Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto Project 0721: Well Weathered

The Assignment: Play along with a storm

/ 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 five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0721: Well Weathered
The Assignment: Play along with a storm

Step 1: On freesound.org, find a recording of a bad storm. Or use one of your own.

Step 2: Listen to the recording from Step 1.

Step 3: Select a section of the recording from Step 1, perhaps 3 to 5 minutes in length.

Step 4: Listen several times in a row to the section selected in Step 3. Get to know its sounds, and the overall shape of the recording.

Step 5: Record a track in which you play along with the storm.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0721” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0721-well-weathered/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How bad is the storm?

Deadline: Monday, October 27, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 721st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Well Weathered — The Assignment: Play along with a storm — at https://disquiet.com/0721/.

Music for (Former Soviet) Spas

From the musician who goes by Ampiila

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Modular synth? Check. Remote location? Check. Dilapidated former spa in the small Georgian town of Tskaltubo? Check. Plenty of footage of the semi-ruins? Check. A soundtrack entirely made on a small portable rig? Check. A constellation of occasional sounds flickering in and out of sonic focus, echoing and pinging and lending a sense of dreaminess to the setting? Check. There is ambient music for spas — and there is ambient music for former Soviet spas. This is the latter, courtesy of the musician who goes by Ampiila.

A Track a Day

From the musician who goes by hijaq. (with a period)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The musician who goes by hijaq. (with a period) has been posting a track a day this year, many of them short little single-instrument experiments — and, better yet, recorded live as videos. The process makes for a fantastic project, one that I’ve seen various musicians, including Marcus Fischer and Taylor Deupree, undertake in the past.

Recording one track a day can be transformative. Something happens to musicians who do this, in ways creative, intellectual, and meaningfully practical. A lot of skills and habits are refined and accrued as time passes, muscle memory levels up, and new techniques are explored both cursorily and in depth.

In the growing body of short pieces, Hijaq. displays a predilection for small, handheld devices, like the Minichord and the HiChord, sometimes combining them through overdubs or adjusting them simultaneously in real time.

There is a “cozy” — in the sense of mystery novels and video games — quality to the solitude and the simplicity of Hijaq.’s activities, whether a given day’s effort amount to a one-minute ditty recorded in a field:

or a little beat made with some pads on a desk:

or a Teenage Engineering gadget sampling excursion on a picnic bench:

Definitely check out this short, chord-focused piece, which inventively splits the screen about halfway through:

And Hijaq. has a Bandcamp page for further exploration.