More on the performance at touchradio.org.uk. More on Menche at danielmenche.blogspot.com. More on the performance space, which has a remarkably designed website, like the Periodic Table of Contents, at yucontemporary.org.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/nq_nhlsqaik. More on Quak at nhlsqaik.com.

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.

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.

Get the full set at archive.org and at ethereallive.wordpress.com. Mahoney & Peck are Mark Mahoney and Michael Peck.

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 work is titled “dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once” and it is credited to Radio Cegeste, which is in fact one Sally Ann McIntyre. McIntyre lives of Dunedin, New Zealand, and Cegeste is her working with a small battery of portable FM radios. The radios, in turn, work in collusion with each other in a small space, in this case in Dunedin gallery, to create a fractured sonic hologram of social activity.

McIntyre is working from a rich theoretical construct, which Radius presents along with the audio on its respective pages at tumblr.com and soundcloud.com. This is an except:

As a site-specific, spectator-less, solo performance, dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once re-constructs and re-imagines personal and public memory through the medium of transmission, as an appropriate framework for uncertain, shifting structural and social realities. Small clusters of radio receivers, constantly shifted around the space, pick up the signal from a stationary mini FM transmitter. These receivers also engage with each other, chattering and heterodyning, becoming analogous to groups of people talking, and the social space of a gallery opening. Such chatter interjects the night airwaves of Dunedin, full of noise, clashing frequencies, and etheric vocal infiltrations, into what is usually perceived as the bounded space, silence and temporal amnesia of the ‘white cube’.

More on Radio Cegeste and Sally Ann McIntyre at radiocegeste.blogspot.com.

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.

But there are other branches, and Prong’s employment over the years, and to varying degrees, of industrial music less as genre and more as nuance has been an interesting, and often enjoyable, thing to observe and listen to. Early on, the essential agent in this was arguably drummer Ted Parsons, who through the simple act of gating his drums — that is, of truncating the sound, lending them them a slightly clipped effect — adopted the aura of electronic percussion. And in turn, those sounds informed the band’s compositions. (Research for this Prong interview led me to get up to date on Parsons’ work, which delightfully led to learning about his Teledubgnosis work: “Digital Dub’s Metal Past.”) Sadly, my favorite Prong track, the one that best exemplifies this approach, never became a core part of the Prong repertoire. Here is a brief segment of the interview that didn’t make the final cut of the story:

Weidenbaum: I interviewed you last in 1990 or 1991, around the time of the Beg to Differ album. I was addicted at the time to the song “Prime Cut.”

Victor: We were recently rehearsing that song, and I knew there was someone who was deeply into that song. So, I guess that was you.

Weidenbaum: Will it be on the greatest hits collection?

Victor: It’s, you know, a little too avant-garde for that compilation.

The compilation mentioned here is due out later this year. Parsons, who is no longer with the band, may, or may not, have been primarily responsible for Prong’s early industrial approach, but Victor certainly himself came to prominence, notably as a participant in Ministry, as well as in Trent Reznor’s Tapeworm project.

Read the full piece at csindy.com.

Get both tracks at restingbell.net, where the liner notes include this explanatory material:

Conception notes
Two spaces, two languages, two focal points, getting so close as synthetical and natural, but never touching.

The first space is black & white, minimal and symbolic. It talks about the beauty of color inside the sound and complicated structures but it has not colors in itself. It is a sort of counterpoint, a reference, a cold therory demonstration, a base of reflexions.

The second space could show colours of structures and physically complicated sounds. The rules that generate them might be very complex, and though unnecessary to be explain. The human perception comes first, on it’s own, at this level.

The first space is more unpretentious and selfgenerateed, the second requires more finely tuned work to take form. But in the end the two spaces are not in conflict. None has more value than the other. They happen separately and simultaniously. The sound reflects this relation, a contrasted proposition between automatic processiong, fixed layer, digital and physical.

Structure
Live audio in the real time.
Live treatments of various objects & contact mics.
Max/msp code in algorithmical sounds.