It begins cinematically, with a heartbeat, some typewriter keys, the distant crack of lightning and a small amount of rain. Or maybe that’s a car revving, its gears shifting, followed by the crackle of fire. It’s all sound, so you lend your own mental images to help find your way, much as the track in question, “Sullen City,” the opening piece to Layborn‘s five-song Rubik, eventually introduces a hard, if limber, rhythm to lend structure to the looping swell that’s been rising in the background (MP3). Nothing like a simple back beat to locate the tempo of a seemingly organic sine wave. Rubik falls squarely in what’s called minimal techno. It’s about the beat the way certain films are about place and certain novels are about ideas, in both cases rather than being about character. It’s all background, even when it veers into the foreground, as with the percussive chatter of “A Pin in the Sky” (MP3) or more of that field-recording drama, again rain, on “Solitary Drive” (MP3). The balletic torque of an undertone in “Wires and Whispers Came” (only available if you download the complete, archived files: ZIP) brings to mind Peter Gabriel’s Passion, his score to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, while at its most minimal, on the closing, the sonic matter is nothing but tiny slivers of static masquerading as drums. More info on the website of the releasing netlabel, archipel.cc.
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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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Current Activities
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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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• 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.
• 0550 / Abrupt Probability / Make music based on a chance graphic score. -
Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 554 consecutive weeks to date. Archives
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