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
• July 29, 2021: This day marks the start of the 500th consecutive weekly project in the Disquiet Junto music community.
• December 13, 2021: This day marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of Disquiet.com.
• January 6, 2021: This day marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.Recent
• 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
• 0500 / Humming to Your Selves / The Assignment: Play a tune by yourself and as if by two people whom you invent.
• 0499 / Out of the Landscape / The Assignment: Record a piece of music in which a sound emerges from a field recording.
• 0498 / Sonic Entomologist / The Assignment: Create a new hybrid insect from the sound of two different insects.
• 0497 / Benjamin's Glass / The Assignment: Pay tribute to Benjamin Franklin and his armonica
• 0496 / Isolation Room / The Assignment: Create new music around one strand of something you made in the past.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 500 consecutive weeks to date.