Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto Project 0687: Applied Science

The Assignment: Record a piece of music that includes physiological and behavioral techniques.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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 lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0687: Applied Science
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that explores physiological and behavioral techniques.

Step 1: It is understood in biology that there are differences between the “behavioral” and the “physiological,” between an action or response a person makes by choice, and one that happens on instinct or involuntarily. (Please forgive these rough descriptions.) Familiarize yourself with the concepts.

Step 2: Consider various ways that some musical activities might be considered behavioral, such as consciously playing notes, and others might be physiological, such as maintaining a beat.

Step 3: Record a piece of music that combines a mix of some of the behavioral and physiological music activities you thought about in Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0687” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0687-applied-science/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, March 3, 2024, 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 687th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Applied Science — The Assignment: Record a piece of music that includes physiological and behavioral techniques — at https://disquiet.com/0687/

Radio, Radio, Radio

Rick Prelinger, Anna Friz, Jeff Kolar

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I had a great time on Saturday night, the 22nd, at the Lab in San Francisco for a combination of lecture and music performance, a hybrid that may be my favorite format. The theme was radio. The lecture was by Rick Prelinger on the topic of “practical radio,” such as shortwave and CB, not to mention GPS and Bluetooth. The performance was by Anna Friz and Jeff Kolar, using real-time and prerecorded signals as the raw material for abstract atmospheric music.

A First?

Peter Gregson is always up to something interesting

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the cover image of a single, “Ritual,” from cellist Peter Gregson’s forthcoming self-titled album. I’m trying to think of another release from a major classical music record label that features a Eurorack synthesizer on its cover, as this one, from Decca, does. Peter Gregson is due out April 11. (And yes, the 1968 Switched-On Bach, by Wendy Carlos, featured a giant Moog on its cover, and it was released by Columbia Masterworks, but that’s over half a century ago, and a totally different synthesizer format.)

And if you’re not familiar with Gregson, I highly recommend his Bach album in the Recomposed series from the Deutsche Grammophon label — the same series as Max Richter’s excellent Four Seasons.

Ouch

A not painful memory

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Back in the early 1990s, I was in a small car accident, and the passenger-side door was damaged just like this, and just like this, I had a friend — the cartoonist Justin Green, best known for Binky Brown, and whose comics I edited at Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine — paint a comic-book sound effect on the side, complete with the little lines showing the action and/or sound of the impact. I wish I had a photo of my long-ago car door. This one here isn’t my car. I stumbled on this modern-day version in my neighborhood over the weekend.

On Repeat: Post-Classical, Modular, Frippertronics

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

▰ Tryptych by Symbion Project (aka Kasson Crooker) is three 10-minute-plus not quite ambient, maybe “romantic ambient” / post-classical, excursions. Richly evocative.

[bandcamp width=640 height=241 album=2310880616 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

▰ I always keep my eye on what’s new from a synthesizer module maker called Djupviks. A module called the Bunker Archeology, which I have, takes the source audio here and “smears it all up,” per the description. No doubt. It’s like the Blade Runner vibe filtered through a rougher industrial aesthetic.

▰ Archival recommendation: I picked up this live 1981 Robert Fripp solo Frippertronics set (use that link, as there is no embeddable player) based on a recommendation from John Diliberto, host of the Echoes radio show. It’s really great, very simple, austere even by Fripp standards, maybe even more musical than atmospheric. You can hear the loops as they accrue, the seams as he stitches and layers. Bonus points for the bit of conversation with Joe Strummer (yeah, of the Clash) in the liner notes. (And if that interview is of interest, here’s the full text. The conversation was moderated by Vic Garbarini, and originally published in the June 1981 issue of Musician magazine. Here’s a great snippet: Strummer: “Now, I’m not a born musician like maybe Robert is…” Fripp: “Not at all! I was tone deaf and had no sense of rhythm…” Strummer: “… I got kicked out of the choir…” Fripp: “…they wouldn’t even let me join the choir!”)

▰ Somewhat less archival recommendation: here’s a saxophone foursome, Multiphonic Quartett, performing a piece (“Mishima/Closing,” originally written for Kronos) from Philip Glass’ score for Paul Schrader’s film Mishima, shot in a massive concrete industrial space. (This video is the source of the “radicalization” joke I posted here yesterday.) The video is from roughly three years ago. (And a side note for those chasing virality: despite this video having over 200,000 views, the group’s Instagram account has well under 600 followers, and its YouTube channel a mere 1,500 subscribers.)