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 it, send me an email at marc@disquiet.com with “Disquiet Junto List” as the subject line.

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:

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

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

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

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.”

As of January 31, 2012, this is a Twitter list of Disquiet Junto participants: twitter.com/nofi/disquiet-junto.

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.

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).

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 …

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).

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).

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.

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.

● New Online Remix Community, and Its Founder’s Thesis (remixin.com): One initial impression: in a neat act of playing egg'n'chicken, on the remixin.com website's navigation bar, the "Remixes" category precedes the "Songs" category. Gotta appreciate a user-interface that’s that philosophically grounded. The website's founder, John Arroyo, has a master's degree in electro-acoustic music (from Dartmouth), and his thesis ("Evolving the Remix," PDF, detail below) reads like a template for remixin.com. Its emphasis is on "iterative," or multi-generational, remixes.

● Aukland Museum Invites Musicians to Score Its Collections (aucklandmuseum.com): The Aukland Museum brought in composer-performers to produce original music for the institution’s major exhibit spaces. Samples of each of the tracks are available online. Participants include Tiki Taane, Tim Coster, Don McGlashan, Richard Francis, Rachel Shearer, Phil Dadson, Chris Adams, Rosy Parlane, and Nathan Haines. (Via newmusicstrategies.com.)

● Call for Submissions: Only 8-Bitters Need Apply (offworld.com): Aspiring, self-restricting, retro-minded computer musicians, take note: the boingboing.net video-game hub offworld.com has a call out to 8-bit composers to help put together a score for some vintage, but currently silent, footage of "an anonymous Atari Computer Camp excursion." Me, I never attended an Atari camp. Trying to remember if there was a TRS-80 equivalent at the time… (Via synthtopia.com.)

● Grey Market: Scott Tuma and Mike Weis "On Cox" (radiofreechicago.typepad.com): A link to the eminently attenuated folktronic track "On Cox", off the limited edition album Taradiddle by Scott Tuma (Souled American, Boxhead Ensemble) and Mike Weis (Zelienople): MP3. According to the releasing label, digitalisindustries.com, its run of 300, vinyl-only copies is sold out.

● Among the Subjects at August’s Edinburgh Interactive Festival: "Sound-Only Games" (edinburghinteractivefestival.com, via music4games.net)

● Over a Dozen Artists to Lead June 7 Public "Soundwalks" in New York City (issueprojectroom.org)

● Toronto’s Contact Ensemble Plays Brian Eno‘s ‘Discreet Music’ (villagevoice.com)

● Today, May 23, Is Radiophonic Creation Day (shakerattleroll.org)

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.

Looking to battle, too. Like the cratekings.com forums, stonesthrow.com hosts ongoing Beat Battles, in which entrants take a communal sample and make something new from it. The most recent battle, number 115 (you read that right), had over 50 participants (you read that right, too).

The house rules are simple, and purposefully restrictive. You’re allowed that one sample, which you can cut’n'splice as you please. There’s an admonition against keyboards, and you can submit only one mix per contest.

There are some masterful little productions among the submissions in contest 115. Dubman‘s upbeat “Chicken of the Sea” (MP3) is an organ-crazed, uncharacteristically upbeat affair, while AJ‘s “stmb bb 115″ uses some backward masking to bring a turntablistic flair to the work (MP3). And while most of the productions have a rap-ready appeal, there’s some abstraction afoot: the cut’n'paste “kvu_STMB115″ has some extended breaks that are downright leftfield — for fun, call its creator Will.i.am S. Burroughs (MP3).

While they’re enjoyable on their lonesome, the best way to appreciate a Beat Battle like this one is to listen to the whole group, which provides a broken-kaleidoscope view of the original track. That organ so central to the Dubman track (which won the battle vote), for example, is reduced to a halting cadence on Saphyre‘s “Stonesthrow15″ (MP3)

The original post is at stonesthrow.com, and voting closed this past Friday at stonesthrow.com. The full set is at drop.io (the track titles veer toward the unintelligible, and I’m not sure which of them is the original sample). There appears to be an expiration date built into those MP3 URLs, but it’s not clear when it is, so if you find the material of interest, download sooner than later.

The next Stones Throw Beat Battle, number 116, is based on “The Paisley Window Pane” by late-1960s folk-pop duo Wendy and Bonnie. This time around, the source is helpfully titled “This Is What You Need to Sample” at the drop site, drop.io/stmb116. (The song was apparently sampled previously by Super Furry Animals on the opening track to their 2003 album Phantom Power, titled “Hello Sunshine.”)

Original forum post at cratekings.com.

1. Composer David Stutz‘s quasi-Gregorian a capella musical accompaniment to Neal Stephenson‘s novel Anathem (disquiet.com).
2. Two DJ sets by Wobbly (aka Jon Leidecker) of mixes from his appearance at a recent Cluster concert, including a century-spanning collection of music related to birdsong, featuring work by David Tudor, Wendy Carlos, Florian Hecker, Christina Kubisch, and others (disquiet.com).
3. A release by smohm from the netlabel Hexawe, which focuses on music made on the free audio software Little Pig Tracker (disquiet.com).
4. Music made on Automaton, a piece of commercial software (from the company Audio Damage) that applies the cellular automata of Conway’s Game of Life to sound. One of the entries, by Kent Williams (aka Chaircrusher), glitch-ifies Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music” (disquiet.com).
5. Closely mic’d eggshells, courtesy of Steve (Subscape Annex) Burnett  (disquiet.com).

In fact, what’s shown above is a stereo recording of scratching, as posted on the site (freesound.org, MP3) back in March 2005 by a member who goes by Edgar.

True to the spirit of Freesound,  about a year later a member called tripta took Edgar’s sample and wove it into field recordings of an urban soundscape. The result looked and sounded (freesound.org, MP3) like this:

And just a week or so ago, yet another user, teamred, further munched up the further (freesound.org, MP3):

As teamred describes it, “i took nervous.wav and thickened it up in adobe by remixing it against itself and then took that result and ran it through audiomulch.” (Audiomulch is the name of a popular audio-synthesis and composition software package.)