The track is by Schrödinger’s Dog, aka British musician Mike Wolf, who thanks the American musician Margaras (aka Ryan Abbott) for some of the sound manipulation. Track originally posted for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/schrodingers-dog. More on Wolf at twitter.com/strangeloup.

The first half of the hour is Achim Mohné on a trio of turntables (Omnitronics), and the second is Philip Jeck on a pair (Dansettes, we’re informed) and in place of a third, Jeck employs a sampler. Both musicians take a device intended to project, to reproduce, sound and then they explore the device’s unintended sonic mechanisms and consequences. In Mohné capable hands, this means a revelatory series of details born of the tight circling patterns of a record needle caught in a groove, of the turntable’s aged gears moving in place; it’s a fantasia that erupts from the sleep induced by the cycling’s monotony. Jeck, with his sampler, layers his source material for a rousing, seesawing haze (MP3).

The set was recorded by Philip Marshall (“from desk to hard drive”). Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. More on Mohné at achimmohne.de, and on Jeck at philipjeck.com. Photo above by credited to Mike Harding and Philip Marshall.

Musics from disparate cultures that occur during a similar era might have shared dispositions, shared characteristics, that become clear only as time progresses. Case in point: Ethan Hein‘s recent experiment in employing a Buchla modular synthesizer to rework source material from hip-hop, specifically the human beatboxing of Doug E Fresh. Fresh isn’t himself self-evident in the track, so transformed are his syllables. But the vibrancy of the track makes sense when the listener is informed of the source material. Hein reports that it is a rough draft of a piece for a class he is taking with Morton Subotnik, who back in 1963 was responsible for commissioning the development of the Buchla, which was the first analog synthesizer: “Rough mix of my newest Buchla epic,” writes Hein, “with some processed beatboxing by the great Doug E Fresh. Presently long and unstructured. Future iterations will probably be shorter and more orderly.”

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/ethanhein. Earlier homework by Hein for his Subotnick class: “The Modular Harmonica.” More on Hein at ethanhein.com.

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:

This is of my introductory comments:

These are of Karuna:

This is of Shanley/Cinchel:

This is of Esposito and Soliday:

The audio track is hosted at archive.org.

More on the core performers: Aroon Karuna / Vapor Lanes at soundcloud.com/vaporlanes, Erik Schoster at hecanjog.com, Jason Shanley / Cinchel at cinchel.com, Jason Soliday at jsoliday.com, Jeff Kolar at jeffkolar.us, Jon Monteverde / XYZR_KX at jonmonteverde.com, Joshua Davison / Stringbot at stringbot.com. More on Schoster’s Milwaukee colleague Tank at wctank.com. More on Esposito at his wikipedia.org page. More on Kg Price at kgprice.com. And more on Ryan T Dunn at liscentric.com. More on the Disquiet Junto at soundcloud.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.

• Monteverde/XYZR_KX wrote at his jonmonteverde.com site, where, among other things, he contrasted his Enemy performance with his earlier glass-harp contribution to the Junto project:

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.

So I was messing about with Animoog on the iPad and thought I would combine some live noodling with some field recordings of household gadgets. The recordings used an induction coil pickup to capture the normally unheard electromagnetic signals in a Sony portable CD player, iPad, laptop and mobile phone. Animoog is probably the best synth app currently available and has a superb level of tactile control using the buchla style keys which allow a huge range of expression when combined with the modulation routing. Anyway, done in one take, warts and all – Dubelectrons…

Savaran is Wales-based musician Mark Walters, more on whom at twitter.com/savaran_music and savaranmusic.wordpress.com. Track originally posted for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/savaran. Image above is of the Animoog iPad app interface (moogmusic.com).

At 79, Morton Subotnick is by no means resting on his laurels, as substantial as those laurels may be. Several years ago, Subotnick, one of the co-developers of the first analog synthesizer, which Don Buchla constructed in 1963, started using Ableton Live in his own performances and recordings — which is a bit like if Les Paul had started using an iPad in his weekly sessions at the Iridium. But the fact that Subotnick did fiddle with and then embrace the Live software is an emblem of his trademark curiosity and creative energy. I had the opportunity to talk with Subotnick in advance of a pair of upcoming Colorado events — one at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs and the other at the Communikey Festival in Boulder. He’s touring and performing with Lillevan, the German visual artist. My interview appears today in the Colorado Springs Independent. Below is one back’n'forth from the Q&A. I will post more of the full transcript here at Disquiet.com at a later date.

Marc Weidenbaum: Does new technology help you achieve old musical ideas, or does it introduce new musical ideas?

Morton Subotnick: When my mother died, I got some boxes of old stuff and I found an essay I had written, I think, in high school.

It was a short story that described a time in the future when I came into a concert when they were doing a late Beethoven string quartet. The four musicians were on the stage with no instruments. They were sitting in chairs and they had bands around their arms and chests, attached to their chairs, and they had their music in front of them — and with their bodies and their minds they were playing their parts.

There was no sound in the auditorium. It was not quite like brain waves, it was more a physical thing; they were able to project the music through the electric currents in the room.

