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Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ Mark Lentczner, aka Electric Kitchen, performs this deep drone piece for the 50th anniversary of the Serge synthesizer instrument line developed by Serge Tcherepnin. Lentczner is one of numerous participants on a recent series of albums collecting Serge-centric works.
▰ The great film-score composer Hildur Guðnadóttir took part in the “What’s in My Bag?” video series from Amoeba Records. In it she talks animatedly about Gavin Bryars, Mortan Feldman, Ellen Fullman, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, and other favorites. She’s currently working on Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to the move that won her an Oscar. (Thanks, Paul Ashby, for pointing this video out.)
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means @[email protected] (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.
▰ Current sounds, Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 2:51pm: rain, wind, someone talking loudly outside, cars passing, car doors slamming shut — no birds, too loud for (most) planes, no fog horns
▰ I do not think I’ll be going for a walk today. This rain is out of control.
▰ So. Many. Sirens.
▰ Concentration level: two different simultaneous brown noise sources
▰ Disappointed that Google’s Bard AI chatbot doesn’t only answer in iambic pentameter
▰ Just sorted out that Apple’s Reminders app on a Mac can have multiple lists open in separate windows. You just have to double click on the given list. This app is so much more powerful than it has any interest in letting people know.
▰ If I remember my foundational Colossus: The Forbin Project and Person of Interest education, then Bard and ChatGPT will either go to war with each other or merge into an unrecognizable force in the next 24 hours
▰ An alert I don’t think I have ever received before: “Ferry services have been suspended”
▰ There’s something unintentionally chilling about this persistent system alert on ChatGPT: “History is temporarily unavailable.”
▰ Me: I’ve bought enough ebooks to last me until the heat death of the universe. Time to hit pause.
Me soon after: Oh, cool, there’s a new, 10-book StoryBundle set (temporarily at storybundle.com) of Lavie Tidhar’s “World SF” recommendations for two bucks a pop. (Authors include Mário Coelho, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Anya Ow, Francesca T Barbini and Francesco Verso, Nir Yaniv, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Premee Mohamed, Eugen Bacon and Milton Davis, Aliette de Bodard, and Tidhar.)
▰ While typing out that this week’s Disquiet Junto project is the 586th, I came to recognize that means the 600th one is coming up. That will be 600 weekly music composition prompts since January 2012 — easily 15,000 individual pieces of music produced by hundreds of musicians around the planet. I kinda find it hard to fathom.
The Assignment: Use probability to remove material from a track.
/ 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 over four 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, March 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 23, 2023.
The Assignment: Use probability to remove material from a track.
Step 1: Record a piece of multitrack music with at least three separate tracks. If you already have a multitrack recording of your own in mind for this project, feel free to use it.
Step 2: Go back and erase various parts of the recording from Step 1 by utilizing chance techniques. (For example, you might roll dice: once to determine which of the multitrack parts, once to determine the starting point in the track of the erasure, and once to determine the length of the erasure.)
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0586” (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 “disquiet0586” (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.
Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.
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. You could leave it to chance.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 23, 2023.
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 586th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chance the Eraser (The Assignment: Use probability to remove material from a track), at: https://disquiet.com/0586/
