From today’s weekly edition of the email (tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto) I send to the Disquiet Junto community members:
Sleepily, I typed this while the cup of coffee to my right slowly dissolved the two ice cubes I placed in it a little over 10 minutes before starting. The time was 7:16am as I began typing this email, though my body knew it was really 6:16am. These cubes — of course not these exact cubes — were in my cup of coffee the very first week I sent out the Disquiet Junto, way back in January 2012. The sound of the ice popping, rattling, and whizzing partly informed the original Junto project, the one we now do at the start of every calendar year.
Change has come slowly to the Junto over the past decade, but when change works, it has a tendency to settle in. For example, only this year did I begin to use automation to post the latest Junto project to Disquiet.com and to twitter.com/disquiet while I’m asleep. If Tinyletter could do automated emails, you’d have received this already. Likewise the llllllll.co post. Instead, I’m sending and updating now that I’m awake — or as soon as the coffee kicks in. (Last week it hadn’t, which is why I first accidentally sent the project to my other email list, This Week in Sound: tinyletter.com/disquiet. That was a mess, though no one complained — at least not to me.)
Similarly, the trios project sequence (more on which in the instructions, if you’re new to the Junto and it isn’t familiar) that was an experiment back in 2018 has become so routine that I find it hard to believe we hadn’t started it years earlier. One thing about the trios project sequence is that each time the third of the weekly phases is complete, I have it in mind to do a fourth round that takes the collective material as a shared sample resource, but most of the time it feels like overkill. And so this year I waited a few weeks. And now we’re going to revisit the recent trios project in the form of a communal remix. Can’t wait to hear what people do with it. The instructions are brief, just two steps, but please read them carefully, especially the second step.
Each week I say thanks for your generosity and your creativity. In the case of remix and collaborative projects like the trios, the word “generosity” is more literal, in that I am referring, in part, to your comfort in making your music available for others to alter. That takes some amount of trust, and I want to say that trust is appreciated.