So, I’m still struggling to realize the ideas I had in 1960 and 1961. And I’m getting really close.

More on the Colorado Springs event at the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at uccs.edu and on Communikey at communikey.us. Read the interview (“Patch Cord Godfather”) at csindy.com.

The above video, from youtube.com, shows Subotnick and Lillevan performing live at Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria in 2010. (And many thanks to Ethan Hein, of ethanhein.com, for an assist in getting the interview to happen.)

The Disquiet Junto Group on SoundCloud each week employs procedural restraint as a springboard for compositional creativity. Over 150 musicians around the world have participated. At this concert, Chicago-area Junto participants will each perform a piece of “expanded glass harmonica,” and additional original work.

When: Thursday, April 19

Where: Enemy Sound
1550 North Milwaukee Ave., 3rd Floor
Chicago, IL 60622

Tickets: Donation requested
Door: 8:00pm
Concert: 9:00pm

(For those not able to attend, the event will stream live at numbers.fm.)

Who’s Playing:

• Aroon Karuna / Vapor Lanes
soundcloud.com/vaporlanes

• Erik Schoster
hecanjog.com

• Jason Shanley / Cinchel
cinchel.com

• Jason Soliday
jsoliday.com

• Jeff Kolar
jeffkolar.us

• Jon Monteverde / XYZR_KX
jonmonteverde.com

• Joshua Davison / Stringbot
stringbot.com

Plus possible guests

More info at:

http://enemysound.com/?p=805

The easier to remember URL for this page is:

disquiet.com/juntoenemychicago120419

Above images drawn from the third Disquiet Junto project.

Then again, that bliss has a functional purpose, so perhaps there is evidence of pressure, in the form of sonic self-medication. In either case, it’s a lovely 20-plus-minute piece of glisten and pluck, of sheer, warm drone that cycles round and round, occasionally propelled by a light ping of a guitar string. The photo above is of Ritger’s setup, and this is his brief description of what he’s up to:

Last week, I dusted off an old four-track tape machine that had been given to me by a friend. After reacquainting myself with the unit’s basic controls — and battling some rather finicky output jacks — I managed to lay down some noise during a late night session. This is the first of what I hope to be many more tape-based recordings made over the next few months. Recorded with guitar, pedals and laptop.

The listener comments to the track allow him to further explain his process. In response to a query “blurred by the magnetic materials?” he responded “Only ever so slightly…I was actually really surprised by the fidelity of the tape.” And he clarified that there was additional, digital manipulation: “Yes. I tracked to tape, then bounced each of the tracks to Ableton,” the popular software platform. “I confess that I did some ‘in the box’ EQing and added some reverb, but the original recordings were really quite clean…especially for such a cheap box!”

The date and the word “session” in the track’s title suggest this is both a sketch of a track and a sketch of things to come. (And as such, it’s a solid example of music as ephemera, of the way SoundCloud has encouraged musicians to post not just final works, but works-in-progress, something I wrote about at some length this past week.) In the comments, he confirms that he has more such tape experiments ahead: “Definitely! Just bought a whole new stack of cassettes. Will be using these for the foundations of a bunch of new solo work.”

Track originally posted for free download at at soundcloud.com/radere. More on Radere/Ritger at twitter.com/falsereactions and falsereactions.tumblr.com.

Speech Jam: Geeta Dayal, author of the 33 1/3 book on Brian Eno’s Another Green World, has taken residence at Wired’s website, which is good news. In one of her first wired.com posts, she covered the “Japanese speech-jamming gun” and smartly highlights precedents ranging from J.G. Ballard to Karlheinz Stockhausen. (Additional coverage at technologyreview.com and io9.com.)

App Updates: These are all iOS, though some if not all also apply to their Android versions. Thicket has added three new modes. NodeBeat has added MIDI support, and expanded the number of savable recordings. Ambiance has added the ability to record sounds and to play sounds in “background” mode, among other things. The eDrops app has added new sounds and the ability to load and save patterns. Audioboo seems to have mostly focused on infrastructure for its latest update. Air has added AirPlay support. Reactable has added access to the community area, “save and view” performances, and more.

Social Bullet: I wrote the following to someone asking for how to “use” “social media” to “promote” their music: “The whole social media thing is complicated. There is no generally applicable answer. I would say the following, broadly: make sure you participate. For example, the Junto project had rules, and to have posted on it without reading the Info page was a matter of not really participating. Make sure if you’re on Twitter and Facebook and SoundCloud that you actively participate: post, reply to other people’s posts, comment on their music. This will, in time, lead to a stronger sense of community. You’re find musicians with whom you have things in common, and you’ll support each other in your pursuits.” (The context was correspondence with someone who had posted a track to the Disquiet Junto project on Soundcloud.com that didn’t have anything to do with the current project.)

The track was posted by Jesse Cox of Searcy, Arkansas, at his soundcloud.com/the-ordinary page. He’s also posted, for comparison’s sake, the “original” (unmuffled) recording. As he points out in the track posting, “you just hear the clicks of the tines and other inner workings.” The muffling does the opposite of what is expected: it exposes. You hear through the original song, and what you hear is the mechanism itself.