Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto Project 0681: Drama Course

The Assignment: Record a piece of music to transform a walk or a run into something theatrical.

/ 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 0681: Drama Course
The Assignment: Record a piece of music to transform a walk or a run into something theatrical.

Step 1: Choose a length of time for a proper walk (or run), maybe 10 to 30 minutes.

Step 2: Think of how that walk might be experienced by someone if that person were made to feel as if they were in a thriller. As the composer, you can set the pace with a steady beat, and add music, and sound effects, maybe even bits of dialog. The idea is someone listening to your track while walking will have a much more dramatic experience.

Step 3: Record the piece of music you imagined in Step 2.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0681” (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-0681-drama-course/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long is the walk?

Deadline: Monday, January 20, 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 681st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Drama Course — The Assignment: Record a piece of music to transform a walk or a run into something theatrical — at https://disquiet.com/0681/

Music for Airports (Trio Edit)

Bang on a Can live from 2023

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When I first began listening to this recording, a sliver of Brian Eno’s classic Music for Airports (1978), I just assumed it was the entire Bang on a Can ensemble playing it, because I saw pianist Vicki Chow’s name at the start of the list of performers, and because it sounded so rich. It turns out, though, that it’s just Chow and two additional musicians: percussionist David Cossin and guitarist Mark Stewart, also of Bang on a Can. And yet with that minimal available instrumentation, they’re able to flesh out the wholeness of the original piece. Now, the word “flesh” there is not entirely correct, because the source material is fairly sparse, famously so, but it’s sparse the way a very large room might be empty yet still be voluminous and communicate its volume, and this trio really gets at that spaciousness, thanks in large part to the sustain on Chow’s piano and the buzzing trail of Stewart’s electric guitar chords. The video was taped at the Ragas Live Festival at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, back in 2023, and was posted this week in advance of 2025’s festival, which is scheduled for October.

In fact, the full performance is also up on YouTube, and had been up since the middle of last year, part of a playlist of 20 videos from the festival:

Knuckle Tattoo

8 digits 4 life

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This image generator brought a smile to my face. The results also reminded me of that brief window of time — post-cellphone yet pre-smartphone — when I considered buying the URL 34778438.com, so people could (it made sense to me at the time — though, again, not so much sense that I actually bought the URL) more easily access my website from their mobile. (Image via knuckle.tattoo — thanks, Emenel!)

On Repeat: Tasselmyer, Bushel, Mirror’s Edge

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.

▰ A short live video by Andrew Tasselmyer that I had on loop for quite a while, a beading ambient techno piece with chamber music overtones:

▰ I’m a sucker for lengthy collections of short snippets of experiments. Book of Golden Furrows
by Bushel is such a thing. A lot of it is like instrumental hip-hop sheared to within a millimeter of its life.

[bandcamp width=640 height=472 album=1038026834 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

▰ I watch — and more to the point listen to — a lot of video game footage on YouTube. This particular approach, which a friend shared with me, is new to me. They are long-form videos intended to be watched by people while on exercise machines. The idea is, while you’re running, it’s like you are in Mirror’s Edge, which is one of my favorite games ever, even though I was terrible at it. Speaking of which: I don’t understand why playing the game gave me motion sickness yet watching the video doesn’t. The channel is named Video Game Run Club. Join in, whether vicariously, or “vicariously vicariously.”