At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ I’m not, by any means, planning on getting a vanity plate — but if I were to …
▰ Yeah, I played hooky this week and went to the de Young Museum for the manga exhibit, which is pretty darn great
▰ I’ve only really used modulargrid.net for Eurorack, so when I looked in the (guitar) pedals section, I was surprised to find things like an Akai MPC1000 and an Elektron Digitakt listed
▰ Was holding out for number 1 but so be it
▰ Barbershop update: The barber who usually has oldies playing was out for the day, the other barber was enjoying the silence, and who am I to argue?
The Assignment: Combine a pair of your recent tracks
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0720: One from Two The Assignment: Combine a pair of your recent tracks.
Step 1: You just recognized something. Two tracks you’ve been working on but haven’t finished would work better if you turned them into one single track.
Step 2: Choose two of your recent works-in-progress.
Step 3: Combine — by whatever means you see fit to employ — the two tracks from Step 2 into a single track.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0720” (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.
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 720th weekly Disquiet Junto project, One from Two — The Assignment: Combine a pair of your recent tracks — at https://disquiet.com/0720/.
This paragraph is from the email newsletter that will announce tomorrow’s Disquiet Junto project. It provides context for the week’s effort. This will be the 720th consecutive Disquiet Junto project.
This week’s project involves reworking recent work. It was inspired by a few different observations, one of which comes in the form of a memory from college. I worked for a spell on one of the literary magazines published by students. Early my first year, the editor-in-chief had quickly announced a due date for submissions. My immediate sense was this impending date didn’t provide sufficient time for potential contributors to write something. I came to understand that the sort of writers this publication was looking for didn’t need to be told to do something in order to start it. They would already be writing regularly. They just needed to be given a deadline to finish one of the things they were working on. I think about this experience all the time.
A new Henrik Meierkord release is always welcome. He has mastered the technologically mediated cello, striving for and achieving a steady, layered tonality that underlines the moment without overwhelming it. “Drones with my beloved cello and pedal” is his simple description of this new set, When time becomes a loop, yet from such a simple combination vast spaces and rich harmonies are made. Overdubbing and reverb and granular effects have become common elements in music-making, but it still takes a considered approach to sustain such a thing, and all the more so to explore new aspects of ambient textures. Meierkord, as always, delivers.
