I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.
▰ I’m in the supermarket squeezing produce when Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” comes on, and I’m like: Yup.
▰ Me: I’ve bought enough (e)books for 2023.
Me 10 seconds later: there’s an $18 sale for 21 John Scalzi books on Humble Bundle for charity, and the new non-fiction book by Cory Doctorow (The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation) is $2 at Verso.
▰ The TV series Irvine Welsh’s Crime: in which the captioning does a fine job of deciphering the Scottish accents, but then you still need to look up plenty of words
Something about the positioning of the lock box next to the exceedingly generic dozen-unit doorbell, in combination with the multiple segments of black wrought iron gating, makes this entryway look less like that of a residence and more like a penitentiary. Someone has tried to lend some levity, but it’s a sloppy bid, muted by its surroundings. I’m trying to decide whether that Godzilla-spine outline drawn around the intercom speaker is supposed to look like Bart Simpson’s head, which the “HA” suggests.
The Assignment: Use recently discarded material to make something new.
/ 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, November 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 23, 2023.
Disquiet Junto Project 0621: The Leftovers The Assignment: Use recently discarded material to make something new.
Step 1: At the end of the calendar year, people often participate in holidays that result in lots of leftover food. Think about the leftovers — discarded tracks, or MIDI files, or ideas — that result from your music-making process.
Step 2: Scrounge around on your hard drive and recording equipment, and in your memory, to access the sort of creative leftovers that came to mind in Step 1.
Step 3: Make a new track primarily using the resources that surfaced in Step 2. You can, of course, add new material. And be sure to reheat sufficiently.
Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0621” (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 “disquiet0621” (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. How far can you stretch your leftovers?
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, November 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 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 621st weekly Disquiet Junto project, The Leftovers (The Assignment: Use recently discarded material to make something new), at: https://disquiet.com/0621/
This Teenage Engineering KO II is pretty sweet. I have the OG KO and love it. As is generally the case with these multi-track samplers, I wonder why different tracks can’t run at independent BPMs. When I asked TE’s Jens Rudberg this, about the OP-1, he had an interesting answer that had to do with the virtual tape format underlying the system. But that does not appear to apply to the KO II. Not a hill I’ll die on, but one I sit on and ponder. I asked a question along these lines about tiny MIDI controllers, and then Tom Whitwell developed one. So … I can dream.
Sometimes when I ask this BPM question, someone asks why, and then I say that this long after Steve Reich’s phase music, and the rise of generative music and sound art and ambient music — well, that’s, in essence, my answer to the question.
