Month: June 2022

twitter.com/disquiet: Pottery, Watson, Berberian

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up sooner in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com. I’ve found it personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself. And sometimes I tweak them a bit, given the additional space. And sometimes I re-order them just a bit.

▰ Re-watching old Great Pottery Throw Down episodes. Season 1, episode 2: large ceramic sinks. They don’t need to look to see if one held up in the kiln: just give a ping to see if it rings. (By coincidence or design, in the same episode they have the potters do a project blindfolded.)

▰ An IBM advertisement on Twitter for Watson AI services reads “No one likes hold music. Quickly solve customer problems.” It’s funny how in the world of AI-mediated customer service, hold music’s been replaced by that rapid processing noise meant to suggest a computer is thinking.

▰ 16th novel I’ve finished reading this year: Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey. Final novel in the 9-volume series. Has elements of my least favorite (the 3rd) but improves on them; lacks some favorite characters while almost balancing out with new/expanded ones. Loved the epilogue. Going to miss this universe a lot.

▰ I’m used to houseplants in photos/videos of music equipment, but seeing a Buddha Machine in a photo for an article about a phone is new to me engadget.com

▰ Wednesday, June 22, 2:34pm EDT: afternoon quartet for rain, passing airplane, washing machine, and suburban construction

▰ “I found that this color provides confidence in all things mechanical.” That’s Jason Sandberg, writing about the results of zinc chromate for the Color Code series at hilobrow.com, for which I recently did a piece on teal.

▰ “The offbeat satire follows the creative differences within a collective of ‘sonic caterers’—performance artists who generate soundscapes from the preparation and manipulation of food” (hyperallergic.com). Film screenwriter-director Peter Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio) is back with Flux Gourmet.

Disquiet Junto Project 0547: Genre Melee

The Assignment: Combine two seemingly different genres.

/ 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 the end of the day Monday, June 27, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 23, 2022.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0547: Genre Melee
The Assignment: Combine two seemingly different genres.

Step 1: The concept of “math house,” a combination of genres, came out of a conversation between friends Jimmy Lem (a Junto member) and tetkik ve tedavi. Consider what “math house” might sound like.

Step 2: Combine two genres of your own choosing. Perhaps “math” and “house,” or other ones entirely.

Step 3: Record a track resulting from the combination of genres you selected in Step 2.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0547” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0547” (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 tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0547-genre-melee/

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.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 27, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 23, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0547” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, 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: It is always best to set 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:

Thanks to Jimmy Lem and tetkik ve tedavi for inspiring this project.

More on this 547th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Genre Melee (The Assignment: Combine two seemingly different genres) — at: https://disquiet.com/0547/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0547-genre-melee/