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 it, send me an email at marc@disquiet.com with “Disquiet Junto List” as the subject line.
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:
Disquiet0004-mfischer
Remix the Marcus Fischer piece “Nearly There.”
Start: 2012.01.26 … End: 2012.01.30
Disquiet0003-glass
Record a live performance for “expanded glass harp.”
Start: 2012.01.19 … End: 2012.01.23
Disquiet0002-duet
Duet for fog horn and train whistle — using only those two provided samples.
Start: 2012.01.12 … End: 2012.01.16
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.
The Automaton effects unit from 
Anthoney J Hart is a London-based musician who goes by Imaginary Forces. His “CT Room” is a collection of sounds culled from unwitting microphones. There are no divulged secrets, no evidence of ill doings. To the extent that voices are heard, they sound more like Electronic Voice Phenomena than like actual conversation. According to the description that accompanies the piece, the recordings come from forms of communication (video chat rooms, instant messenger services) in which sound was conveyed but text was the primary form of transmission. And thus the verbal component — along with, even more compellingly, the extended near silences — is a mere byproduct of the process. The result is a series of textured static and garbled speech, of curt bits of grey fuzz and thick ropes of drone. Speech is an underutilized component of electronically mediated music and sound art, and here it is successfully sourced for its sonic rather than its literal assets.
Banner Music: I don’t look too deeply into the statistics for this site. When you write about free music and about galleries that require no entry fee, as well as commercial music that often sells in the under-500-unit zone, the whole notion of pageviews can be an exercise in misdirection, if not futility. I do take note, because the dashboard in WordPress (the publishing tool that is this site’s backend) puts the information front and center, that this site seems to get a lot more visitors via Facebook than Twitter, even though I dedicate more time to Twitter than to Facebook. (Perhaps the automated posting of Disquiet’s RSS feed to Facebook that currently occurs is something I should do more of on Twitter? Somehow that doesn’t seem right. My approach to Twitter is conversational.) Anyhow, in the mix of sites sending somewhat significant traffic to this one is a service that was previously unfamiliar: