Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto Project 0672: Day Break

The Assignment: Make a handful of sonic alerts for various purposes.

/ 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 0672: Day Break
The Assignment: Make a handful of sonic alerts for various purposes.

Step 1: You’re going to make alarm sounds. Think about the alarms and alerts — phone, egg timer, microwave, neighborhood church bells, etc. — that currently go off regularly in your life.

Step 2: Make a list of a handful of instances you want to create an alert for, like something urgent and something that’s a gentle reminder, and so forth. Maybe you have a different tone for each morning of the week?

Step 3: Record roughly five (more or less) sonic alerts for the purposes you decided upon in Step 2.

Step 4: Make one track with each of the alerts separated briefly by some silence. When posting the track online, be sure to list the intention behind each alert.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0672” (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 https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0672-day-break/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long do you plan to snooze for?

Deadline: Monday, November 18, 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 672nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Day Break — The Assignment: Make a handful of sonic alerts for various purposes — at https://disquiet.com/0672/

Autechre Diary Updates

Halfway through, but only just getting going

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

My ongoing Listening Diary of the newly released dozen Autechre live sets from 2023 and 2024 has passed the 2,000 words milestone, with no signs of slowing down, and thus far I’ve still only touched on half the latest AE_2022- recordings. Today I focused on the Melbourne date for the first time, with side trips to Turin, and to Japan, and to William Gibson’s early fiction (speaking of which, Neuromancer turned 40 this year). In the process of keeping this diary, I’ve also been building up a much larger collection of “Other Notes” at the bottom of the post than I had expected to, most recently to share some examples of the software Autechre utilizes (live and in the studio), as well as to strike an accidental contrast between these new sets and one of the ones from the seven that were released in 2023.

It’s at disquiet.com/autechre_live_2024, which is the “human-readable” URL for the diary about this very post-human music.

Dawn Break

One of my favorite movies of all time

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Anti-eroticism. Architectural literacy. Consumerism finger-poking. And zombies, lots of zombies. I wrote about the original Dawn of the Dead (1978), one of my favorite movies of all time, for Hilobrow’s ongoing horror series. The 25-part collection, titled Scream Your Enthusiasm, has some great contributors, including comic book artist and playwright Dean Haspiel, film editor Crockett Doob, author Lynn Peril, and series editor Heather Quinlan, just to name a few. I didn’t have space to get into the music, but of course the film’s classic score was the result of a team-up between the band Goblin (“the Goblins” on the poster) and Dario Argento. I dedicated the short essay (as I did an earlier Hilobrow piece on Celtic Frost) to my late friend Eric Engelhardt.

Car Talk

Think of it as GTASMR, or in this case GTAVSMR

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’ve been doing a lot of research these past few years into field recordings, those of both the natural environment and the built environment. Bridging, in a manner of speaking, the gap between the two respective realms are the environmental sounds that fill video games, virtual reality, and the like. They are artificially created yet intended to give the impact of something real, something heightened or extrapolated, something — to use the ubiquitous term — immersive. Many of these high-definition sonic studio concoctions are derived from actual field recordings, while others are produced more synthetically. Such recordings are, of course, intended to be experienced in a given context.

However, as with the one heard (and seen) below, in which a driver navigates the nighttime streets of the 2013 game Grand Theft Auto V, there is a large and growing audience for prerecorded video game experiences, and though they are, inherently, audio-visual, many of these fan recordings are couched in sonic terms, like “ASMR” and as “sleep aids.” There is something lulling, indeed, to this city drive, which the title informs us has “NO LOOPS” — which is to say, it is a constant, non-repeating stream of different journeys around the open world of the video game, courtesy of the channel named Video Game Weather ASMR. It is also, per the functional title, eight hours long. The primary things I found myself listening to are the car engines and the rain, and I found myself listening for variations therein. Your mileage may vary. I recommend starting at the beginning and then checking out the different scenarios, each from the point of view of a different driver/character in the game. There is a clickable table of contents to the video, helping situate you should you want to know where you are — or more to the point, who you are — at a given moment.

This is excerpted from the Friday, November 8, Listening Post (0026) issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter.

AE, Matey

Some context on the recent Autechre motherlode

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The British duo Autechre traffic in abstract music that veers between abstract sound design and challenging club music, which is to say they record what is known as IDM, and this past week they did what they seem to do every few years, which is to unleash an ungodly amount of their music out of the blue all at once. For background: There was the four-hour-plus elseq 1-5 in 2016, and the eight-hour NTS Sessions 1–4 two years after that. And of course, way back in 2015, there were the 28 hours of music comprised by AE_LIVE. Oh, and the nearly eight-hour AE_LIVE 2016/2018 in 2018. Bringing us up to the present: In 2023 Autechre released 7 full sets, packaged as AE_LIVE 2022–, from a tour that occurred mostly the year preceding, and then this week, rather than create a new catch-all title, they simply added another dozen sets from 2023 and 2024, bringing AE_LIVE 2022– (the hyphen still open, no end in sight) to a total of 19 sets, or nearly 23 hours of music. It’s a lot. Like, a lot, even on its own, and especially in the broader context of these 2001-ish monoliths, not to mention their studio recordings and other work. As I’ve done in the past, I’m going to try to tackle — and almost certainly fail — this motherlode by doing so in plain sight, keeping a listening diary rolling in public. It’s at disquiet.com/autechre_live_2024. Now, the point of this Listening Post series is to help pick out items in the vast miasma (sorry, I’m in the midst of reading Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Polostan) of modern music. I’d suggest starting off with AE_MADRID_100424. (I can’t embed it here, but you can check it out at autechre.warp.net.)

This is excerpted from the Friday, November 8, Listening Post (0026) issue of my This Week in Sound email newsletter.