Get the full set as a Zip archive. More information, including helpful liner notes, at the modiste.com netlabel. More on Essl at essl.at, and on Tammen at tammen.org.

Certainly it is about the use of constraints to stoke creativity. That is the Junto’s stated purpose. But one constraint was to be avoided from the start: the Junto is not a sample-of-the-week endeavor. And thus, at the risk of being met with mass disinclination, the third project was designed to test some boundaries. It required the participants to record a live performance. This meant no post-production, which is something of an anomaly in a realm of music-making that, oftentimes, takes place entirely in a creative zone that would be considered “post-production.” Despite some initial concerns on my part about potentially limiting turnout, almost three dozen musicians uploaded finished tracks.

These were the instructions:

This project is in honor of Benjamin Franklin, after whose Junto Society our little group was named.

In an effort to expand and refine the glass harp, Franklin developed his own lathe-like glass harmonica, which he called the “armonica.” Marie Antoinette took lessons on it and Beethoven composed for it, but Franklin’s invention proved expensive and fragile, and it had a limited lifetime. And it may have given its frequent users lead poisoning.

You are *not* being asked to build a Franklin armonica. But like Franklin, we are going to expand on the glass harp. In our case, we are going to do so digitally.

You’re being asked to use the more common instrument, the glass harp. That involves the familiar “rubbing the top of a wine glass that has water in it” approach:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_harp

The Junto assignment is to record a live performance on the glass harp, and to employ live processing in the performance. There should be no post-production. And there is no length limit for the piece, though I would suggest that anything over 15 minutes may limit the size of your potential audience.

We could just as easily — more easily, really — used samples of glass harps and harmonicas as pre-made building sonic blocks for the piece. But the goal was to be true to Franklin, whose Junto lent its name to our collective endeavor. Franklin was as famous for his inventions and scientific inquiries as he was for his role in the development of the United States government. (An inveterate constructor of organizations — not just of his Junto, but of fire departments, militia, schools, and lending libraries — it’s quite possible to see the U.S.A. as the largest club he helped invent. Our ambitions are not so large.) And since the armonica was developed by him as an instrument for live performance, it seemed only right to use the glass harp in a live setting. (Just as a side note: the title of the piece was inspired by the concept of “expanded cinema.”)

Here, for further background, is an excerpt on the armonica from the Benjamin Franklin biography written by Walter Isaacson:

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, January 19, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 23, as the deadline.

View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0003-glass. As of this writing, there are 35 tracks associated with the tag.

Visit, listen to, and consider joining the group at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto.

A full list of Junto projects is housed on Disquiet.com.

(The images up top are from the tracks contributed, going clockwise from upper left, by: Matthew Barlow, Mark Rushton, Brian Biggs, and Ted Laderas)

The Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963) depicted surreal visions in which the mythological and the quotidian intertwined in enchanting ways. She created fascinating documentation of her explorations of the terrestrial and the otherworldly, a place where sight and sound, scent and taste, sense and fantasy collaborated and contrasted toward a tantalizingly ephemeral end.

This month I had the pleasure of concluding work on a project with Julio César Morales and Max La Rivière-Hedrick that celebrated various facets of Varos’ work and life. Titled La Alquimia de los Sueños (which translates as The Alchemy of Dreams), it was commissioned by the gallery Frey Norris in San Francisco to coincide with an extraordinary Varo exhibit running there through February 25. The project took the form of a dinner, a kind of meal-as-art, held at Engine 43 in San Francisco’s Excelsior neighborhood. There were six courses, each associated with a different magical spell and drawing on the surrealist recipes that Varo had created with her close friend, Leonora Carrington. There’s a January 29 story about the event at nytimes.com (“Break Brick, Break Bread, Break the Mold”).

I. The Sound of Dreams

As for my role, among other things I had the pleasure of interviewing Mexico-born sound artist and musician Guillermo Galindo, who lives in San Francisco, about his participation in the project. As seen up top, in a pair of photos by Andria Lo, he performed at the dinner — not only his own mix of sounds, but also deep shuddering bass lines that drew from Varo’s interest in resonance and vibration. What follows is an excerpt of the full interview, “The Sound of Dreams,” which can be read at engine43.org:

Weidenbaum: Regarding the relationship between Tarot and the collective unconscious, can you talk a bit about specifically the role of sound in dreams?

Galindo: I have found that for most people it is difficult to remember the sound, or sounds, of their dreams. Most people, including me, have an easier time remembering music: music that accompanies the dream, music that is played by someone or, in my case, composition ideas that appear by themselves or performed by myself or someone else. As in real life, dream components have sounds: an explosion, someone walking in high heels, the sound of the rain etc. Having said this, I do think that sounds have their own significance in dreams — a significance not necessarily attached to the visual or narrative elements of a specific dream. In other words, I believe that sounds in dreams do have their own specific symbology.

