Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto Project 0643: Stone Out of Focus

The Assignment: Make music inspired by a poem.

/ 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 appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com). 

Disquiet Junto Project 0643: Stone Out of Focus 
The Assignment: Make music inspired by a poem.

Step 1: This project is inspired by a brief poem by Yoko Ono, in which she wrote, “Take the sound of the stone aging.” Consider that sound.

Step 2: Record your impression of the sound of stone aging.

Background: This week’s project is based on a text by Yoko Ono, originally published in her book Grapefruit 60 years ago, back in 1964.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0643” (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-0643-stone-out-of-focus/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, April 29, 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 643rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Stone Out of Focus — The Assignment: Make music inspired by a poem — at https://disquiet.com/0643/

This week’s project is based on a text by Yoko Ono, originally published in her book Grapefruit 60 years ago, back in 1964.

Es Devlin’s Model Forest

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

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A highlight from the Es Devlin exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in Manhattan. This is a plan for her installation at the 2021 Art Basel in Miami Beach, Florida. Titled Five Echoes, it was a full-scale maze based on the floor of the Chartres Cathedral, a “sound sculpture” that contained a “temporary forest”: “We immersed visitors within a soundscape that Invited them to learn each plant and tree species’ name, making a habitat for the non-human species within the human imagination.” The exhibit runs through August 11.

Pre-Show (Bill Frisell & Co.)

In advance of a world premiere

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

As I type this, I’m preparing to drive over to Berkeley, from San Francisco, to see guitarist Bill Frisell in a sextet that will be premiering new music. The group, who will play at Freight & Salvage, consists of Frisell plus violinist Jenny Scheinman, violist Eyvind Kang, cellist Hank Roberts, bassist Thomas Morgan, and drummer Rudy Royston.

There is, as far as I can tell, no available footage or audio of them playing as a group, so I’ve been piecing together a mental sonic image, as it were, from various smaller group settings.

These two short videos are all the strings from the sextet excepting the bass, filmed back on November 4, 2017. It’s the same group (Frisell, Sheinman, Kang, Roberts) who recorded the 2011 album Sign of Life (Savoy) and the 2005 album Richter 858 (Songlines). The latter was recorded back in 2002, so this is no new partnership by any means.

Roberts has, I believe, with Frisell, the longest-running association of all the musicians playing in the premiere. There’s plenty of examples, both commercial releases and live video, including this short piece, recorded June 15, 2014, at the New Directions Cello Festival, at Ithaca College, in Ithaca, New York.

Roberts was one of the first musicians I interviewed professionally, shortly after I got out of college in 1988. By then I had interviewed numerous musicians for a school publication, including the drummer Bill Bruford (Yes, King Crimson) and the Joseph Shabalala (founder of the vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo). After school I moved to New York City (first Manhattan and then Brooklyn), and for a solid swath of that time I was lucky to score a shared apartment on Crosby Street just south of Houston, incredibly close to the Knitting Factory, where I went several times a week and saw Frisell, Roberts, and so many “Downtown” musicians of that era in each other’s groups. I also saw Frisell play at the Village Vanguard around that time, but mostly just went to whatever was at the Knitting Factory on a given night. When I interviewed Roberts, it was on the subject of his then fairly new record, Black Pastels. (I wrote the piece for Pulse! magazine, published by Tower Records. In 1989 I moved to California to be an editor at Pulse!)

Frisell, bassist Morgan, and drummer Royston have recorded and toured widely and frequently in recent years. Here they are on July 3, 2023, at Arts Center at Duck Creek.

I’m imagining tonight’s music will have the “chamber Americana” quality of the quartet heard above, but the presence of Royston may rev things up a little, and it may have more of a jazz quality, closer to the trio work highlighted here.