Scratch Pad: Sirens on a Sunny Day

From the past week

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.

▰ It’s a lesser-known Gen X superstition that if you happen to walk by an establishment that’s playing “Come On Eileen” before 10:30am, it’s gonna be a better than average day

▰ Current status: trying to run the battery down on a device so I can then see what chargers it does and doesn’t work with. I unplugged it and had it play MP3 files of Buddha Machine tracks on loop with the screen at the highest brightness level.

▰ A beautiful sunny and warm day translates to the sound of emergency vehicles heading quickly to the ocean at dusk

▰ The concise if ambiguous narrative of a car* with a freshly broken windshield and, dangling from the rearview mirror, a bright blue disabled person parking permit

*not mine

▰ Spent the day in nature, which was beautiful, but being now back in the city, I feel the need to take a walk, not for the exercise so much as to feel re-centered. I think “glimpse graffiti” is my “touch grass.”

▰ Vibe: if The Secret Garden was a first-person shooter

▰ I finished reading my fifth novel of the year, Cory Doctorow’s (very good) Walkaway (2017). And now I wonder: Is its use of the word “enfilthening” an origin point of his later and more popular neologism “enshitification” (2022)? I also read the graphic novel Zatana: Bring Down the House, written by Mariko Tamaki and drawn by Javier Rodriguez.

Disquiet Junto Project 0691: Un-Ravel

The Assignment: Make a recording of a string quartet fall apart.

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 0691: Un-Ravel
The Assignment: Make a recording of a string quartet fall apart.

Step 1: Download the first movement of the Ravel string quartet at this URL: https://bit.ly/un-ravel

The original source is the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/3-capet-sq-col-d-15057-60-ravel-1928-mov-3/

Step 2: Listen to the track closely.

Step 3: Create a new piece of music by employing the provided recording as source material. The goal for your piece is that it should make the Ravel sound like it is falling apart — that is, like it is unraveling, or un-Ravel-ing.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0691” (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-0691-un-ravel/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, March 31, 2024, 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 691st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Un-Ravel — The Assignment: Make a recording of a string quartet fall apart — at https://disquiet.com/0691/