Author: Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto Project 0701: Gap Ear

The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
The photo shows a blue sky with bright white clouds over a flat landscape with hills in the distance, plus the name and number of the project

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 0701: Gap Ear
The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces.

Step 1: Choose a piece of music (whether your own or something in the public domain) and break it into sequential pieces. You might do this to a recording, or you might place gaps between parts of a notated melody (just to provide two different ways this instruction might be interpreted).

Step 2: Now, fill the various gaps, however many there may be, resulting from Step 1.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0701” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0701-gap-ear/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. The finished track will likely be maybe 50% larger than the source material.

Deadline: Monday, June 9, 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 701st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Gap Ear — The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces — at https://disquiet.com/0701/

Chaos and Precision

The frantic glitchcore of MTCH's hkyrbnnpkmdtvovgjr (EVEL)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

[bandcamp width=640 height=472 album=1286483180 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

Half of an upcoming glitch/beats album by MTCH, hkyrbnnpkmdtvovgjr (if something is encoded in that letter slurry, please lemme know), is up now for streaming, and it’s a fantastic set of frazzled IDM, full of heady echoes of Autechre and Monolake, with a vibrant arrhythmia that suggests live coding at work. Here and there are ominous drones, from which snatches of whirling effects, bounding percussion, and cybernetic beats emerge. It’s sound-design techno, breaking noises into fragments and moving them around with the subgenre’s trademark mix of chaos and precision — artisanal pick-up sticks tossed into a cyclone. Tracks like “kjbg” and “5_bstrckt” resemble a sonification of a subroutine attempting to take matters into its own hands (or lack thereof). The full album comes out Friday, June 6, on the label EVEL, which — at least based on its social media and Bandcamp pages — maintains a geographic ambiguity.

Junto Profile: Ángel Luis Martínez

From New York, New York: The music of poetry, and recording in the moment.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This Junto Profile is part of an ongoing series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.

What’s your name? My name is Ángel Luis Martínez.

Spirit Turnpike is my project that I’d like to see perform as a full band someday. I use Professor MTZ (first word is derived from my “day” job) on recordings where my main contribution is mixing other artists’ work.

My first band, and which exists to this day, is The Arawax. It’s where I gained deep confidence and understanding of the bass guitar through folk, punk, and many other influences. We have done concerts together that were fun and well-received.

Currently, I also collaborate with New Haven Improvisers Collective.

Where are you located? I grew up in Brooklyn — specifically in Williamsburg and the adjoining areas in Bed-Stuy. While I played a little guitar, tape recorders and a Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard were at the center of my sonic adventures. The sampler also has a synthesizer function to make more sounds. This was the 1980s, so I made mixtapes from radio and TV programs, my own voice, and occasional noodlings on instruments, enjoying especially sampled weirdness from loops. I still have many of those cassettes, so now I sometimes think what, if anything, I can make from them.

Continue reading “Junto Profile: Ángel Luis Martínez”

Listen to the Code

And watch

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In a manner of speaking, much electronic music is made entirely in code, whether within standalone physical devices that provide tactile means to control sound digitally, or in software that runs on, say, laptops or phones. And then there are coding systems that allow one to, from the ground up, create what might be thought of as raw software, such as the work GrundTon does in Pure Data (a visual programming language), here making what he calls ambient breakcore. And for a bonus, he posts some of his code on his GitHub. Below you can see (and listen to) a slightly spruced up version of the visual system he is developing. GrundTon is an art and technology student based in Vienna, Austria. 

On Repeat: Score, Drone, Shadow

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰  I end up listening to a lot of scores to films I never end up seeing. From the strength of the fragile ambient and minimalist music that Chris Gestrin recorded for his collaboration with filmmaker Jeff Carter, I’ll definitely be tracking down So Below, which is described as “A contemporary reflection on the utopian vision of Charles Fourier (1772-1837), framed in a multi-format cinema landscape variously local, regional, global, and cosmic.” Gestrin is based in British Columbia.

[bandcamp width=640 height=472 album=3197209799 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

▰  Dreunen, by Magnetic Loops, is a series of quite varied drones recorded for International Drone Day, May 24, 2025. Magnetic Loops is based in Bristol, UK.

[bandcamp width=640 height=406 album=917770467 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

▰  Christopher Hanlon’s gentle “Thought Shadows” hides little glitches and beat-like plosives in its embrace. Hanlon is based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.