Disquiet Junto: 11th Anniversary

It’s a new year, and a new project — and also an old one. This week’s music composition prompt, to record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it, is the same project the Disquiet Junto community does the first week of every new year. It’s the same as the very first Junto project, way back during the first week of January 2012. It’s a simple proposal, just a single line of instruction, and you can, as always, interpret as you see fit.

I’m sitting here as I type this, drinking black iced coffee with three ice cubes in it — two and a half ice cubes, actually, as half of one disintegrated when I tried to remove it from the tray. Those ice cubes in the context of that daily morning habit were on my mind when I first started the Junto, as were the clinking sounds in an old Alkaholiks rap song (the great “Hip Hop Drunkies”). Also on my mind at the time, as I sat with a friend in a now defunct cafe on Valencia Street here in San Francisco, was the inclusion of sampled ice cubes by an important Junto precursor, the challenge series Iron Chef of Music, in which samples are equivalent to the shared ingredients on the Iron Chef TV shows.

I truly had no idea that week if anyone would even take up the proposed project, but people did, and we’ve been doing a new Junto project Junto starting each Thursday ever since. It isn’t always a sample-based effort. We’ve explored visual scores, and live recordings, and open source software, and numerous techniques, and many other types of prompts.

If you’re new to the Junto, welcome. I hope it can be part of a productive and fulfilling year of music-making. If you’ve been around for a while, then you new this project was coming.

And that covers it. Thanks, as always, for your generosity with your time and creativity. Oh, and I might as well mention that this week marks a double milestone: not just 11th anniversary of founding of the Disquiet Junto, but the 575th consecutive weekly project.

Best from a windy and rainy San Francisco.