Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto Project 0662: Spin Cycle

The Assignment: Record a piece of music that pits one bicyclist against another.

/ 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 0662: Spin Cycle
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that pits one bicyclist against another.

Step 1: Imagine a bicycle race underway. Picture two competitors in the lead, running neck and neck for a long distance.

Step 2: Record a piece of music in which two prominent musical elements align, one each, with the two bicyclists in Step 1. How would you depict their rivalry as it unfolds, the give and take as each bicyclist strains to pull ahead of the other?

Note: You need not continue to the end of the race, when one or the other wins. You could simply focus on a segment of the race.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0662” (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-0662-spin-cycle/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Is it a sprint or a marathon? How many loops?

Deadline: Monday, September 9, 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 662nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Spin Cycle — The Assignment: Record a piece of music that pits one bicyclist against another — at https://disquiet.com/0662/

Alien Environment

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Yes, I enjoyed the new James S.A. Corey novel, The Mercy of Gods. The depiction of alien life, consciousness, socialization, and habits in the book was very enjoyable. The duo who write as Corey established, in their previous nine-volume Expanse series, a predilection for micro-interactions and interior motivations, and it was excellent to see that play out amid myriad fantastic lifeforms. The main downside to The Mercy of Gods is realizing how much CGI overkill might be required to adapt this to the screen.

Perhaps “Brass Noise”

An id m theft able joint

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The musician who goes by the name id m theft able, and who is based in Portland, Maine, does these incredible videos where he places a tuba, amplified by a mic, in the environment and just records the resulting resonance. He does this with other instruments, as well, like the sound of light snow on a drum and freezing rain on a guitar. There’s a lengthy playlist of his tuba videos, which generally have prosaic titles, such as “A tuba by the falls (with a microphone in it) at dusk, April 19th 2020” and “A tuba at Whitney’s Falls (with a microphone in it), September 1st 2024.” The most recent id m theft able tuba video, “A tuba at one of the falls revealed when Dundee Pond was drained (with a microphone in it)” (note the absence of a date), was uploaded on September 3, 2024, and features a metallic drone that has the threatening vibrancy of a distant buzzsaw. It’s nearly 25 minutes of the deeply raspy rumble. The sound is sufficiently routinized and static to qualify as a colored noise, perhaps “brass noise,” rather than merely white or brown.

On Repeat

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’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ A rich industrial drone performed live on an AE Modular setup by Belgium-based pt3r:

▰ Lovely live cello + synth performance by Brooklyn-based Serafim Smigelskiy:

▰ Norwegian violinist Mari Samuelsen performs works by a who’s who of largely post-classical and minimalist composers — among them Olivia Belli, Bryce Dessner, Ludovico Einaudi, Nils Frahm, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Mário Laginha, Hania Rani, Max Richter and Steve Reich — on her album Life, out last month on Deutsche Grammophon. This is her Rani piece: