In its own way, Pilot Balloon‘s “Vampire Tonic” (MP3) elegantly compresses the already brief history of pop psychedelics, from the Beatles through the Chemical Brothers and Tortoise, into one seamless montage. But don’t call it a mashup. The track, off the duo’s Ghastly Good Cheer album, released last year on the German label 2nd Rec, opens with something reminiscent of so-called Britpop. There’s an electrified piano and a solo male voice, barely intelligible and heavily echoed. Don’t bother grasping for what it’s saying because soon enough that same echo has dispersed the voice into background haze, and the drums have worked their way into primacy. If that alone isn’t the history of heady rock, what is? Anyhow, the next time you hear the voice, late in the track, around the four-minute mark, it’s been sampled and repurposed as pure tone, an instrument to be played. The message is clear: the real “voice” on a track like this is the voice of the arranger, or in the case of Pilot Balloon, the arrangers. The Massachusetts-based duo of Judson MacRae and KaeoFLUX are able to segue from the opening song through elegant post-rock to tunneling drum’n’bass and on, never losing sight of where they’ve been and where they’re headed. The post-rock sections are particularly fine, threaded through with a woodwind dirge and a halo of mallet work that could just as easily be from a piece by a post-minimalist, like a Michael Torke, or a composed-jazz macher, say Marty Ehrlich, and yet feel right at home here, among the fragments of pop songs, the trip-hop grooves, the machine drums. Yeah, it’s that good. More info at 2ndrec.com and pilotballoon.net.
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.