Author: Marc Weidenbaum

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.

/ 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.

These following instructions went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).

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:

https://www.dropbox.com/t/TGexgpq93GPLGFxE

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:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0600-reaching-out/

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.

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-0600-reaching-out/

This project’s cover image is a detail of a photo by Marcus Fischer.

Susan Philipsz on an SFMOMA Balcony

Experiencing and documenting “Songs Sung in the First Person”

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I spent much of an afternoon this past week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a key cause of my visit being an exterior installation, on a high balcony, of a piece by sound artist Susan Philipsz. The work is titled “Songs Sung in the First Person on Themes of Longing, Sympathy and Release.” Philipsz was born one year before I was. Her personal songbook registers her as a peer: Teenage Fanclub, Gram Parsons, the Smiths, and Soft Cell. Philipsz’s voice has a lovely quality. An untrained singer, she combines a mix of tenderness and self-consciousness that feel, for lack of a less ordinary term, real. Then again, ordinary is sort of the point. There is a useful ordinariness to her singing. It’s not “bad” by any means. In fact, as someone who doesn’t listen to much music with singing, I prefer her dedicated amateur tonality with the throaty, emotive overkill of many professional entertainers (trained or otherwise).

Perhaps ironically, the work that this ephemeral piece reminded me of most is one with visuals: a video titled “the world won’t listen” by the artist Phil Collins (not the recording artist). That piece presents music fans from Colombia, Indonesia, and Turkey singing karaoke versions of Smiths songs. Collins is a half decade younger than Philipsz, both are from the United Kingdom, and they naturally draw from the same cultural source material.

As with a lot of Philipsz’s work, there is no real physical presence to “Songs Sung in the First Person on Themes of Longing, Sympathy and Release.” You stand on the balcony and you listen. You do or don’t look at the other people who are also present. Perhaps the intimacy of her voice makes eye contact difficult. Perhaps that is the point. There is some ritual to the scheme. You have to walk through two heavy sets of doors to get to the balcony. If you look around, you might spy a distant, massive speaker, separated from visitors by a light metal stanchion that signals to not venture further. A bit of unintentionally exposed cabling at the balcony’s edge suggests that maybe some other approach had been experimented with earlier. (I’m fairly certain this speaker cone is the same model I’ve seen in other Philipsz installations — interior and exterior — and I wonder if it’s an intended marker of her work, or simply the right choice for certain type of space.)

I wondered how, aside from a photograph of the exposed speaker, I might visually document the Philipsz piece. In the end, photos of the wall text made particular sense: they show the related information, and reflect back the view in which the singing is experienced.

An Amplified Skeuomorph

And the sound of photography

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I don’t know what it says about my aesthetic leanings, but I found this 1912 building far more interesting once the presumably temporary scaffolding went up than I ever had previously — so much so that I pulled over the car I was driving in order to take a few pictures. None of the resulting snapshots began to do justice to the elegance of the lattice, the way the newly enveloped structure suggested an architectural plan come to life. 

The point of my noting this incident isn’t the construction or the photo but what happened when I hit the button on my phone to trigger the camera app to document the scene: the sound of the shutter filled the car. It would have been even louder had I not already rolled down the window to get a better view of the building, a large church on Turk Street here in San Francisco. Hearing the artificial shutter sound — a classic example of a digital skeuomorph, in which a software application mimics a vestigial design element of a formerly physical object — was confusing, to say the least. Played that loud in the car, it wasn’t even recognizable at first as a camera sound. The magnified noise was entirely out of scale with the succinct click that audibly confirms a photo has been shot. I took a few extra photos in order to, in turn, confirm my sense of what had occurred. 

This incident was an unintended consequence of my phone being connected to the car via CarPlay, a service that mimics select iOS apps on a dashboard display. These versions of the apps are optimized, even restricted, given the use case. That is, they tend to emphasize voice input and to limit hands-on activity. Somehow, though, the rerouting of the phone’s shutter wasn’t taken into consideration in the process. Perhaps at some point in the future, an update to iOS or to CarPlay or to both will eliminate the car’s exaggerated echoing of the camera’s shutter. Which leaves a question lingering about whether we’ll even notice such a passing. The constant iterative updating of the devices and software tools we employ in our lives means that numerous changes, small and large, occur on an almost daily basis, generally without any ability on our part to roll back the clock, to contrast today with yesterday. The future keeps occurring. Only by documenting the details of the momentary present might we even begin to keep track, to make sense of it all.