The only thing better than a new hip-hop release with Arckatron as its producer is a new hip-hop release with Arckatron as its producer that also includes the respective instrumentals. And that would be the brand new single from rapper Anwar HighSign, “Understand” (also including an Alta Vista Mix of the lead track). The Los Angeles–based Arckatron is a master of soft-spoken instrumental tracks, with an ear for old-school source audio, right down to the surface tension of well-loved vinyl. The highlight of his team-up with HighSign is the b-side, “Kids Don’t Feel,” a low-slung beat that starts off like it’s got gum on one sole (that is, slightly off-kilter — think Dustin Hoffman navigating a city sidewalk in Midnight Cowboy). Arckatron proceeds to reinforce the sad-sack gait with a raspy drop-in, a vocal snippet, and other choice samples. At points, the samples skip and stutter, matching the beat’s downcast charm. The full track features a guest appearance from rapper Castle, but wait until the end of the single for the instrumental, which is pure Arckatron.
The Black Dog has, with various members over the years (key to its longevity being Ken Downie), recorded electronic music on and off since the tail end of the 1980s. Last year they had a residency at the Moore Street electricity substation in their native Sheffield, England. Resulting from that experiment in space-specific music is a quartet of “brutalist hymns” for what the Black Dog refer to as an “industrial cathedral.” These are the tracks that make up the new Nybrutalism EP. They are dense with overtones, like church organs on overdrive, all supercharged echo. The final track, “We Build on Dust,” pulses majestically, the whale song of infrastructure.
The Assignment: Break a piece of your music and put it back together again.
/ 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 just under five days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 22, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 18, 2024.
These following instructions went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). Note that this service will change shortly, likely to Buttondown, due to Tinyletter shutting down.
Disquiet Junto Project 0629: Jigsaw Logic The Assignment: Break a piece of your music and put it back together again.
Step 1: Choose a piece of your own music that is already recorded. Keep in mind, you’re about to break it up
Step 2: Break the recording from Step 1 into pieces. You might be inclined to think in terms of bars, but you could break it into notes or phrases, or into random segments of time. You might think about other ways to break it, like by relative volume, or note value, or some other aspect of the sonic spectrum. It’s entirely up to your ear, of course. Experiment until you arrive at a satisfying approach.
Step 3: Construct a new recording that begins with all the pieces that resulted from Step 2, simply played in sequence. Then slowly reassemble the original recording as you go. How you go about the reassembly is the real compositional question at hand.
Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0629” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0629” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. It may end up roughly the same length as the source material. Then again, it may not.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 22, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 18, 2024.
Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.
Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).
For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 629th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Jigsaw Logic — The Assignment: Break a piece of your music and put it back together again — at: https://disquiet.com/0629/
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the January 16, 2024, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.
▰ SURROUND SOUND: This Tab AI necklace seems like it could be a potential privacy nightmare, but at the same time the combination of small microphones and AI is bound to have ramifications, so better to start keeping abreast of such developments sooner than later: “Tab is a small puck that hangs around your neck and listens to everything you (and the people around you) say. Essentially just a microphone and a battery that lasts up to 30 hours between charges, it uses Bluetooth to beam your audio to your phone and into the cloud, where ChatGPT currently transcribes your conversations, and various AI models will extract insights for you. (Its UX isn’t final, but assume you’ll use your phone screen for most anything you want to do.) Ultimately, Tab is meant to be an AI companion, or what Schiffmann calls a ‘clarity machine’ that rides along in every moment of your life.”
▰ SPACE, MAN: Workplace life is ever-changing (especially now that life/work balance is morphing into remote/office-work balance), as is use of those “privacy pods” that have been popping up in recent years: “The pods, some resembling old-school telephone booths, have emerged as one of the hottest segments in the $24 billion North American office-furniture industry. Manufacturers such as Room, Nook and Framery say business has been brisk. But some workers and managers say more booths means less eavesdropping, less gossiping, less camaraderie and less fun. … Other products seek a different balance between isolation and community. Furniture maker Steelcase offers a desk-encircling tent meant to ensure ‘territorial privacy’ instead of silence. Nook, headquartered in the U.K., makes hut-shaped hideaways intended to provide a sense of psychological safety without being completely enclosed.”
▰ PHONE HOME: The threat of AI fakes is getting real: “A San Rafael mother received a terrifying phone call in October, and a voice on the other line was a perfect replica of her son saying, ‘Mom, mom, I’ve been in a car accident!’ Then another man came on the line saying that he was a police officer, that her son had run a stop sign and injured a pregnant woman in the accident, and that he was going to be taken to jail. This was followed by another call from someone claiming to be a local public defender, saying that she and her husband needed to pay $15,000 bail ASAP to get their son out of jail.”
"Silence is not visible, and yet its existence is clearly apparent. It extends to the farthest distances, yet is so close to us that we can feel it as concretely as we feel our own bodies. It is intangible, yet we can feel it as directly as we feel materials and fabrics."
That is the late Swiss philosopher Max Picard (1888-1965), as quoted by LM Sacasas in a recent issue of The Convivial Society. Writes Sacasas: “Those were the lines that first helped me perceive silence as an autonomous reality, and they did so simply by leading me to think again about what silence feels like. When in the presence of silence, I do not feel an emptiness, rather I feel something. Something looming, something active, something that is at work on me.” (The Picard quote is from his book The World of Silence, originally published in 1948.)
. . .
"Even the Pokémon noises are gently mellowed out in contrast to the coarser, more caterwauling sounds of the games; here the creatures purr, cry, coo and sigh like docile house pets."
That is Maya Philips writing in the New York Times about a new Netflix series titled Pokémon Concierge.
. . .
"He never allows you to rest, because he never settles into a groove or plays a familiar lick. His sound is a permanent antidote to complacency."
That is from a review in the New York Review of Books by Adam Shatz of Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music, the new autobiography from musician Henry Threadgill, who wrote it with Brent Hayes Edwards. (Thanks, Evan Cooper!)
