I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others, including Bluesky (disquiet.bsky.social), which remains behind a beta firewall at the moment.
▰ “This person called, but left an empty message”
The digital silence of unanswered robocalls
▰ The AudioMoth field recorder had its first multi-day overnight in the backyard, and the resulting 1080 files were, thankfully, automatically divided into three different folders, one for each day.
▰ I was doing some research that led me back to some ancient issues of Scientific American, and came across some excellent home-audio fear-mongering in an advertisement about turntable care.
▰ Person: “Oh, you like sound. You must love the Fourth of July, all those fireworks.”
Time for the annual conversation:
Me: ” … “
▰ Mundane crowdsourcing question: If you keep a running document on a given topic broken down by day, do you generally put the items in chronological order or reverse chronological order? I find I do some one way and some the other.
▰ The dentist had yet another iteration of x-ray tech, a 360° thing you stand in the middle of. It makes “sample and hold”-style synth beeps. Ended up talking about MRIs. The dentist said he got through the annoying noise by imagining instruments fleshing out an EDM arrangement.
▰ Several people have uploaded their Disquiet Junto tracks this week to Bandcamp, and I thought, “Hey, since I can make a playlist on the mobile app, I’ll do so.” Then I realized I can’t share that playlist with anyone else. That’s on the official app. But several people recommended some third-party solutions, so I’m trying out bndcmpr.co.
I included the following message in this week’s email to the Disquiet Junto music community:
And like that, 600 weeks have passed. Back at the start of January 2012, I was sitting in a cafe on Valencia Street in San Francisco with a friend. We were both getting some work done, but this idea I had been pondering was suddenly coming into shape, and rather than try to push aside the idea, I attended to it. Only a few weeks earlier, I’d completed a group music project called Instagr/am/bient, in which 25 different musicians swapped Instagram photos and treated the one they received as the cover for their next single, which they proceeded to record. I wanted to try something that nudged that disparate-yet-communal idea even further: on the one hand, more open, in that participation didn’t require much if any decision-making on my part, but also more constrained, in that the creative concept was a little more narrow, a little more specific. I came up with an idea — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — and I posted the brief instruction as a call for entries with a short deadline, less than a week.
I needed a name for this undertaking. I borrowed the word “Junto” from the club that Benjamin Franklin formed in 1727 for “mutual improvement,” a concept the wording of which fascinated me. I appended “Junto” to “Disquiet,” which since 1996 had been the name of my website, the word borrowed from the English translation of a book by Fernando Pessoa. I let folks know about this “Disquiet Junto” on Twitter, and waited to see if anyone would even take note of the concept, let alone join in. They did join in, so I did another project the following week, and the one after that. And now, 600 weeks later, we have nearly 2,000 subscribers to the Disquiet Junto email list and every week people make music based on these composition prompts — prompts that are, not infrequently, proposed by members of the community themselves.
This week’s project was going to be a big round number. I wanted something special for it — not that every week the Junto doesn’t feel special to me in some way — and so I asked Marcus Fischer, long a friend of and occasional participant in the Junto, if he could wrangle some shared source audio of his own creation that Junto members could work with. Other sounds of his were the focus, in fact, of the fourth Disquiet Junto project, back at the end of that first month of 2012. I’m a big fan of shared-sample projects. Two shared-sample groups, the Iron Chef of Music and the Stones Throw Beat Battles, were among the inspirations on my mind when I posted that first Junto project. As I mention in this week’s project instructions, shared-sample projects have a unique attribute: there will be an underlying quality — a tonality, a texture, a commonality — to all the disparate works that are produced from the foundational material. Listening to the variations as they surface will be its own special source of pleasure. Having everyone work with the same sources this week felt appropriate, not just because the sounds themselves originated from an especially talented and generous member of the Junto, but because that resulting sonic commonality would serve, for a moment, to highlight the notion of community we’ve accomplished as a group.
And that covers it. I can’t wait to hear what people do with these shared samples.
And whether you’re new here or started participating a long time ago, whether you just get these emails to read them or you join in almost every week, I want to say thank you. Thank you, truly, for your time, creativity, and curiosity.
The Assignment: This is a shared sample project. Rework a set of seven WAV files provided by Marcus Fischer.
/ 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, July 3, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 29, 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0600: Reaching Out The Assignment: This is a shared sample project. Rework a set of seven WAV files provided by Marcus Fischer.
Step 1: The musician Marcus Fischer, long a friend of and participant in the Disquiet Junto, has graciously put together a set of shared samples that will be the source audio for this project. Part of the beauty of a shared sample project is that there will be an underlying quality — a tonality, a texture, a commonality — to all the disparate works that are produced from the foundational material. Listening to the variations as they surface will be its own special source of pleasure. You can access the files here:
Step 2: You can rework the audio from Step 1 in any way that you see fit. You can use all of it, or just one tiny piece, or whatever subset you find strikes your ear. The one stipulation is your finished piece should begin and end with an unadulterated segment of one of the provided tracks for at least two seconds. Please credit Marcus Fischer when posting your track.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0600” (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 “disquiet0600” (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, July 3, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 29, 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 600th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Reaching Out (The Assignment: This is a shared sample project. Rework a set of seven WAV files provided by Marcus Fischer), at: https://disquiet.com/0600/
Please credit Marcus Fischer when posting your track.
