With far more elegance than the project might suggest, (dj) morsanek is constructing an album-length collection in which each track is built from segments of pre-existing avant-garde, out-jazz and otherwise exploratory recordings, and he’s posting the material online as a work in progress. For example, “Lucifer on Lucifer” (MP3) pairs two aggressive saxophone theorists, John Zorn and Anthony Braxton, with two masters of the understated: composer Olivier Messiaen and ambient figure Pete Namlook. We get two horns squeaking out tiny complaints at the far sides of peripheral hearing, while an organ and intoned synthesis layer in between. One particularly strong entry, “Double Country Music” (MP3), mashes up Lou Harrison, Steve Roach, Vidna Obmana, Taylor Deupree, Kim Cascone, Tangerine Dream and Town n Country: closely recorded noises linger above a deep drone, the drone itself augmented by the occasional addition of tonal lines that lend gentle highlights. There doesn’t appear to be any pre-production tweaking of the lifted samples, none of the speeding up that a Kanye West might have employed, or the rampant cut’n’paste of a John Oswald, though the latter does figure in here, on a track, titled “Btls Breaks” (MP3), that teams the plunderphonics figure with Maggi Payne, Greg Kelley and Jason Lescalleet. Get them now: offbeater.blogspot.com.
Current Activities
Upcoming
• Autumn, 2019: I'll have a new piece in The Wire.
• December 13, 2019: This day marks the 23rd anniversary of Disquiet.com.
• January 7, 2020: This day marks the 8th anniversary of the Disquiet Junto.
• March 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.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.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).