September 2019 – Disquiet

The Home that Partch Built

On a hot San Francisco day

September 26, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

When the heat comes, all the windows are opened to get the cross-breezes going, and the house turns into a massive Harry Partch instrument: fluttering wall calendars that need to be calmed with leaning paperbacks, mobiles that must be grounded, windows that evidence aged creaks.

Disquiet Junto Project 0404: Seven (St)ages

Record a piece of music that follows the arc of Jacques' "All the world's a stage" speech from Shakespeare's play As You Like It.

September 26, 2019September 27, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, September 30, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 26, 2019.

Tracks will be added to the playlist for the duration of the project.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0404: Seven (St)ages
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that follows the arc of Jacques’ “All the world’s a stage” speech from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It.

Step 1: This project is inspired by a famous speech from William Shakespeare’s play As You Like It. The speech is the one that begins “All the world’s a stage,” and is spoken by the melancholy character Jacques.

Step 2: Familiarize yourself with the speech, in which Jacques lists the “seven ages” that people move through over the course of their lives, should they lead full and long ones: the infant, the student (“schoolboy” in the play), the lover, the soldier, the justice, old age, and the final decline (likened to a “second childishness and mere oblivion”).

Step 3: Consider how those seven ages might be explored in musical terms. Consider concepts in the original text, such as how in old age “his big manly voice, / Turning again towards childish treble, pipes / And whistles in his sound.”

Step 4: Record a piece of music that occurs in seven stages, following the seven ages of Jacques’ speech. One possibility is to have seven related pieces of music, as i na suite, that represent the ages. Another is to have one consistent source audio throughout, but to treat/filter/process it in accordance with each successive (st)age.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0404” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0404” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0404-seven-st-ages/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, September 30, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 26, 2019.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0404” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and be sure to 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. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: Consider setting your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 404th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Seven (St)ages / The Assignment: Record a piece of music that follows the arc of Jacques’ “All the world’s a stage” speech from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It — at:

https://disquiet.com/0404/

Shuttlecock/ver10

An ersatz AFX sighting

September 25, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

When your very cheap badminton racket looks like Aphex Twin merchandise.

And because the internet can be a confusingly small place, none other than Paul Nicholson, the graphic designer of Aphex Twin’s famed logo, joked on my Facebook post of this same photo: “When my wife hears me playing Aphex Twin, she always says, ‘What a racket!'”

Carl Stone & the Sound of Japan

From an interview by Katherine Whatley in today's Japan Times

September 25, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

“I love the soundscape here. First of all, the fact that it’s changing all the time,” Stone says of his desire to remain in Tokyo. “There’s an ecology of sound here. A sound that exists now might be gone in five, 10 years. Just as the sounds I recorded when I was here in the beginning of the Heisei Era (1989-2019) don’t exist anymore. For example, there was a time when there weren’t automatic ticket gates. There was a line of men punching your little ticket. A big station had 20 people lined up in a row. It was a great sound.”

That’s from a great profile of the composer-performer Carl Stone in today’s Japan Times. Titled “Carl Stone: Plugging into the sounds of the changing city” and conducted by Katherine Whatley, it provides a thorough overview of his life and work, written with a local audience in mind, “local” meaning Japanese, because the Los Angeles native has lived in the country for roughly two decades.

I’ve admired his work at least since I first saw him perform in New Orleans many years ago, likely earlier, and I wrote liner notes for a 2016 album of his archival works (Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties on the Unseen Worlds label). I’ve shared meals with him (a meaningful statement where he’s concerned, since he often titles his compositions after restaurants he favors; the late, legendary food critic Jonathan Gold, an old friend of Stone’s, wrote liner notes for the same album I did), and I have a review coming out in The Wire of the recent San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, which Stone headlined.

And yet still, I found his comments about the sound of place to provide a new fresh vantage on a composer whose work is so multifaceted. Here’s another tasty snippet, one with which the Whatley article closes:

“People talk about Tokyo or Ueno Station in the Meiji Era (1868-1912) with everyone wearing geta or zori (traditional Japanese sandals). Think of the reverberations. I kind of regret that I never got a chance to hear that.”

Read the full piece at japantimes.co.jp.

Disquiet Junto Project 0403: Filter Box

The Assignment: Record music a piece of music in which a sequence of sounds is treated by the same filter or process.

September 19, 2019September 21, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, September 23, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 19, 2019.

Tracks will be added to the playlist for the duration of the project.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0403: Filter Box
The Assignment: Record music a piece of music in which a sequence of sounds is treated by the same filter or process.

Step 1: Come up with a filter or process that might be applied to a wide variety of sounds. It could be a preset in a piece of equipment, or a matter of recording something through a closed door. It’s up to you and your ears and your imagination.

Step 2: Select a sequence of sounds that are unrelated. The number is up to you, but between a half dozen and a dozen is recommended.

Step 3: Create a recording that consists of the sounds from Step 2 being played in sequence, with little to no overlap, with each sound being treated by the filter or process from Step 1.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0403” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0403” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0403-filter-box/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, September 23, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 19, 2019.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0403” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 403rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Filter Box / The Assignment: Record music a piece of music in which a sequence of sounds is treated by the same filter or process — at:

https://disquiet.com/0403/