Author: Marc Weidenbaum

I’m looking forward to my little presentation I’m giving at Mission Synths in San Francisco about the Disquiet Junto on Thursday, the 22nd. I’ve done a bunch of Junto talks over the years. To date, the majority of them have been overarching descriptions of the now long-running music community. The main distinction among the talks I’ve given in the past is whether they were intended for audiences that are deeply into electronic and experimental music/art, or if they were for more general audiences, like when I spoke at SETI years back, just for one example. In contrast, the talk that’s coming up is more tightly focused, looking at particular Junto projects as a microcosm of Junto compositional prompts over the years, and emphasizing what these specific projects have to say about collegial online artistic communities — how one might foster and maintain them, how one might contribute thoughtfully as a participant in them, and what the artistic activity and online communications have in common.

The timing is especially good in that the event occurs at the start of the 699th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project, just one week from the milestone 700th project. The 699th will also be the final of the three-part trios project that’s currently underway. And this week marks the 10th anniversary of Lines, or llllllll.co, the message board where much Junto activity has been centered for many years.

Below are two slides from the deck I’m putting together for the talk.

I’ll decipher these on Thursday. I’ll also be playing music from various Junto projects.

The event starts at 7pm on May 22. Mission Synths is at 3026 24th Street in San Francisco. It costs $15, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. I’m pleased to share the bill with three other presenters: Naomi Seyfer (@sixolet), Jonathan Snyder (@iasekenighter), and Thadeus Reed (@creativecontrol).

I mentioned this over on the llllllll.co bulletin board, and will here, because news travels in various patterns, and often the best communication strategy is repetition. So:

There have been fantastic works this week in the second project in the Disquiet Junto sequence in which we build trios asynchronously over three weeks. I love hearing these trios take shape as time progresses. I feel torn, because at the heart of it, I want to hear every solo become at least a duet. And yet, on the other hand, some of my favorite musical experiences are listening closely as an individual solo becomes a variety of duets, thanks to the intervention of different asynchronous colleagues — and in turn, I find myself imagining the hypothetical trios that might yet emerge.

To that end: of the original 43 solos from the first phase of this three-week sequence, just 11 (as of this blog post) have yet to become duets — so, I’m going to ask that, for those who have the time to put in, and the interest do do so, please do select one of the remaining solos (the ones highlighted in yellow in the shared spreadsheet), which I’ve been updating manually for the past two weeks, and go for it — even if that means you’ll have done a third (or even fourth) duet.

To be clear: don’t rush it; only elect to do a duet with one of these if you can engage with the source material. Also, feel free to extend the deadline up until the start of this coming Thursday’s third and final phase of the project, just to fit these in.

Thanks, everyone. And as always, let me know if you have any questions.