Disquiet Junto Project 0753: 5 Minute Wait

The Assignment: Write outdoors hold music for a single-lane tunnel entrance delay.

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0753: 5 Minute Wait
The Assignment: Write outdoors hold music for a single-lane tunnel entrance delay.

Perhaps you’ve experienced the pleasures of a single-lane, two-way tunnel yourself. They way they are usually situated is that there is a signal for when you can go through, and for when you can’t. Traffic proceeds in one direction, leaving enough time at the end of the cycle for all vehicles to pass. Then after a pause, the direction changes. At the tunnel where this project’s cover photo was shot, the phase for each direction is five minutes, and at each end there is a warning sign about the wait. The sign reads “5 Minute Red Light.”

Now, imagine you were commissioned to write “outdoors hold music” for the delay experienced by drivers at either end of the tunnel. Consider the circumstances of the delay for automobile drivers and their passengers. Now, record a five-minute piece that fulfills that creative brief.

Bonus if you record the track in a manner that reproduces the sense of it being heard outdoors — and, perhaps better yet, from inside a parked vehicle.

Note: Cover photo shot at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, California.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0753” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0753-5-minute-wait/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you, though five minutes sort of makes the most sense for this one.

Deadline: Monday, June 8, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 753rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, 5 Minute Wait — The Assignment: Write outdoors hold music for a single-lane tunnel entrance delay — disquiet.com/0753.

Where Junto Projects Come From

From glass harmonicas to musical snails

It’s pretty common that when I’m talking with someone about the Disquiet Junto, the weekly music community I have moderated since January 2012, the question arises as to where Junto projects come from — how is it that the ideas originate, week after week, some 753 in a row as of this writing. I’ve answered this question various ways over the years, and one key explanation is that the Junto projects rarely if ever originate because I’m trying to come up with an idea. I have a huge backlog of potential projects. Most projects originate instead based on an observation, one that is then turned into a kind of interrogative, flipped from something that is or seems to something that might be. For example, the third Junto took the origin of the Junto itself, as inspired by Benjamin Franklin, and tried to imagine what one of his inventions, the glass harmonica, might sound like today. The 120th project came about because I saw reproductions of the heartbeart of artist Marcel Duchamp and wondered how musicians might interpret it. This week’s project, which launches tomorrow, June 4, came about, as did one a couple of weeks ago involving a snail, because of signs I saw on a day trip to the Marin Headlands. The above photo inspired tomorrow’s project, which explores the concept of “outdoors hold music.” We’ll see what comes of it.

Gentle Pedal Steel Improvisation

A live solo piece from Gary Peters

Gary Peters is the author of two books, both published by the University of Chicago, on improvisation, Improvising Improvisation: From Out of Philosophy, Music, Dance, and Literature and The Philosophy of Improvisation. In this short solo improvisation, he lets the music do the explaining. The piece, simply titled “Gentle Pedal Steel Improvisation,” moves from a slow, old-timey opening through a more modern exploration of tentative scales and ambiguous atmospheres, as if shifting from Oliver Wallace to John Zorn, or from Les Paul to Bill Frisell, in a few elegant minutes. It’s a lovely, thoughtful live performance, one I had playing on loop for quite a while. More of Peters’ music at garypeters.bandcamp.com.

Frisell x Morrison x Keaton x Roulette

Two nights of live scores.

The New York venue Roulette’s YouTube channel keeps posting one amazing performance video after another. A recent one is the live score to a film, The Great Flood by Bill Morrison, performed by the tight little trio of Bill Frisell (guitar), Luke Bergman (bass), and Tim Angulo (drums). The production takes as its topic the catastrophic 1927 flooding of Mississippi River. While the threesome perform there are short segments on the flood itself, the immediate aftermath, the resulting migration, and other interrelated factors. It was followed the second night with live scores to two other Morrison films, and two from Buster Keaton, The High Sign and One Week. More at the Roulette website on night one and night two, May 23 and 24 of this year.

On Repeat: Parker, SML, James

Home/office playlist

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ The Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, a jazz foursome, posted a full video recording of a live set, doing their new album, Happy Today, co-released May 15 by the International Anthem and Nonesuch labels — heavy on atmosphere and exemplifying a rich sense of ensemble:

▰ SML, a jazz quintet, revs percolating minimalism into virtual Afrobeat in this first available track from their forthcoming live album, Spontaneous Music Live, due out June 26, also on International Anthem:

▰ Glitch/IDM producer Loraine James works with vocalists a lot lately — introspective rap, sultry soul, stream-of-consciousness spoken word — and her excellent recent album, Detached from the Rest of You, released May 8 on Hyperdub, exudes artful anxiousness: