Larry Johnson, an active SoundCloud member under the avatar L-A-J, oftens pops up in the comments section of Disquiet.com having remixed a Disquiet Downstream entry of the day. His remixes are like comments in the form of sound. In Downstream entries, I try to describe what the track is getting at by how it is composed, how it functions, and Johnson then does this by dissecting the source audio and making something new of it.
This following original piece of his music, “Vernal Drone,” is in a manner of speaking itself a form of commentary in sound, in that it is a five-minute piece of music inspired by a haiku, written by David Dayson:
Spring clouds
Write their own free verse
Published in the sky
The resulting audio is a drone that merges with what sounds like slow-motion water and sleepy cicada.
It’s part of a series of haiku-derived musical compositions called the Naviar Haiku Project, which describes itself as follows:
Welcome to the creative section of Naviar Records. This is a collaborative music-making space: each week we will post a Haiku, for musicians to interpret and convert to music. At the end of every month a selection of tracks will be available on Naviar’s Bandcamp page as a pay-what-you-want album.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/l-a-j-1. More on the Naviar Haiku Project at naviarlab.tumblr.com. It’s a project of Naviar Records, which is based in London and at naviarrecords.com, twitter.com/NaviarRecords, and facebook.com/naviarrec.
Fun project (not my track – a nice nonetheless).