Weidenbaum: Are there parallels between food and sound you’d like to discuss?

Galindo: I had a Chinese music student who, in order to reconnect to her homeland memories, recorded the sound of herself cooking of Chinese dishes, which she would cook one day each month. Then she would present random photographs of the dishes with the audio of the cooking sounds. Different foods have different textures of sound when one cooks them. This provides information about their physical nature and about the chemical reaction that they have when mixed over the fire with other elements. I think that the purest and most enjoyable “food” sound is the sound of water. I think that the sound of the water falling into a glass is a vital element when enjoying a good drink of water, not to mention the “clink” of the wine glasses, the sound of silverware, or the sound of clay, wooden, or ceramic plates and bowls.

And this is a screenshot that Galindo provided to me of the software setup he utilized when playing live, in addition to a pair of Kaoss Pads and at least four iPods. (It is of higher quality than the casual camera shot I posted on Twitter the night of the event.)

Here, from a post-event summary, is a list of the sounds he developed for each of the courses:

0. XECATL (simulated gigantic ice flutes) independent white noise frequency bands oscillating randomly in chaos.

1. Introduction of 50 Hz.low frequency modulated by 260 Hz. and 2.5 Hz. LFO simultaneously resulting in sudden architectural shaking.

2. Harmonic content evolving from Erik Satie’s Gnossienne #1 as if reproduced by echoing crystal feathers.

3. Multiplication of Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater as if sang by a bleeding heart.

4. Intermittent triple drone in Eb and recurring patchy electric glitches emanating from pure electricity controlled by light boxes. Agustin Lara’s Veracruz emerges from the minuscule speaker of a transistor radio.

5. Modulated low frequency enters the 20 Hz realm as if entering subsonic levels. Low frequency joins polyrhythmic mass reaching a climax buildup made of electronic glitches and samples of heavy metal distorted guitars doubled with baritone sax reaching 120 bpm plus tempos. The sonic storm breaks into total silence.

II. A Brief Fiction

In addition, I served as managing editor on the project, working with the various participants on their written contributions. And I wrote a short story, “Sitting for a Dream,” that is an imaginary scenario inspired by the fact that Mexico City cardiologist Dr. Ignacio Chávez commissioned what yielded the 1957 Varo portrait “Retrato del doctor Ignacio Chávez.” This is an excerpt from the story:

She took his hand in hers and silently led him through several chambers, each its own little world. One was dark and painted like a jungle. Another was covered, walls and ceiling, in billowing cotton tarps that filtered the daylight. He entered the final chamber by himself. Varo stood on the far side, directly opposite the doorway through which he had just walked. She, too, wore a lab coat, her hair pulled back. The room was almost empty. In the center there was a medium-size wooden frame suspended from the ceiling by pulleys. On either side facing the frame was a single chair. He walked toward the frame, and as he approached, so did Varo. He realized she was mimicking him, but not in a rude way. If anything, it was flattering to be the subject of such attention. He walked toward the closer of the two chairs. She approached the other, copying his gait, adjusting her posture to match his.

When they reached their chairs, they both sat down, looking at each other through the frame, as if at a painting. She gave him a little smile, which he acknowledged by removing his hat. In turn, she pulled from her coat pocket a deck of cards. She selected one card, seemingly at random, and turned it toward him. It showed an old sage with a stick, and below it, in English, was written “The Hermit.” She then pulled another card, this one in Spanish. It read “El Corazon.” It was his turn to smile. He recognized it from the lotería. The next card was “La Pera,” and he recalled the tree from the ill-fated mural she had proposed. She saw the recognition in his face, and her shoulders relaxed. Then his shoulders relaxed. Somehow, he found himself now imitating her, unintentionally but naturally. Varo reached under her chair and lifted a small goblet. Taking the hint, Dr. Chavez did the same. Again, he found himself mimicking her — how simply she had cast her spell.

This is the painting that inspired the story, which is readable in full at engine43.org:

III. Notes on Scent

One especially fascinating element of the event was smell. Each course was accompanied by a scent developed by Mirjana Blankenship (of captainblankenship.com), and these scents built one upon the previous as the evening proceeded. The terms for these elements of a collective scent, I learned from Blankenship, are musical: they are “notes.” The deepest is the “base” note, and then there are “heart” and “top” notes above, and they all “decay” over time, much as a struck chord might. The explanation reminded me of an essay by Brian Eno from the magazine Details back in 1992 (“Scents and Sensibility”), in which he described the parallels and intersections between his experiments in smell and sound. Blankenship’s scents (presented in the elegant bottles shown below) were not to be experienced in their own olfactory anechoic chamber. Quite the contrary, they were selected and constructed to mix with the scents inherent in the meal, including the rich smoke that emanated from the hearth in which meat was roasted, and the burnt sugar that resulted from pistachio pralines made on site just moments before they were served (see the very bottom of this post). By intending to mingle rather than command attention, Blankenship’s scents were like the famed “furniture music” of Erik Satie that is understood as a strong precursor of ambient music — sounds that Galindo included in his performance.

