CDM.link, the long-running website from Peter Kirn, calls itself “a home for people who make and play music and motion.” CDM is a required-reading part of any electronic musician’s RSS feed, covering music and performance technology, as well as the highly creative work that people do with such tools.
And so, it was great this week that Kirn took the time to highlight the 750th consecutive week of the Disquiet Junto, which he has covered many times over the course of its existence, including way back at the start, in 2012, as well as in 2016 and in 2019. For this week’s coverage, he says, in part:
It’s been running continuously, without a break, since 2012. Every Thursday morning, Disquiet’s Marc Weidenbaum posts a call to a community for a new compositional assignment. And this week, the project reaches the 750th (!) week. That means a call for something epic.
It’s really the opposite of the current trend toward sameness, big data, and extractivist industry capitalism, or even snobbery as an antidote. Membership is open. You can post however you like, though SoundCloud is an easy shortcut. (Hey, it started in 2012, back when that was sort of the only game in town.) It’s just a chance for people to share music with each other. None of the elitist think-piece agonizing about whether there’s “too much music” and art requires scarcity, blah blah.
As Marc puts it, the goal is “to use constraints to stoke creativity.” It’s the process of making — that challenge in the assignment — that’s a big part of the appeal, and the camraderie of tackling it together and discovering how others respond.
Read the full piece at cdm.link. And thanks again, Peter!
750 consecutive weeks is an amazing achievement! Well done making it happen.