for streaming, at mediafire.com. Among the highlights of the contest are those by bit1 (MP3), who provides a slo-mo version, all laconic hand claps, buzzy atmospherics, and a riff that suits the downtempo approach, and insDrumental (MP3), who judging by the sheer internal-combustion complexity of the outcome may have put more effort into his entry than a good number of his competitors combined.

The winner, chosen demo-cratically by votes on a separate message thread (at stonesthrow.com), was mplssoul, who worked in au courant sped-up vocals and a stuttery beat (MP3).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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The direct links and streaming above may not function properly, but either way, be sure to spend some time at the drop.io/battle151 site, where the entries reside. The service continues to up its game, now allowing for Zip downloading of a given folder. Also give a read to the comments that trail each entry, evidence of the supportive community of producers that has built up around the Stones Throw Beat Battle.

And on to battle 152 …

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The Rashomon of Remixing (MP3s)

[ July 31, 2009 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

There are few pleasures as richly kaleidoscopic as the Rashomon of Remixing: the online beat battle.

Two of the foremost beat fight clubs are located at cratekings.com and stonesthrow.com. In the message boards at both sites, disparate producers, most weaned on hip-hop, take a shared sample and do with it what they will.

Consider the latest from Stones Throw — the 126th beat battle hosted by that great record label. The originating cut is a mostly instrumental bit of soul, “Look What You’ve Done to Me.” And as of this evening, more than two dozen renditions have been posted, key among them an entry by Theory Hazit that takes the initial funk and cuts it up into something just broken enough to be entirely contemporary (MP3).

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Then there’s DJ Earl-e, who slows it to a spartan pulse, the guitar flashing past like a distant comet (MP3), and, just to single out one other fine entry, an edit by Density & Time, which ratchets up the guitar into something approximating hard rock, though the looped beat ensures it’s never mistakable for anything but raw hip-hop (MP3).

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View the full set of entries in chronological order at drop.io/stmbbattle126 — especially should the links above fail to function. Witness the original posts and voting at, respectively, stonesthrow.com and stonesthrow.com.

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Stones Throw Beat Battle MP3s

[ June 25, 2009 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Last week’s Beat Battle at stonesthrow.com/messageboard yielded a victory for a newcomer to the ongoing audio-mixing throwdowns. The participant named biz20 had only joined the boards on June 17, a few days after the battle began. Nonetheless, his slurry, loping entry won best in class. Perhaps he got extra credit for having done what so few other beatmakers do, especially in contests such as this one, which is that he crafted an opening and a close to the track: it begins like a piece of vinyl slowly being brought up to speed, and ends (in a mirroring moment) as if someone had yanked the plug from his turntable.

Streaming audio and direct-download MP3 links aren’t functioning, but you can check out the original sample and over four dozen entries, including biz20′s, at drop.io/stmbbattle120; the initial discussion at stonesthrow.com; and the final votes at stonesthrow.com.

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