Musicians who make drum’n’bass, electronic pop’s avant-garde extreme, often incorporate the sounds of video games and children’s toys. Bogdan Raczynski mines everything from tin xylophones to windup noisemakers, plus a wide array of modern synthesizers, to construct his purposefully distracted music on Boku Mo Wakaran (Rephlex). Perhaps this vein of sampling is intended to provide familiar focal points amid the hallucinogenic goings-on. More likely, though, those sounds are important touchstones — the sonic memories that inform Raczynski’s work, most of which bounces around with the pace of an arcade game. The bass end hums like an ominous, circling death ray, while melodies (or their nearest equivalent) ricochet about at maddening speeds. There are moments of peace among the 26 tracks here, notably the elegiac closer, but Raczynski loses patience with patience fairly quickly.
Current Activities
Upcoming
• December 13, 2021: This day marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of Disquiet.com.
• December 28, 2021: This day marks the 10th anniversary of the Instagr/am/bient compilation.
• January 6, 2021: This day marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.Recent
• July 28, 2021: This day marked the 500th consecutive weekly project in the Disquiet Junto music community.
• There are entries on the Disquiet Junto in the book The Music Production Cookbook: Ready-made Recipes for the Classroom (Oxford University Press), edited by Adam Patrick Bell. Ethan Hein wrote one, and I did, too.
• A chapter on the Disquiet Junto ("The Disquiet Junto as an Online Community of Practice," by Ethan Hein) appears in the book The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning (Oxford University Press), edited by Stephanie Horsley, Janice Waldron, and Kari Veblen. (Details at oup.com.)Ongoing
• The Disquiet Junto series of weekly communal music projects explore constraints as a springboard for creativity and productivity. There is a new project each Thursday afternoon (California time), and it is due the following Monday at 11:59pm: disquiet.com/junto.
• My book on Aphex Twin's landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, was published as part of the 33 1/3 series, an imprint of Bloomsbury. It has been translated into Japanese (2019) and Spanish (2018).
disquiet junto
Background
Since January 2012, the Disquiet Junto has been an ongoing weekly collaborative music-making community that employs creative constraints as a springboard for creativity. Subscribe to the announcement list (each Thursday), listen to tracks by participants from around the world, read the FAQ, and join in.Recent Projects
• 0506 / Wipe Out / The Assignment: Take something whole and erase half of it.
• 0505 / Line Out / The Assignment: Share a track, get feedback, and give feedback.
• 0504 / Transform Formula / The Assignment: Take a sound, change it, and contrast that with the original.
• 0503 / Sing Song / The Assignment: Record a song using only your voice transformed beyond recognition.
• 0502 / Global Swarming / The Assignment: Create a swarm of imaginary insects.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 506 consecutive weeks to date.