Whew, I have finally seen Brad Mehldau live, in saxophonist Walter Smith III’s quintet, with Matt Stevens (guitar), Harish Raghavan (bass), and Kendrick Scott (drums). Apparently Robert Glasper was there during the previous set. At the jazz club Smoke in Manhattan.
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.
There is usually a playlist for these projects. This week is kind of an exception, more on which below.
These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com).
Disquiet Junto Project 0640: Time Vault
The Assignment: Record a track for eight months in the future.
Step 1: Record a piece of wordless music for yourself eight months from now. Think of where you are now and where you will be — or may be — then.
Step 2: Send the track to me ([email protected] — as a private link, not as an attachment) with your artist name, the track title, and a brief description (up to roughly 200 words) you’d like to annotate it with. The idea is the track will not be available to you or anyone other than me for the next eight months.
Step 3: When I reply to confirm receipt of the material from Step 2, delete the file from your laptop. (This step may feel drastic, so if you’re not comfortable doing so, please don’t.)
In eight months, on December 9, I’ll post a playlist of all the tracks, and you can then listen with fresh ears to what you — and everyone else — recorded.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0640” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Don’t Upload: Usually you would upload your track. Instead, per the above, send it to me.
Share: You won’t be posting your audio publicly now, but you might make a comment in the thread on Lines about what you were thinking and doing when you recorded your piece: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0640-time-vault/
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you, but please consider keeping it to under six minutes.
Deadline: Monday, April 8, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.
About: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/
License: When I post the track in eight months, I’ll do so as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license), unless you request otherwise.
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 640th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Time Vault — The Assignment: Record a track for eight months in the future — at https://disquiet.com/0640/
I have a white noise app on my Mac laptop that helps me focus. I noticed it doesn’t have “on” and “off” modes. It has “play” and “pause” modes. Apparently it’s never “off.” You will always listen again. If you’re not listening, you are simply preparing to listen.
As of this writing, these are the available sounds:
Airplane
Beach
City
Crickets
Fan
Fan 2
Fan 3
Fire
Ocean
Pier
Rain – Light
Rain – Heavy
Rainforest
River
Shower
Thunderstorm
Wind
Wind Chimes
Blue Noise
Brown Noise
Pink Noise
Violet Noise
White Noise
I use the “airplane” noise mode, myself. I’ve become so accustomed to its tonality that I’ve been known to use it while on airplanes, which is ironic given that I usually use noise cancelling headphones on planes to block out the actual airplane noise. This is to say, I both eliminate the sound of the plane and then pipe in the artificial sound of the plane. The action is, from one perspective, the sonic equivalent of tearing out your backyard and laying down astroturf. Though of course, it’s nothing like that.
As for the other options, I appreciate the cicadas, but it mostly makes me think of camping, which is not on my personal list of ideal situations. I’ll take a non-reclining coach seat on an airplane over camping.
Of the “color” noises, I occasionally opt for brown, which is essentially airplane noise reduced to a mathematical formula. Brown noise is the airplane noise of a low-polygon simulation of flight.
One thing the app lacks is café chatter — better yet, café chatter in a language I don’t understand (which would be any language other than English, though I’m coming up on a year-long streak in Duolingo German, so who knows). Perhaps chatter will come with a future upgrade.
