When musician Maciek Szymczuk titled his EP Romantic Piano for Lovers, he meant lovers of surface-noise-laden, static-laced, beats-all-a-flutter minimal techno, with saw blade string sections and chest-pounding thuds of subterranean dread. Or he was just being ironic. Either way, RPfL is a six-track set on which the piano is contorted until it skips like a broken self-playing model (“Supper at Piano Bar”), or it’s muted until it sounds like an alien harpsichord (“Romantic Walk”), or it provides occasional accent marks (“Flame of Love”), or it’s entirely abandoned after an opening chord in favor of speaker-shaking sludge and heavenly vocals (“Tender Kisses”). Szymczuk calls his music “click’n’everything” — and he clearly takes pleasure in contorting whatever sounds come his way, running them over mechanistic pulses and through echo chambers with sodden walls. The rich and varied set was the final release of 2004 on the tonAtom netlabel. Download it here, and visit tonAtom at tonatom.net and Szymczuk at mszymczuk.prv.pl.
Current Activities
Upcoming
• July 28, 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 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.
• 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
• 0487 / Carillon Quotidian / Assignment: Turn a recurring sound from your life into music.
• 0486 / Earths Days / The Assignment: Celebrate Earth Day on or for another planet.
• 0485 / Strange Weather / The Assignment: Remix the pure sounds of Chris Kallmyer's traveling wind chimes to your own musical purposes.
• 0484 / A Movable Heart / The Assignment: Transplant the sounds of Chris Kallmyer's wind chimes to a new location.
• 0483 / Type Set / The Assignment: Use a recording of yourself typing something as the underlying rhythmic track for a piece of music.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 487 consecutive weeks to date.