More on the exhibit and the gallery at freynorris.com. There’s a wide range of coverage of the La Alquimia de los Sueños event at engine43.org.

I previously participated in A Sors, a project the duo developed, with Norma Listman, for the Warhol Initiative.

(Photos by Andria Lo of andrialo.com.)

The album Floating in Being by Widesky made my top-10 list of favorite free releases from last year, and a recently posted live recording makes a fine follow-up. Taped just three days ago, on January 14, in Seattle, it’s a solo performance by Widesky that mixes foreground and background just as effectively as it does the tensile and the incandescent. There are watery field recordings and harsh textures, there is a layer of broken radio signals that ebb and flow like a tide, but there is also a lovely, sustained undercurrent of angelic guitar, piercing notes that decay so slowly you suspect they never quite fully truly disappear. Widesky lists his equipment as “field recordings, electric guitar, eBow, AM radio, & processing.” The event took place at Gallery 1412 in Seattle, Washington.

Recording originally posted at soundcloud.com/widesky. More on Widesky, aka Seth Chrisman, at effervescent-airwaves.blogspot.com.

The great ongoing Radius broadcast/podcast often takes radio its subject. Those entries carry additional meaning because the series’ name suggests a circumference of available signal, and because the catchy glitchy sound that opens each episode is derived from broadcast technology (see “Entering and Exiting the Electromagnetic Spectrum”). “Rise and Shine” is just such a segment: a live and improvised performance by Emilie Mouchous and Andrea-Jane Cornell that concerns itself with the way the landscape shapes radio signals. The result is an extended conversation played out between thick, wavering tones and momentary snatches of disruption.

At the hosting site, the duo explain the narrative that informs the performance:

The piece responds to the clarity of local signals in Montreal that are obscured in areas directly adjacent to the main radio tower transmitter site atop Mount-Royal. The areas situated in the shadow of the mountain, where there are no sight-lines to the tower, have poor reception because the signal must pass though the ground to reach the receivers. The signal is only received in mono and occasionally cuts out intermittently for indeterminate periods of time.

Rise and Shine begins with undulations, like the intermittent signals in the mountain’s shadow; a rising and falling, an ebb and flow of tones meditatively sweeping through the frequency range that stretch the spectrum that is most receptive to the combination of signals. Once the space is carved out, the piece unfolds at a languorous pace, evocative of a hot summer night when the air is thick and sleep comes in waves carrying episodic dreams linked together by a common thread.

More on the piece at theradius.tumblr.com. Emilie Mouchous and Andrea-Jane Cornell are based in Montréal, Québec.

The exercises provide a good example of a moment when the meaningfulness of the waveforms that are intrinsic to the Soundcloud site can be called into question. A track like “Oscillator vs Guitar pt4″ seems, by gauging its fairly blockish waveform, likely to be less antic than, say, the more vibrant and varied “Oscillator vs Guitar pt3.” The opposite proves to be the case. No close reading of number 3 in the series would prepare the listener for the way the opening oscillator gives way to light figurations that, while angular and active, nonetheless comprise an overall meditative and monastic whole. Number 4, by contrast, is certainly static, but its stasis is woven from anxiety.

The guitar and oscillator series might be read as a series of duets for man and machine, or of a guitarist utilizing the oscillator as a kind of tonal metronome, a drone-keeper that sets a very slow pace.

Track originally posted for free streaming and download at soundcloud.com/passerby. They were all recorded live on October 31 of this year, and are listed as “rehearsals.”

Amorphous music becomes all the more so when live performances are experienced on tape. Take Cloud Shepherd‘s work, for example. With all the gravitas of a dark ritual, it unfold in mystic proportions: droning intonations, whisps of sonic smoke, percussion that seems to resonate with unseen forces. Unseen forces, of course, are key to the listening experience when one hears a recording of a live performance. It isn’t especially clear who is doing what. For a new listener to jazz, it can be a learning experience to distinguish saxophone from trumpet, let alone a tenor sax from an alto. In improvisatory zones that lean toward space music, such as Cloud Shepherd’s appropriately titled album Unknown, the challenge is even more significant. The best response to the challenge is to ignore it. Spend less time trying to sort out what the instrumentation is, and more on the overall flow.

And lest the improvisatory intent and droning undercurrent suggest otherwise, Cloud Shepherd are not without a sense of humor. The lyrics to the first of the album’s five tracks are provided, thanks to a handy Bandcamp tool. These lyrics consist of a single word: “Oohwowwowza.” And while the first four tracks are named for their track numerals, the fifth track appears to be titled “6.”

