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
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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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).
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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
• 0415 / Seasonal Metal / The Assignment: Tinsel is your latest instrument.
• 0414 / Mod Cons / The Assignment: Compose one or more sounds for an appliance/device/gadget of your own choosing.
• 0413 / Objective Thankfulness / The Assignment: Highlight one piece of musical equipment for which you are particularly grateful.
• 0412 / One Chord Wonder / The Assignment: Play an extended chord where the instrumentation of each note changes as the piece proceeds.
• 0411 / Wrapped Up / The Assignment: Record a piece of music as a gift for someone special to you.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 415 consecutive weeks to date.Tags
8-bit app audio-games brands of sounds chiptune classical comics copyleft field-recording film free free download gadget generative i-hop IFTTTgram installation ios ipad iphone ipod ipod touch junto listening to yesterday live-performance modular netlabel noise recommended stream remix rock saw2for33third science-fiction score site-maintenance software sound-art sounds-of-brands studio journal this week in sound turntablism TV video video-games voiceMost Recent Comments
Patrick Glynn: "Hello, I’m looking forward to hearing what you’ve been listening to. Thanks, Patrick "
Michael Mennell: "ok, glad I could help. Do you have a link to that MicroFreak video btw? I had posted it to our..."
Michael: "Yesterday, this post had a video (mistakenly?) linked at the top featuring a MicroFreak. What was that?..."
Marc Arsenault: "Are you saying, it’s like a smurf’s arm with a plum in its fist? "
David Neale-Lorello: "Would Thomas Dolby be one of the heroes or the mascot? "