Midway through last month, the audio irritants at 20kbps netlabel released Paranomia‘s EP Le Requiem Pour les Refrigerateures Solitaires — or, as they helpfully translate for us cognate-challenged types, Requiem for Lonely Refrigerators. From the coarse, scrunched sounds of the first of its four tracks, it’s quite possible to believe that audio emitted by an old Frigidaire is indeed the extent of Paranomia’s palette. But this is no concept album, which means you needn’t ponder the provenance of the pingy echo of “No Prestamos Servicio a los Viciosos” or hard distant techno of “Le Dompteur de Pingouins” in order to take pleasure in this often desperately minimal electronica. The 20kbps site credits Paranomia as “a sideproject by Estonian producer Talvel.” And it’s really no surprise that the landscape that gave us Arvo Part’s haunting minimalism would, a generation or three later, unleash such a parched and monastic digital music. In fact, the submerged vocals on “Les Fusillades Massives des Masses” could very well come from one of Part’s latter-day modernist Gregorian chants. Download a stuffed archive of the set, complete with “album” art, here. And visit the label at 20kbps.sofapause.ch.
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.