- Birthday party for three-year-old? Slide whistles! http://t.co/8qHTDT2nvV ->
- Got my ticket to see @robert_henke and company Sunday night in San Francisco: https://t.co/79VCS7y1TF ->
- Six years after moving my site to WordPress I realize there is a dashboard plugin to display a list of scheduled posts. ->
- 50+ @djunto acts broke a 1-hour @JaredBrickman track into parts & added their own music. Then he pieced it together: https://t.co/lnkO4JT0Nq ->
- So glad you could make it. MT @ambienteer: My contribution to this week's poignant @djunto project with @nofi: https://t.co/dyolJ29o1L. ->
- Thanks to @kenmistove for coding the browser-based tool that sorted out which @djunto musician would do which @JaredBrickman segment. ->
- Name a dog: "To help the puppy distinguish its name from ambient noise, choose something with a sibilant consonant": http://t.co/7T9zDOzHMk ->
- I always play the "Who's the most dangerous person in the café?" game in my head. Today: giddy guy in red CERN T-shirt working on a netbook. ->
Month: April 2013
Disquiet Junto Project 0067: Odyssey Machine
The Assignment: Compose music for a phrase from Homer's The Odyssey.
*Each Thursday at [the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto) a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: [just join and participate](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto).*
This assignment was made in the mid-afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 11, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 15, 2013, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at [tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto)):
>Disquiet Junto Project 0067: Odyssey Machine
>
>This week’s project is an adaptation of the ongoing National Poetry Month project at SoundCloud. The Junto will, collectively, produce new fragments of The Odyssey of Homer. A die and access to text-to-speech software are required. There are seven steps.
>
>These are the steps:
>
>Step 1: Roll a die twice (or two dice once) and add the results. This number will tell you which of the first dozen books of The Odyssey by Homer you will be working from.
>
>Step 2: Roll a die three times (or three dice once) and multiply the results (i.e., if you get a 3, a 5, and a 6, then 3 x 5 x 6 = 90). This will tell you which line of the book from Homer’s Odyssey you will be working with.
>
>Step 3: Locate that line in the version of The Odyssey at this URL:
>
>http://archive.org/stream/theodysseyofhome24269gut/24269-0.txt
>
>Step 4: Select the phrase that begins at your assigned line and ends with the next full stop (that is, with the next period) in the text.
>
>Step 5: Record the selected text as audio using an automated text-to-speech tool. You can alter this text in any way you choose, but make certain that it remains inteligble.
>
>Step 6: Record a new piece of background music for the spoken text. The sole source material for this background music should be the audio that resulted from step 5. You can transform the source audio in any way you choose. You can add up to three full seconds at the beginning and end of the spoken audio to allow for the music to build up and to fade out.
>
>Step 7: This is the final step. Combine the audio from steps 5 and step 6 into one track, adjusting the relative volume levels as necessary.
>
>Deadline: Monday, April 15, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
>
>Length: Your finished work will be the length of or a few seconds longer than the track that resulted from step 5 above.
>
>Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.
>
>Title/Tag: The title of your track should be formatted as “National Poetry Month: [Your Name] (disquiet0067-odysseymachine)”— with, needless to say, your name in place of Your Name. Dispense with the brackets, too. Also, please additionally tag your track with the “oneliner”tag, which is part of National Poetry Month project.
>
>Download: Please consider setting your track in a manner that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
>
>Also: Please consider doing this as well: Join the group at https://soundcloud.com/groups/national-poetry-month-collaborations and share the track there.
>
>Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:
>
>More on this 67th Disquiet Junto project at:
>
>https://disquiet.com/2013/04/11/disquiet0067-odysseymachine/
>
>More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
>
>http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
>
>This project was inspired by the National Poetry Month event at SoundCloud, more details on which here:
>
>https://soundcloud.com/groups/national-poetry-month-collaborations
>
>The source text for this project is William Cowper’s translation of The Odyssey of Homer, available here:
>
>http://archive.org/stream/theodysseyofhome24269gut/24269-0.txt
Image of Homer up top from [wikipedia.org](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer).