Cloud Shepherd appears to consist of three members — Andrew Joron, Brian Lucas, and Joseph Noble — though information is somewhat scarce (one album cover appears to feature four individuals). Get Unknown and other Cloud Shepherd music for free download and streaming at cloud-shepherd.bandcamp.com. (Photo borrowed from wehavenozen.blogspot.com.)

Track originally posted at cronicaelectronica.org. More on Valle at alg-label.com.

Over at percussionlab.com, Radere (aka Carl Ritger) posted a live set he performed at this year’s Communikey festival in Boulder, Colorado. Opening with shimmering guitar and cloud-break choral effects, the piece builds in density and intensity, as if the soft-focus sounds are slowly brought into stark relief, and their fractured surfaces are revealed for all their grizzled imperfection, and yet in turn those imperfections come to urge their own sense of wonder. In other words, it’s downright fractal.

I’d interviewed Ritger for a story about Communikey in advance of the festival (“Ghost in the Machine”), and was glad for the opportunity to, belatedly, hear his set. The brief descriptive note at Percussion Lab, and at Ritger’s soundcloud.com/radere account, note that he used “Guitar, pedals and laptop” and that he performed material from two of his releases, A Season in Decline and Lost at Sea, I’m Never Coming Back.

However, like as with any good music, repeated listens brought questions, and so I asked Ritger to discuss the performance a little more thoroughly.

Marc Weidenbaum: What was the equipment you used?

Carl Ritger: The primary element in all of my performances is the guitar, which I run through a constantly evolving array of pedals and processing stages. This particular set was one of my last using my laptop as a processing tool, actually. I had my guitar patched into a preamp, an overdrive, and a variety of delay pedals before hitting the soundcard. From there, the signal went through a bunch of granular effects and things of that nature, resulting in the swelling drones that you hear in the recording. The laptop was also running a few layers of field recordings and textural elements, which were culled from several releases, including stuff I’ve done for the labels Full Spectrum and Basic_Sounds.

Weidenbaum: What was the performance space?

Ritger: I performed at the Communikey headquarters during the festival, which was located in the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a beautiful space with nice hardwood floors and plenty of natural light. Plus, a bunch of my friends from around the country were in the audience, including some I hadn’t seen in years. It was a really nice vibe.

Weidenbaum: What was your aesthetic goal?

Ritger: A lot of that material was produced during a pretty weird period in my life. I was pretty isolated, so I found my aesthetic shifting from quieter, minimalist place to a louder, slightly more abrasive sound. I guess in a sense, working with distortion and feedback more deeply provided a level of catharsis that more subtle forms couldn’t provide me with. The core of what I’ve always been interested in — signal processing, drones, minimalism — was still intact, but the volume was always inching upwards. I actually played a show out here in Boulder shortly after my relocation and the promoter was worried they were going to get their first noise complaint! I would never have imagined being faced with that sort of situation during a performance even just a year ago.

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

It will be interesting to read retrospective impressions, a decade from now, about the generation of musicians who gave themselves over to the drone — a generation of musicians who dispensed with the recognizable and memorable sequences of melodic elements of their recent predecessors, and instead distinctly favored a tonal bliss (and seeming stasis) whose unique properties divulge themselves only through close listening, deep patience, and side-by-side comparison.

There will be vast amounts of music to be revisited, ranging throughout genres, from doom metal gongs to rural country ambience to everday noises derived from the realm of European free improvisation. No doubt the work of William Fowler Collins will be considered. Perhaps drone scholars will focus on the recording of his live performance at the On Land Festival in San Francisco from 2009. An MP3 of it was posted earlier today for free download at the website of the record label Root Strata (rootstrata.com), which sponsored the concert series, and it is already circulating widely. (It’s enclosed in a Zip file and housed on the mediafire.com service.)

I was at the concert. In my review at the time, “On Land Festival, Opening Afternoon,” I noted how Collins, who performed solo, “evoked his adopted home of the southwest by producing rich, feedback-intense approximations of Ennio Morricone soundtracks; he patiently limned the delicate no man’s land between abstraction and melody.” As heard in the MP3, the concert was even darker than description at the time suggests. When the sound of a lap guitar arises, it’s as if a whole world of hurt has been unpacked from a single chord from an old Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys recording. When waves of feedback waft up, it’s like the the entire Neil Young catalog has been set afire. And on the occasion when rhythm dares to present itself, as a nascent chugga-chugga, the failure — the determined failure — to resolve into a deeper, more trenchant phrasing reveals the piece as an especially maudlin vestige of doom metal. The sense of ritual, of ceremony, makes a very strong impression.

Track originally posted at rootstrata.com. More on Collins at williamfowlercollins.com.

He has a new album, The Resurrections Unseen, out on the Type label, and it is streaming freely at soundcloud.com:

More on the new release at typerecords.com.