One more recommended audio-video stream (nee “music video”) before the weekend. Following up on yesterday’s bit of aquarium stillness by Keith Fullerton Whitman (aka Hrvatski), the second most recent entry on his site’s film page is “Travel.” The glitchy yet tonal audio comes from two unreleased tracks. Whitman describes “Travel” as follows: “a compilation of crossfaded still digital-camera-in-movie-mode clips shot out of train windows during 2002 and 2003 throughout asia and europe. it was originally intended as a performance backdrop for kfw concerts and has since acquired a life of its own.” The visual pairings, resulting from the fades, include luggage conveyor belts and rolling countryside, trains and neon, and many layered cityscapes. There’s also a strange little animated interstitial that inserts a little humor. As for the music, “the soundtrack consists of two extended aleatoric computer music pieces. … one using the sounds of the hourly bell procession in barcelona’s pla?a de catalunya as its source, the other a rough version of a piece keith began whilst working on the ’73’ ep (long since abandoned).” And for those aspiring videographers in the audience, the footage was filmed “with a canon powershot g2 digital still camera in ‘movie mode.'” (The film archive is here, on Whitman’s reckankomplex.com website.)
Current Activities
Upcoming
• February 5, 2020: The first session of the 15-week course I teach at the Academy of Art about the role of sound in the media landscape.
• April 15, 2020: A chapter on the Disquiet Junto ("The Disquiet Junto as an Online Community of Practice," by Ethan Hein) appears in the forthcoming 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.)
• December 13, 2020: This day marks the 24th anniversary of Disquiet.com.
• January 7, 2021: This day marks the 9th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.Dates TBA
• There are entries on the Disquiet Junto in the forthcoming 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.
• At least two live group concerts by Disquiet Junto members in the San Francisco Bay Area are in the works for 2020.
• I have liner notes for a musician's solo album and an essay in a book about an art event due out. I'll announce as the release dates come into focus.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
• 0456 / Line Up / The Assignment: Interpret a painting by Agnes Martin as if it were a graphic score.
• 0455 / Inner Invertebrate / The Assignment: What does a moment (or a day) in the life of a jellyfish sound like to a jellyfish?
• 0454 / Lsoo Vneg / The Assignment: Encode the name of someone you love into a piece of music.
• 0453 / Dial Up / The Assignment: Imagine the technologically mediated First Contact through sound.
• 0452 / Let's Scream / The Assignment: Get cathartic. Be resilient. Turn your scream into music.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 456 consecutive weeks to date.