My latest album review for Pitchfork was published earlier this week. I wrote about the latest from the Kenyan musician KMRU, Dissolution Grip. First two paragraphs below. Read in full at pitchfork.com.
KMRU is not the call sign of a radio station, though it could very well be. The calendar of this imaginary broadcaster would vary in format and genre. Shows would change frequently: evolve, morph, disappear. To tune into KMRU would mean being surprised. Some shows would feature lengthy abstract drones, others would venture into the territory of techno, or focus on cerebral minimalism, and some would feature guest instrumentalists and vocalists. Yet for all that unpredictability, to pull up KMRU on your radio dial would invariably entail hearing field recordings—sometimes in their raw, undigested form, but far more frequently augmented by all manner of digital techniques and aesthetic practices.
But of course KMRU isn’t a radio station; KMRU is a lone individual (if an impressively prolific one). That taut quartet of letters is a compression of his family name: Kamaru. First name Joseph, born in Nairobi, Kenya, and relocated to Berlin, Germany, he has over the past few years become a widely referenced figure in contemporary electronic music, excelling in all the sounds mentioned above. Throughout it all, field recordings have been central to his work—quarried for their textural qualities, or sliced and diced into corrosive soundscapes, or laid bare to serve as vicarious sonic travel aids.
The Assignment: Do something you often do, but differently.
/ 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, October 9, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 5, 2023.
Step 1: Think of something related to making music that you do a lot.
Step 2: Think of an alternate way to do it that challenges your habits.
Step 3: Make a piece of music using the approach you thought of in Step 2.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0614” (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 “disquiet0614” (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.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, October 9, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 5, 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 614th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Alternate Route (The Assignment: Do something you often do, but differently), at: https://disquiet.com/0614/
I’m enjoying John Darnielle’s novel Devil House. Makes sense such a talented musician would have a narrator with a good ear:
“Neither of them announce themselves when they enter: they aren’t seasoned thieves, but they know that a doorknob turned gently enough makes hardly any sound at all if there’s ambient noise to mask it: a stove fan, a countertop radio. Everyone was a child once; everyone’s moved stealthily sometimes, either at play or from sheer animal need.”
I didn’t even have pictures on Disquiet.com, which I founded in 1996, until the mid-2000s. Only recently did I start using the first person when writing here. Ironically, it was many years after naming the website for Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet that I finally came to recognize — not just to see, but to get — the parallel: fragmented writing that adds up to something. That, in a word, is a blog. And in a little over two months, it will have been 27 years.
This is a slightly edited version of my concert review that appeared in the October 2023 (Issue 476) edition of The Wire magazine.
Ross Hoyt/Leila Abdul-Rauf/Ryan Honaker/Ed Lloyd + Cecyl Ruehlen + Michael P Dawson + San Kazakgascar Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco, US July 5, 2023
The Luggage Store Gallery on Market Street sits a few doors down and a few flights up from a corner, at Sixth Street, that veered toward dissolute long before the pandemic turned cities into targets for end-times rhetoric. The interior stairwell is festooned with scrawl and stickers, visual chaos that channels the exterior urban disorder into something willfully beautiful. You emerge, after a climb, into the stark space of a single large room. At one end, floor to ceiling windows would overlook the street were the glass not lightly frosted.
The Luggage Store Gallery New Music Series takes place there nearly weekly, programmed by Outsound Executive Director Rent Romus, who lends context to experimental acts by coordinating — or simply creating a sympathetic venue for — shared themes, approaches, vibes. On a seasonally cool Wednesday night after U.S. Independence Day, four sets manage to explore expressly different corners of ambient drone music with a touch of noise. Each of the first three creates a moment that concentrates its unique capacities.
First comes the quartet of Leila Abdul-Rauf (trumpet), Ryan Honaker (guitar), Ross Hoyt (keyboard), and Ed Lloyd (double bass). For them, the key moment is when Abdul-Rauf switches, after the midpoint, from electronically mediated trumpet, à la Arve Henriksen or Nils Petter Molvær, to intoned voice — and the band don’t miss a beat. Their consummate ambient chamber jazz allows for a shifting of source materials, including some found vocals and even an exclamatory shout from Hoyt.
For Cecyl Ruehlen, a fantastic saxophonist who performs through and along with a synthesizer rig, the moment is when a certain stratagem solidifies. There is a gating effect underway, a man-machine sidechain by which his horn, when loud enough, pushes the synth down in the mix. When he rests for a moment, the synth comes back strong, only to subside again when he next blows. Combined with Ruehlen’s effortful breathing, this method lends vibrancy to the synth, positing it as a natural force unto itself.
Michael P Dawson’s moment occurs when he simply stands up. He initially sits with a tiny modular synth box in his lap, coaxing muted signals patiently with a professorial demeanour. Quite suddenly, he rises, places the box on his seat, walks toward the audience and recites poetry. Instantly, the sounds the audience had focused on become background music, a setting for his recitation. It’s WB Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” — the poem from which, back in the late 1960s, Morton Subotnick borrowed the title Silver Apples of the Moon. Later those same words emerge, fragmented, from Dawson’s instrument.
The final act, San Kazakgascar, take on the role of drone band. They launch with a single such clarifying moment, a textural tone — then seek to hold it in reverberant stasis as long as possible. Tonight the members of this ever-shifting ensemble are guitarist Jed Brewer (guitar), Kevin Corcoran (percussion), Rachel Freund (clarinet), Greg Hain (synth), Colleen Kelly (six-string electric cello), Matt Kretzmann (synth), James Jaroba Barnes (bass clarinet), and Brian Lucas (guitar). The most impressive result from a large drone band is to hear more musicians producing seemingly less music. By those standards, tonight is a major, if at times loud, accomplishment.
