Darren McClure and Hiroyuki Ura performed live at a spot in Tokyo, and in preparation to do so, they brought the outside in. According to the brief liner notes that accompany Content in a Void, a four-MP3 document of that performance, the duo “gathered field recordings from the area around the venue” and then improvised on a mix of various electronics. That real-world sound is especially evident on “Loop Line I” (MP3), which is close to six minutes of the urban audiosphere, from kids screaming to water dripping to whistles blowing, all sewn into a singular trip. “Loop Line II” (MP3) trades exteriority for its opposite, a fine thread of miniscule sounds, little fuzzy bits, with the occasional high-pitched bleep of a Morse Code machine on the fritz. “Loop Line III” (MP3) adds mechanical drones, which threaten to subsume those coded beeps. And the real keeper, “Loop Line IV” (MP3), locates a nearly melodic cohesion that deserves repeated listens; its lovely pulses approximate a developing musical pattern, even if they’re clipped and splintered like flashing images from an old zoetrope. Though the four tracks have their own inherent flavor, they are intended to be listened to straight through, and easily fade from one to the next. More info at the website of the releasing netlabel, standard-music.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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• 0555 / A Simple Timer / The Assignment: Simplify by a factor of 5.
• 0554 / Cage Chord / The Assignment: Riff on a chord by John Cage.
• 0553 / Break That Cycle / The Assignment: Record in a steady tempo but break it on occasion.
• 0552 / The Radio in My Life / The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation.
• 0551 / The Bends / The Assignment: Get less strict about something you're strict about. -
Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 555 consecutive weeks to date. Archives
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