Leonardo Rosado‘s “Sharp Knives Eyes” opens with what could easily be, or be mistaken for, the warning signals of fog-deep lighthouses, muffled and solemn sirens that pulse slowly and forbiddingly. As the track proceeds, the sounds soon move from apparent naturalism to a more representative approach, as what appears to be a slowly implemented guitar registers a barren sonic landscape. The music straddles the line between enticing and remote, between the depiction of a stark realm, and being pleasing in its solitary presence.
As of this typing, the 18 seconds of static that I recorded off my hotel radio in Evanston, Illinois, last weekend has been played over 350 times on soundcloud.com. That’s 105 minutes of a bit of noise that served more as a trigger for an extrapolative thought process than as actual listening. The noise occurred when I hit a button marked “classical” on the bedside radio. The button was, presumably, intended to be preset to the local classical radio station. Instead, it was untuned, or tuned to a near-dead zone between stations, yielding a particularly minimal techno.
Now the frequent SoundCloud poster, and Disquiet Junto participant, Jmmy Kpple has gone and riffed on the source material. His tweaking of the 18 seconds has extended it by nearly three full minutes, which collectively are titled “AntiGravity Certification #4 [@disquiet's radio].” It’s the originating rough noise, with its beat slowed to from a twitch to a scratch, along which a sonorously fluctuating wave hovers, while another flanges up and down, like something emitted from a bit of sci-fi tech in a Cold War–era horror film when the device gets a little too close to a man paid union scale to roam the set in a rubber suit. Which is to say, it sounds great.
Kpple tagged the creation with the characteristic “cheap concrete” genre neologism. It was especially interesting to have Kpple’s take on the near tabula rasa of that static, because the other work enacted under that name has been both enticing and remote — Kpple’s identity on SoundCloud (and at twitter.com/jmmy_kppl) is one of the most accomplished acts of ecstatic minimalism in recent memory: in sound, and image (note the slightly obscured avatar up top, with its mix of Negativland-like celebrity blankness and serrated-GIF disruption), and text (a typical Kpple track comment is a mix of vibrant disjuncture and odd characters turned into glyphs through repetition and spacing, such as “///Thanks! I guess i chose *undramatic* when i should have said something like u n e v en t f u l perhaps” and “[ w a r m c r e a k i n g & d r e a m s c r a p e &rt;”).
Now, given the Instagram sale for US$1 billion, I would value the free compilation inspired by its photo sharing at least a couple of million dollars. Finding a welcoming community both to spur on new musical ideas and share the results? Priceless.
For communities of creative individuals, working under shared constraints can result in some incredible work, showing off what artists can put together with a limited set of tools. A great example is the “beat battle,” in which competing musicians are all given the same sample and compete to build the best instrumental track out of it.
Part of what is rewarding about these two stories is that they come from beyond the realm of publications that are focused solely on music as end-product. Much of CDM’s coverage is on the technology of music-making, and the Verge is pretty squarely in the gadget-journalism category. Between the two articles, an additional approximately 5,000 listens were registered at soundcloud.com/disquiet in the 48 hours or so after the posts appeared, and the Disquiet Junto had almost half a dozen new participants, bringing the total to 170 as of project 16.
On Thursday, April 19, 2012, seven members of the Disquiet Junto and three of their guest accompanists played a concert of music for expanded glass harp at Enemy in Chicago. The concert was also available for live streaming at numbers.fm. It was the first group concert to develop out of the Junto project series. And what follows is audio (MP3) of the full evening. As the founder of the Disquiet, I am heard framing the evening at the opening, intermission (between Soliday and Monteverde), and end. I was visiting Chicago from San Francisco, where I live.
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The performers were in order: Aroon Karuna, Erik Schoster (with Jason Nanna on glass harmonica and Wesley Charles Tank on vocals), Jason Shanley (aka Cinchel), Jason Soliday (with Michael Esposito on glass harmonica), Jon Monteverde (aka XYZR_KX), Joshua Davison (aka Stringbot), Jeff Kolar (with Kg Price on glass harmonica), and Ryan T Dunn.
