Disquiet Junto Project 0490: In Conversation

The Assignment: Compose a piece of music structured like dialog.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 24, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0490: In Conversation

The Assignment: Compose a piece of music structured like dialog.

Step 1: Think of someone to have a conversation with. It could be a friend, or it could be someone who is gone, or it could be someone you actually don’t want to talk to, or it could be someone entirely fictional. It’s up to you. Who do you want to be “in conversation” with?

Step 2: Compose a piece of word-less music that takes the form of a conversation, of a dialog, with the person you identified in Step 1. Your piece of music will move back and forth between the two “speakers,” who also may occasionally interrupt each other, or pause for thought. Those individuals may be represented by individual instruments (I’m a cello, while you’re a Buchla Music Easel), or by some subset combination of sounds.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0490” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0490” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0490-in-conversation/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0490-in-conversation/)

Step 5: Annotate your tracks with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 24, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 20, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Is this a quick chat or a long debate?

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0490” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 490th weekly Disquiet Junto project — In Conversation (The Assignment: Compose a piece of music structured like dialog) — at: https://disquiet.com/0490/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0490-in-conversation/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0490-in-conversation/).

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet) for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is by Suzie Blackman, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

[https://flic.kr/p/7Uv7uq](https://flic.kr/p/7Uv7uq)

[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/)

Norah Lorway’s Lockdown Loops

On Xylem Records

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Birth rates may have declined during the pandemic, but a year of quasi-seclusion has yielded a lot of music. Norah Lorway just released her latest entry in that phenomenon, [*anotherworld I*](https://xylemrecords.bandcamp.com/album/anotherworld-i), which she characterizes as “lockdown sound loops”: “repetitive, insistent, ever present.” Harsh noise is muffled to gaseous effect; soft sounds are shredded to sharp objects. The music revels in such contradictions over the course of the album’s four tracks.

Album published at [xylemrecords.bandcamp.com](https://xylemrecords.bandcamp.com/album/anotherworld-i). It was released by Xylem Records. More from Lorway at [norahlorway.com](https://www.norahlorway.com/).

Joe Colley’s Locked Grooves

Two noise tapes

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Veteran noise artist (and fellow former Tower Records employee) Joe Colley has a new two-tape collection out on the No Rent label. There’s a five-minute taste of its slow-motion, error-message, machine-rhythm pace on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gYSBJHBFio), and all four lengthy tracks (each just under 20 minutes) are streaming on the release’s [Bandcamp page](https://norentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/trance-tapes-norent031). The sounds vary from cicada-like chittering to lawnmower overdrive to distant-fire-alarm ambience, all with a robotic intent and the motoric uncertainty of a locked-groove record played with a particularly dusty needle. All of which is intended as a high compliment.

More details at [norent.bigcartel.com](https://norent.bigcartel.com/product/norent031-joe-colley-trance-tapes-2xc40). Colley is based in Oakland, California. No Rent is out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Current Favorites: Büşra Kayıkçı, Vitiello x Quiet Club, Circuitghost

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.

▰ The Turkish musician Büşra Kayıkçı is the latest musician featured in the excellent Project XII series from Deutsche Grammophon. Her new single, [“Bring the Light,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJdsXrhFVlg) is a propulsive, athletic take on Philip Glass’ arpeggio-heavy minimalism. Listen for how she carves out space for individual notes amid the flurry. It’s tremendous.

▰ There’s not much in the way of liner notes for [*That Which Remains*](https://thecircuitghost.bandcamp.com/album/that-which-remained), a new EP by Circuitghost, but over on the [llllllll.co](https://llllllll.co/t/circuitghost-new-ep-that-which-remained/) message board, it’s explained to be remnants from a previous EP, *All That We Lost*. It’s a beautiful amalgam of small sounds in which textures are put to percolating, rhythmic use.

▰ This 2017 collaboration between the Quiet Club, an Irish collective, and Stephen Vitiello, the American sound artist, just popped up [on Bandcamp](https://digital.farpointrecordings.com/album/black-iris-2). Titled *Black Iris*, it’s an ever-changing assortment of sound objects, from bells to scifi wiggles, borrowed audio narrative to dramatic creaking, footsteps to feedback, just to name a few, improvised live.

Disquiet Junto Project 0489: The Prestige

The Assignment: Apply some magic to ABA form.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 17, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 13, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0489: The Prestige

Assignment: Apply some magic to ABA form.

Thanks to Disquiet Junto member rbxbx for proposing this.

Step 1: There’s a now famous quote from the opening of the 2006 film *The Prestige*. It goes as follows. Give it a read:

“Every magic trick consists of three parts — or acts. The first part is called the Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird, or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it — to see if it is, indeed, real. You know: unaltered, normal. But of course … it probably isn’t. The second act is called the Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now, you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call the Prestige.”

Step 2: This arc, moving from Pledge to Turn to Prestige, can be read as a take on the classic ABA structure, in which a theme is introduced, then something else occurs, and then the piece returns to where it began.

Step 3: Compose and record a piece of music that takes the process described in *The Prestige* as its blueprint.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0489” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0489” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0489-the-prestige/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0489-the-prestige/)

Step 5: Annotate your tracks with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 17, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 13, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Listening can be deceiving.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0489” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 489th weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Prestige (Assignment: Apply some magic to ABA form) — at: https://disquiet.com/0488/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0489-the-prestige/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0489-the-prestige/)

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet) for Slack inclusion.