Keith Rowe and Oren Ambarchi play a mix of guitar and electronics on Flypaper (Staubgold), an exhilaratingly stark album, if such a thing is possible. Their tandem playing has the randomness of field recordings, the spaciousness of great soundscapes and the give-and-take of substantive free improvisation. Flypaper is a pan-generational affair, teaming old-school avant-guitarist Rowe (b. 1952) with a guitarist of a younger generation, Ambarchi (b. 1969), who besides a rich resume of free/noise music has experience in today’s experimental pop-electronic realm, largely as a result of his association with the Touch label (which is home to, among others, Fennesz, who has done his part to make the electric guitar at home in the modern realm of the laptop-computer studio). Over the course of four tracks, “Flypaper I” through “Flypaper IV,” Rowe and Ambarchi tread rarified territory, eking out granular layers of dread and texture, and keeping to stoic rhythms that tend toward the ritual. Rowe can be a tough guitarist to love, because the sounds he himself loves are generally abrasive, and he seems bored by playing the same thing twice. That said, he’s more than happy to play the same thing — a shuddering low tone, a buzzy rasp — for minutes at a time, and to let that thing resolve on its own accord. Only a diehard fan could begin to imagine where he lets off and where Ambarchi comes in, so intimate is their deeply sensitive sense of ensemble and their weighty patience.
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about
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Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996 at the intersection of sound, art, and technology, and since 2012 has moderated the Disquiet Junto, an active online community of weekly music/sonic projects. He has written for Nature, Boing Boing, The Wire, Pitchfork, and NewMusicBox, among other periodicals. He is the author of the 33 1⁄3 book on Aphex Twin’s classic album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Read more about his sonic consultancy, teaching, sound art, and work in film, comics, and other media
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• December 13, 2022: This day marks the 26th anniversary of the founding of Disquiet.com.
• January 6, 2023: This day marked the 11th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community. -
Recent
• April 16, 2022: I participated in an online "talk show" by The Big Conversation Space (Niki Korth and Clémence de Montgolfier).
• March 11, 2022: I hosted a panel discussion between Mark Fell, Rian Treanor and James Bradbury in San Francisco as part of the Algorithmic Art Assembly (aaassembly.org) at Gray Area (grayarea.org).
• December 28, 2021: This day marked the 10th (!) anniversary of the Instagr/am/bient compilation.
• January 6, 2021: This day marked the 10th (!) anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.
• December 13, 2021: This day marked the 25th (!) anniversary of the start of 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.) -
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• 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).
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disquiet junto
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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 -
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• 0561 / Samplelicker / The Assignment: Rework environmental sound recordings with Aphex Twin's new software.
• 0560 / Sonic Disambiguation / The Assignment: Help the Wikimedia Foundation develop a sonic logo.
• 0559 / Yes Exit / The Assignment: Compose your personal entrance and exit cues for conference calls.
• 0558 / Chore Progressions / The Assignment: Use a routine activity as the map of a composition.
• 0557 / Condensation Is a Form of Change / The Assignment: Interpret a graphic score that depicts four phases. -
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And there is a complete list of past projects, 561 consecutive weeks to date. Archives
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