“Ambient Hip-Hop” …
... is how Patrick Ellis describes his piano-drum loop.
The SoundCloud interfaces provides tracks with the opportunity to be associated with an array of tags, to be situated amid a veritable cloud of tags, but one tag is always selected for its primacy. “Warm Fog” by **Patrick Ellis** gets “ambient hip-hop” as its main flag to fly, and the enticing semi-neologism provides appropriate sonic triangulation for what Ellis is up to. The music in “Warm Fog” is background material, and not in the pejorative sense. It’s piano, lulling and looped, alongside a trap-set beat. A deep tone and a substantial amount of vinyl surface noise rise to bridge the gap between the elements, to render them whole. At less than a minute and a half of running time, “Warm Fog” demands to be played on repeat, and at least one commenter has asked where the loop button is.
Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/patrick](https://soundcloud.com/patrick/warm-fog). Ellis is based in Seattle, Washington.
A Software Dry Run (MP3)
Experimental drone from Ken Mistove
One person’s experiment with new gear is another’s background listening — one’s focused subject of hands-on attention, another’s office-filling atmosphere. Such is “Dry Sun Anode,”a gently torqued drone that contorts in one direction while it moves in another. It’s the work of **Ken Mistove**, aka Kenzak, who lives in Simi Valley, California. The tool he was fiddling with is Atomic Shadow’s Panoramic Wave Generator for Kontakt, which the developer calls “an experimental sound generating sample library.”He talks over at his [website](http://kenzak.com/dry-sun-anode/) a bit about what he was up to:
>I explored the first two presets this weekend. I turned off Kontakt’s effects and routed each patch to its own buss. Each used a unique delay line (Fxpansion’s Bloom and ValhallaUberMod). These were then both sent to an instance of ValhallaVintageVerb. Both tracks made extensive use of pitch and modulation wheels.
>
>In the end, it was a quick experiment resulting in a filter swept drone. The resonant filter on Bloom really colors the first Kontakt patch (Android Sine). The second patch (Atomic Yak) is not very prominent but does peak through the background every now and then.
>
>Will I be exploring this library more? Absolutely”¦
Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/ken-mistove](https://soundcloud.com/ken-mistove/dry-sun-anode). More from Mistove at [kenzak.com](http://kenzak.com/). More on the source tool at [atomicshadow.com](http://www.atomicshadow.com/atomic-instruments-for-kontakt.html).
Junto x Brickman, Together Again
The 55 parts of the 65th Disquiet Junto, pieced back into a whole
The project that is currently underway, the project that ends this evening, is the 66th in the Disquiet Junto, a series of weekly communal music projects that explore restraint as an engine for creativity and productivity. It’s a tribute to, to my knowledge, the first regular Junto participant, Jeffrey Melton (aka Nofi), to pass since the group was formed back in the first week of January 2012. The project from the week prior, the 65th, was a less bittersweet, if no less reflective, communal activity. For the 65th project, we broke a single, hour-long composition of “ambient piano” by **Jared Brickman** into pieces, and then randomly assigned each piece to a different participant, ending up with 55 different parts. After the project was complete, Brickman generously offered to then stitch those 55 parts back into one long piece, which can be heard here:
https://soundcloud.com/jaredbrickman/disqueit-junto-everyday-we-are
Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/jaredbrickman](https://soundcloud.com/jaredbrickman/disqueit-junto-everyday-we-are). More on the original project at [disquiet.com](https://disquiet.com/2013/03/28/disquiet0065-pianoverlay/)
The browser-based tool that segmented the Brickman track for this project was coded by Disquiet Junto member **Ken Mistove**, more from whom at [kenzak.com](http://kenzak.com). More on Brickman’s source audio at [soundcloud.com/one\_hello\_world](https://soundcloud.com/one_hello_world/every-day-were-dying-and-outer).