One of those moments when the laundry — in this case the droning washer and the dryer, the latter with a zipper rattling — could just as well be a lost single from the Chain Reaction label. (Also: I’m kind of impressed that SoundCloud automatically associated the hashtag “#Krautrock” with this track, based solely on the audio and that previous sentence.)
Author: Marc Weidenbaum
Death Hags’ 3rd Junto x Bern Podcast
A new set of tracks collected on her listen.camp show, Big Grey Sun 2.0
For the November 4, 2023, episode on her listen.camp show, Big Grey Sun 2.0, the L.A. musician/producer Lola G. (aka Death Hags) played tracks from the third of three Disquiet Junto projects that participants did this year in collaboration with Musikfestival Bern, as well as some of her own music. The theme of this project, number 0599, Minimal(ish) Blend, was: Make a piece of music that combines self-contained minimalist parts.
This is the playlist from “Big Grey Sun 2.0 / 04th November 2023,” which is hosted at Death Hags’ mixcloud.com account:
- Death Hags — “There Is a Full Moon Tonight”
- Death Hags — “Sun Still Standing”
- LazenbeeIndustries — “leadhills”
- Death Hags — “Dance Around the Fire (remix)”
- Gerard Paresys — “Blend”
- Death Hags — “Monster Lullaby (instr.)”
- Krakenkraft — “Emerging Flavours”
Scratch Pad: AI, Duolingo, Celtic Frost
From the past week
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. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I take weekends off social media.
▰ One reason I was terrible in foreign language in school was my inability to not think. I couldn’t turn off my brain and just listen/speak. Duolingo’s been a learning experience: how much my progress improves when I stop thinking and just act. This has, in turn, positively impacted my guitar lessons.
▰ My current tab management approach is that once every month or so I click the wrong thing on Safari and they all disappear and I have no idea why
▰ Here in San Francisco, autumn has cosplayed as summer for Halloween.
▰ My voice recorder had what I thought to be some stray thoughts from yesterday in it, so this morning I fed the file into a speech-to-text tool — which then produced this. Turned out the audio was a few phrases I’d recorded at the end of guitar class that I’d forgotten about.
Would have been sort of amazing if it had actually identified the pitches and so forth.
Tired: speech to text
Wired: audio to guitar tablature
▰ Just here to note that Celtic Frost’s Into the Pandemonium remains an absolutely incredible album
▰ Looking to 2024, I wanna to spend more time doing less. The Disquiet Junto Slack was something I spent too much time thinking about. So the Slack has been renamed and is now run by a crew of regulars; I’m just a citizen there now. Feels freeing after 7 years. Of course, the Disquiet Junto continues.
▰ I pretty much live in my RSS reader and it’s clear that several blogs I follow are now plumping up their “content” with AI-written blather on various topics — some time-sensitive, others evergreen. The result is generic mush. They’d be better to just post the AI prompt in the form of an outline. The worst are the ones that appear to be the work of people who want to be known as “writers” or “thinkers” or “authorities” but don’t actually, you know, wanna write or, for that matter, think.
▰ Spent most of the afternoon at the Apple Store, where people wander in with shards of glass taped to bits of wire and bent scrap metal, requesting speedy assistance
Music School
Despite appearances, Duolingo Music isn’t currently offering turntablist lessons
Disquiet Junto Project 0618: Burying the Lede
The Assignment: Turn old news into new music.
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 6, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 2, 2023.
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 out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).
Disquiet Junto Project 0618: Burying the Lede
The Assignment: Turn old news into new music.
Step 1: Locate an old news article, the less dramatic perhaps the better, from roughly 50 years ago. Try to find something local to where you live now or have lived.
Step 2: Use a text-to-speech tool to convert the article to audio. There are numerous such software applications, and no doubt discussion in the Junto thread on llllllll.co will yield suggestions should you require one.
Step 3: Set to music the voice recording that resulted from Step 2. A length of two and a half to five minutes is recommended. Use an article sufficient to that length — you may end up not using the entire text. As the piece goes on, have the voice slowly get subsumed by the music, until by the end the voice is no longer intelligible — perhaps not even audible.
Note: In case the word isn’t familiar, a “lede” is “the opening sentence or paragraph of a news article, summarizing the most important aspects of the story.”
Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0618” (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 “disquiet0618” (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:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0618-burying-the-lede/
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 will largely be determined by the length of the text you select.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, November 6, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, November 2, 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 618th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Burying the Lede (The Assignment: Turn old news into new music), at: https://disquiet.com/0618/
About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0618-burying-the-lede/