There seemed to have been some sort of low-key Y2K-ish thing going on with WordPress and with Buttondown last night, the 28th of February. The post for this week’s Disquiet Junto project went live on Disquiet.com prematurely, after which I tried to set up the email newsletter to go out (the next day, as usual) but the interface wouldn’t allow such a thing: February 29 showed in the pulldown, but I couldn’t save the schedule setting. As a result, both the Disquiet post and the Buttondown email went live a few hours early (late on the 28th instead of early on the 29th — Pacific Time Zone, that is). In retrospect, it is sort of poetic that TinyLetter is being shut down by its parent company, MailChimp, on February 29th, as if it’s saying, “There are complexities behind the scenes, such as leap year, that require resources, the expense of which we can’t rationalize.” I’ll try to get the situation sorted over the course of the next four years, before the scenario potentially comes round again — clearly it’s not pressing. Also, this could all just be coincidence, or the technological equivalent of a bad hair day. And, I was pretty frazzled last night after a particularly long, and thankfully productive, stretch of writing.
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
Disquiet Junto Project 0635: ’Round the Bend
The Assignment: You’re in a duo, and your bandmate is a train.
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 0635: ’Round the Bend
The Assignment: You’re in a duo, and your bandmate is a train.
Step 1: Listen to this short recording, under a minute, of a passing train, recorded by Todd (Toaster) Elliott:
https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/train-source-1
And, if you’d like, to this longer one, which is a little over 10 minutes:
https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/train-source-1020
Both are available to download.
Step 2: Record a piece of music using the field recording as the rhythm track. You can use the shorter one, or a segment of the longer one. Make sure the original is audible in your final work.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0635” (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-0635-round-the-bend/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. Could be 16 coaches long, as Elvis sang.
Deadline: Monday, March 4, 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 635th weekly Disquiet Junto project, ’Round the Bend — The Assignment: You’re in a duo, and your bandmate is a train — at https://disquiet.com/0635/
The image associated with this track is a photograph by Todd (Toaster) Elliott, who also provided the field recordings of the train.
My Interview on Artists & Hackers
In which Lee Tusman asks me questions about the Disquiet Junto
A new interview with me about the Disquiet Junto, experimental music, and online collaboration is up as part of the excellent Artists & Hackers podcast (mine’s the 21st in the series), courtesy of host Lee Tusman. The overarching topic is the Creative Commons, and appropriately the podcast and associated elements are licensed via a Creative Commons license, CC BY 4.0, allowing me to reproduce the materials here, which is what I have done. These include a full transcript. Also appropriately, the podcast employs music from past Junto projects, with tracks by wasabicube, analoc, he_nu_ri, caustic_gates, and NolanVerde.
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Ep. 21 – Creating in a Commons: Conversations with Creative Commons and Disquiet Junto
Kat Walsh from Creative Commons joins us to talk about the history of Creative Commons as a ‘hack on copyright.’ Marc Weidenbaum speaks on the history of the Disquiet Junto, a long-running online distributed community creating new music in response to a weekly online composition challenge.
. . .
In this season of the podcast we’re working in collaboration with the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU Law. In addition to our usual crop of artists and programmers we’re adding in legal scholars to help us unpack some of the thorny issues for those working in art and code as they unleash their work into the world.
In this episode we dive into the world of Creative Commons, which is now over 20 years old. It is both an organization as well as a collection of copyright licenses used by artists, musicians, writers, directors and creators worldwide to communicate to the world how they want their work shared and potentially to be used as a source to build upon.
We also speak to Marc Weidenbaum, founder and steward of the Disquiet Junto, an online “community of practice.” Each week Marc sends out an email newsletter with a creative prompt, consisting of a title, and instructions. These instructions may read like a Fluxus event score, a recipe in sound, a concept or technical description. Those who choose to participate create a single piece of music, then post it online, to be shared, listened to and potentially discussed by the online community. Marc has been leading Disquiet Junto since 2012, and from the beginning has encouraged participants to share their work with Creative Commons licenses. In fact the creative re-use of Creative Commons licensed sound and music has often been an integral part of Disquiet Junto creative prompts.
Continue reading “My Interview on Artists & Hackers”The Sound of Broken Glass
Apologies to Nick Lowe
This is the sound of a window pane made of safety glass that has broken but not yet fallen apart. The glass is a splintered spiderweb of a thing. At some point soon it will likely collapse to the floor, but right now the glass is settling, this sound evidence of the uneasy peace inherent in its fraught physics. (It’s a double-paned window, and only the inside pane has broken.)
End of Day, End of Weekend
