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.
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about
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Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996 at the intersection of sound, art, and technology, and since 2012 has moderated the Disquiet Junto, an active online community of weekly music/sonic projects. He has written for Nature, Boing Boing, The Wire, Pitchfork, and NewMusicBox, among other periodicals. He is the author of the 33 1⁄3 book on Aphex Twin’s classic album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Read more about his sonic consultancy, teaching, sound art, and work in film, comics, and other media
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Upcoming
• December 13, 2022: This day marks the 26th anniversary of the founding of Disquiet.com.
• January 6, 2023: This day marked the 11th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community. -
Recent
• April 16, 2022: I participated in an online "talk show" by The Big Conversation Space (Niki Korth and Clémence de Montgolfier).
• March 11, 2022: I hosted a panel discussion between Mark Fell, Rian Treanor and James Bradbury in San Francisco as part of the Algorithmic Art Assembly (aaassembly.org) at Gray Area (grayarea.org).
• December 28, 2021: This day marked the 10th (!) anniversary of the Instagr/am/bient compilation.
• January 6, 2021: This day marked the 10th (!) anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.
• December 13, 2021: This day marked the 25th (!) anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.
• 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.) -
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• 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).
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disquiet junto
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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 -
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• 0541 / 10BPM Techno / The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats.
• 0540 / 5ive 4our / The Assignment: Take back 5/4 for Jedi time masters Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond.
• 0539 / Control Breath / The Assignment: Let your slow breathing guide a piece of music.
• 0538 / Guided Decompression / The Assignment: Get someone from tense to chill.
• 0537 / Penitent Honk / The Assignment: Do sound design for "a missing gesture" of vehicular life. -
Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 541 consecutive weeks to date. Archives
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