▰ Here is pianist Hania Rani performing, live, some of the music from her beautiful score to the film The Giacomettis, which I mentioned earlier this month. The footage was shot at Atelier in Stampa, Switzerland. That’s a former barn Giovanni Giacometti, father of artists Alberto and Diego Giacometti and architect Bruno Giacometti, in 1906 turned into the family studio. Listening to this solo concert while alone at home is a highly recommended. Headphones are great, but better yet, play it loud and transport the sonics of the Atelier into your own room.
▰ The title to René Margraff’s “Hiccup” may be the result of sorting out a playful alternate word for the light glitch the musician brings to this otherwise plaintive, subdued drone. It’s a magnetic piece, just drawing the ear in even as it risks disturbing the very trance it insinuates.
About a decade ago, a little over a year into the existence of the Disquiet Junto, I put together a Junto FAQ (frequently asked questions) because I was, in fact, receiving a lot of questions, and I figured the best way to preemptively answer them was to answer the common ones publicly. Every once in a while I’ll update the FAQ. I reorganized some of the material this morning, for the first time since October of last year. It’s available at disquiet.com/junto. The main reason I’m sharing it is to be informative to new members. The other reason is to ask if there’s anything missing or that would benefit from clarification. Thanks very much.
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.
▰ The unique digital silence when the other person due to attend your online meeting doesn’t show up, and you just hang out all by yourself in the virtual space, un-disturbable and undisturbed, for a period of time — say 10 minutes — before logging off.
▰ This week in the #DisquietJunto, participants are creating new techno subgenres (more at llllllll.co and disquiet.com/0582). I’d say “imaginary” subgenres, but they’re not imaginary because they’re then recording example tracks. So far we’ve got:
Techno Bossa
Organ(ic) Takeno
Lockdown Techno
▰ Taking an online class. Unless the concepts get especially complicated, I watch the videos at 150% of the recorded speed. The main issue is the background music can get a little peppy.
I still find plenty of interesting music and sound on SoundCloud. The most complicated (i.e., annoying) aspect of the service (aside from spam, which you know is automated, but you can’t — or at least I can’t — resist the instinct to anthropomorphize) is that the number of accounts you’re allowed to follow remains capped at 2,000. This means that every time I want to follow a new one, I have to find someone among my many follows to unfollow. It also means I can’t follow the vast majority of the 10,600+ people who follow me. Such a restriction seems like an ill-considered structure for a social-media community, because it forces individuals to, in essence, be rude by not allowing them to easily reciprocate a fundamental social action.
Exacerbating the problem is that there are no tools (within SoundCloud or third-party), at least that I’m aware of, to assist in the whittling necessary when you do want to follow someone new once you hit to the magic 2,000 ceiling — this tending of my plot in the virtual community garden. The best thing I can do is to type two or three random letters into the search option that lets me filter my existing follows, then click on the handful that show up, and then locate an account among them that hasn’t posted in a few years (yeah, yeah — there’s plenty those). Then I unfollow that account in order to make room for the account I want to follow.
SoundCloud was founded back in 2007, and I think I joined at the start of 2010, because that’s the earliest email I can find that mentions SoundCloud that involves my having an account. I have a couple other emails dating back to 2008 that were professional promotional requests for me to listen to someone’s music on SoundCloud. The service hasn’t changed much in years. As community gardens go, SoundCloud is more than a bit thick with weeds, but it’s still plenty alive. It’s just hard to deal with those weeds without some good tools.
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.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 23, 2023.
Step 1: You’re going to make a new subgenre of techno. Think for a moment about what makes techno techno.
Step 2: Choose a word and put it before “techno.” Those two words in combination are your new subgenre.
Step 3: Record a piece of music in the style of the subgenre you came up with in Step 2.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0582” (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 “disquiet0582” (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. What’s the norm in your new subgenre?
Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 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 582nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, X Techno (The Assignment: Make a new subgenre), at: https://disquiet.com/0582/
