The Disquiet Junto is a group I founded on Soundcloud.com. The purpose of the group is to use constraints to stoke creativity. Each Thursday evening I post a clearly defined compositional assignment, and members of the Junto are to complete the assignment by 11:59pm the following Monday. The initial Junto assignment was made on January 5, 2012, the first Thursday of the new year.
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 the suscription list, you can join up here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.
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:
21: Disquiet0021-4seasons
Create a piece with one field recording representing each of the four seasons.
Start: 2012.05.24 … End: 2012.05.28
20: Disquiet0020-nodebeat
Make a piece of music with the NodeBeat app and one other instrument.
Start: 2012.05.17 … End: 2012.05.21
19: Disquiet0019-rojiura
Treat the provided photograph as a graphically notated score.
Start: 2012.05.10 … End: 2012.05.14
18: Disquiet0018-3×3
Make a three minute track from three sounds, alternating their relative prominence.
Start: 2012.05.03 … End: 2012.05.07
17: Disquiet0017-transition
Make a seamless transition between an original field recording and a provided, preexisting track.
Start: 2012.04.26 … End: 2012.04.30
16: Disquiet0016-backforeground
Take samples of sandpaper and dice. Make a track with one as foreground and other as background.
Start: 2012.04.19 … End: 2012.04.23
15: Disquiet0015-rgbinteract
Create sounds from colors, and make them interact with each other.
Start: 2012.04.12 … End: 2012.04.16
14: Disquiet0014-oumupo
Do a sonic-narrative version of Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story.
Start: 2012.04.05 … End: 2012.04.09
13: Disquiet0013-wildup
Make new music from a multitrack recording of a Shostakovich symphony.
Start: 2012.03.29 … End: 2012.04.02
12: Disquiet0012-cutpaste
Use “cut and paste” to combine two 1928 recordings of rural music.
Start: 2012.03.22 … End: 2012.03.26
11: Disquiet0011-motoring
Record an everyday mechanical rhythm, and make something of it.
Start: 2012.03.15 … End: 2012.03.19
10: Disquiet0010-reflect
Remix one of the previous Junto project tracks.
Start: 2012.03.08 … End: 2012.03.12
09: Disquiet0009-avian
Create a cross-species collaboration between bird song and acoustic guitar.
Start: 2012.03.01 … End: 2012.03.05
08: Disquiet0008-voice
Rework a spoken-word recording of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.
Start: 2012.02.23 … End: 2012.02.27
07: Disquiet0007-subtract
Create by removing material from an existing field recording.
Start: 2012.02.16 … End: 2012.02.20
06: Disquiet0006-cylinder
Remix three archival Edison cylinder recordings.
Start: 2012.02.09 … End: 2012.02.13
05: Disquiet0005-layer
Add sounds to a pre-existing field recording of everyday life.
Start: 2012.02.02 … End: 2012.02.06
04: Disquiet0004-mfischer
Remix the Marcus Fischer piece “Nearly There.”
Start: 2012.01.26 … End: 2012.01.30
03: Disquiet0003-glass
Record a live performance for “expanded glass harp.”
Start: 2012.01.19 … End: 2012.01.23
02: Disquiet0002-duet
Duet for fog horn and train whistle — using only those two provided samples.
Start: 2012.01.12 … End: 2012.01.16
01: 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.
As of May 21, 2012, there is a dedicated Twitter account for the Disquiet Junto: twitter.com/djunto.
In a clear case of more allowing for less to occur, the team-up of powerhouses Karlheinz Essl and Hans Tammen is a rich improvisation between the former’s laptop and the latter’s computer-processed guitar. To listen is often to hear neither, and to forget frequently that anyone, let alone two people, is playing. The opening track, “Brutz,” is often little more than flittering nuances. The guitar evaporates in the laptop’s processing, and the dual computers yield slivers of sound, drones that might just be the result of an ungrounded line, effects that could be artifacts in the sound recording. There’s a moment, for example, in a track titled “Prelock” when it sounds as if we’ve left the concert hall (the work was recorded live at Harvestworks in New York City back in May 2010) and wandered down to the subway. Elsewhere, there’s a point in “Nomisola” when piano chords are heard, but they drift away, subsumed in the nether-absence of obfuscating noises and general compositional entropy. Later, in the same track, what might be a guitar chord but resembles an archival orchestral recording gets tossed here and there like seaweed as it nears a shore, where it will soon dry and, soon enough, flutter away.
Much of the Mizati album ydna, released late last year, is a collection of slight elements aligned in unlikely combinations, among the most delectable of such combinations being those that mix emotionally remote piano lines with slender fragments of electronic percussion. There’s something special to how the piano here is almost inhuman in its simplicity, and how that spare quality allows for a camaraderie, a kind of cold simpatico, with the far more mechanized beat. The track titled, simply, “G” may be the highlight, its chords spaced apart to such an extent that they often decay fully before a new one enters in — an effect that is amplified, so to speak, as the close nears, when the decay fades into a drone that never quite seems to end (
Among the many good things that have come from the increasing prevalence of drone-based music is a clarification, a realignment, of the word “industrial.” Thanks in addition to the rise in field recordings as broadly produced and consumed sonic media, the word “industrial” has ceased meaning simply a pounding nightife nihilism akin to an ersatz jackhammer beat, and come to mean a sonic aura akin to or actually resulting from a mechanical process. And that why it is a term that can be applied to much of Colliding Textures, a four-song release by Mon0 on the great Test Tube netlabel. The album’s initial two tracks, “Cathedral of the Lost” (
