It wouldn’t be a week without a new riff on the Buddha Machine, the inexpensive sound-art gadget produced by the China-based duo FM3. The Iowa City, Iowa-based musician Mark Rushton has posted another in his ongoing series of free downloads, and like the one featured as a Disquiet Downstream entry back in May 2006 (disquiet.com), this one builds an original composition out of one of the nine loops contained in the Buddha Machine. The piece’s title, “Pulse Detector,” gives some hint at its compositional strategy. By propagating, during the course of five minutes, the warm, enveloping Buddha loop with swelling tones that appear at a slow, metronomic pace, Rushton draws attention to the seams in the raw loop’s repetition — which is to say, he amplifies the original, even as he covers it with other sounds (MP3). More at markrushton.com.
Current Activities
Upcoming
• July 28, 2021: This day marks the start of the 500th consecutive weekly project in the Disquiet Junto music community.
• December 13, 2021: This day marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of Disquiet.com.
• January 6, 2021: This day marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.Recent
• 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. 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.)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).
disquiet junto
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
• 0489 / The Prestige / The Assignment: Apply some magic to ABA form.
• 0488 / Reverse Delay / The Assignment: Do something you've been putting off.
• 0487 / Carillon Quotidian / The Assignment: Turn a recurring sound from your life into music.
• 0486 / Earths Days / The Assignment: Celebrate Earth Day on or for another planet.
• 0485 / Strange Weather / The Assignment: Remix the pure sounds of Chris Kallmyer's traveling wind chimes to your own musical purposes.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 489 consecutive weeks to date.