Dunn’s brief performance was an unplanned, and welcome, closing to the evening. Throughout the concert, he watched over the broadcast. The instructions to the other performers were to do two pieces: one of “expanded glass harmonica” and the other a work-in-progress they wanted to share with their fellow musicians and the audience. There are some extended silences and glitches/artifacts in the audio.
Dunn’s playing wasn’t the only surprise. Esposito had driven in from Indiana, and the crew that was the largest, Schoster’s, drove the furthest: from Milwaukee. Thankfully expanding the range of the performances, Tank read a poem through Schoster’s work. It closed with this memorable stanza:
it’s cold everywhere here…
i’m inventing a month called ‘revember’
where there’s reverb on every life sound
and you get to relive warm wet
memories
The evening was just tremendous. The Enemy venue, in a large third-floor space in Wicker Park, has great sound, and the audience was attentive — barely anyone spoke at all during the performances. Despite the fact that everyone performing was from Chicago (or driving distance), no one who performed knew everyone who was performing. For example Soliday, who manages the Enemy space, only knew one of the performers in advance of the evening. The glass harp was selected as the subject of the evening because, as I note in my spoken introduction, it was an important piece of the Disquiet Junto series. The glass harp project was the third Junto project, and its intent was to make clear to participants that the Junto wasn’t just a sample-of-the-week endeavor; instead, it required that participants perform live. Thus, what better subject for the first large-scale Junto concert (I use the phrase “large scale” to distinguish the Chicago show from the times when members of the Junto have performed some of their project material live in other settings).
Someone seated on a couch at Enemy, Sei Jin Lee (twitter.com/sadlypanda), captured these five videos and posted them at youtube.com:
Any additional, post-concert material will be posted here:
• Shanley/Cinchel wrote about his concert experience at his cinchel.com site. He really gets into the spirit of the Junto, which involves talking about musical process as an interative process:
I also have really worked hard these past few months on live sets that a simple and focused. I’ve also now spent well over a year working in the same tuning (DGdgbe low-high) and the past month with the partial capo. its a tuning that seems to lend it self to drone really well. aslo i have spent a lot of time thinking about layers of frequency and focusing on that to really expand the guitar. pitch shifting with the whammy or in abelton to reach registers that the guitar normally doesnt hit. i see/hear a lot of guitar based drone/ambient and i really want to try and carve out a new sound or a fuller sound like mike shiflet or david daniell.
I was emboldened to create sounds by tapping various parts of the glass and the contact mic itself. The latter method produced low thumps that sounded very much like a kick drum, and the piece overall became much more percussive.
The photo at the top of this post is from Shanley/Cinchel’s set and was taken by by Cole Piece (instagr.am). That large box just behind the laptop is a tape delay. And the glass is, indeed, from Brooklyn Brewery. The image counts as a mid-concert update, in that Pierce tweeted it during Cinchel’s set.
Mindshed by Mahoney & Peck on the Ethereal Live netlabel may be live but it is more than ethereal. There is blippy 8bit maneuvering (“The Divine Dark”) that yields broken beats, and Muslimgauze-style modal exploration (“Ghost Transmission”), as well as gaseous meandering (“Interstellar Murmur”). One highlight is a track, “The Pale Blue Dot” (MP3), with pixel percussion, these fissures that seem more like absences, sudden rhythmic moments of digital clarity that lend momentum to a cloud of synthesized dust. The collection comes from three different live performances: from broadcasts on the websites stillstream.com and electo-music.com, and from “City Skies 2011 sets in Atlanta, Georgia.”
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As of this typing, the 18 seconds of static that I recorded off my hotel radio in Evanston, Illinois, last weekend has been played over 350 times on 
Mindshed by Mahoney & Peck on the Ethereal Live netlabel may be live but it is more than ethereal. There is blippy 8bit maneuvering (“The Divine Dark”) that yields broken beats, and Muslimgauze-style modal exploration (“Ghost Transmission”), as well as gaseous meandering (“Interstellar Murmur”). One highlight is a track, “The Pale Blue Dot” (