downstream – Page 127

Disquiet Junto Project 0473: Placebo Effect (2 of 3)

The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio that others will complete.

January 21, 2021January 22, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

*Special Note: You can contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. This week you can do a second one. Please see additional details in Step 5 below.*

*Answer to Frequent Question: You don’t need to have uploaded a solo in last week’s project to participate in this week’s duet project.*

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, January 25, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 21, 2020.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0473) for the duration of the project.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0473: Placebo Effect

The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio that others will complete.

Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second in a sequence intended to encourage and reward asynchronous collaboration. This week you’ll be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project ([disquiet.com/0472](https://disquiet.com/2021/01/14/disquiet-junto-project-0472-jam-time-1-of-3/)). Note that you aren’t creating a duet — you’re creating the second third of what will eventually be a trio. Keep this in mind. Leave space for what is yet to come.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to the pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by 68 musicians in all to choose from, 62 as part of this playlist:

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0472

(Note that it’s possible another track or two will pop up in or disappear from that playlist. Things are fluid on the internet.)

Count as the 63rd this track from RPLKTR:

https://soundcloud.com/rplktr/disquiet-0472-jam-time-1-of-3/s-ABJKYjr9Pvx

And count as the 64th this track from Jason Richardson:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0472-jam-time/40425/3?u=disquiet

And count as the 65th this track from Pineyb:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0472-jam-time/40425/59?u=disquiet

And count as the 66th this track from Sevenism:

https://sevenism.bandcamp.com/track/ymist

And count as the 67th this track from Chris Ledwidge:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0472-jam-time/40425/64?u=disquiet

And count as the 68th this track from Hardworking Families:

https://hardworkingfamilies.bandcamp.com/track/corn-pop-disquiet0472

To select a track, you can listen through all that and choose one, or you can use a random number generator to select a number from 1 to 68, the first 62 being numbered in the above SoundCloud playlist, and 62-68 being the ones linked to above.

Note: It’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece.

It is strongly encouraged that you look through the discussion on the Lines forum, because many tracks include additional contextual information there:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0472-jam-time/

Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and leave room for an eventual third piece of music. When composing and recording your part, don’t alter the original piece of music at all, except to pan the original fully to the left if it hasn’t been panned left already. In your finished audio track, your new part should be panned fully to the right. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.

Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it will be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.

Step 5: You can contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. You can do up to two total. For the second, it’s appreciated if you try to work with a solo that no one else has used yet ( look at the project’s post on Lines, linked to in these instructions, or to the project playlist, which will be posted here once tracks start coming in). The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. After a lot of detailed instruction, that is the spirit of this project.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0473” (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 “disquiet0473” (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-0473-placebo-effect/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0473-placebo-effect/)

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, January 25, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 21, 2020.

Length: The length should be roughly the same as the solo track you selected.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0473” 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 473rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Placebo Effect (2 of 3) / The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio that others will complete — at:

https://disquiet.com/0473/

On Algorithmic Winds

A new video for Jamuary by Heymun

January 19, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

You can almost see the clouds break when Heymun’s video gets underway. Her small synthesizer emits massive clouds of cello and other unidentified strings, plus vast choruses of consonant-free singing. Those clouds are artificial, needless to say, and gloriously so. They are striated digitally, and they flow according to algorithmic winds.

This is the latest video I’ve added to [my ongoing YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-) of fine live performance of ambient music. Video originally posted to Heymn’s [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyvvSXe4G_g) channel. She is based in Sydney, Australia. More at [soundcloud.com/heymun](https://soundcloud.com/heymun) and [instagram.com/heymunmusic](https://www.instagram.com/heymunmusic/).

Dong Zhou’s Alternative Bows

Live video from the Soundwave festival

January 18, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The medium of perfect sound forever, the compact disc, is here explored for its textural details. One might think that the CD, its data secure(ish) within layers of clear plastic and bright metal, is distinct from, say, vinyl LPs and cassette tapes, both of which have their well-known reproductive shortcomings. LP and tape surface qualities, the wear and tear, are an implicit part of the bargain. But the CD is different. Debates about its fidelity have to do with high-grain digital verisimilitude, not with background noise (even if the glitch genre/effect did derive in part from the sound of failing CDs).

But this video performance locates something different. By using a CD, at the opening of “we will finally lost in heavy fog,” as a means to play a violin, musician Dong Zhou (born in Shanghai, China, and based in Hamburg, Germany) gets at its hard materials, at the clipped corner of it sharp edge. She then proceeds to use other tools, including a pair of bows, what appears to be a rubber band, and an unidentified if certainly suggestive green object. Furthermore, she begins to process the sounds, so by the six-minute mark, when the green item is employed, she’s also using her laptop to echo and lightly yet radically transform the source audio.

Video originally posted at Dong Zhou’s [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvWWSO8OgLo). It appears that it was streamed during the October Soundwave Festival 3.0, which was held five Saturdays in a row in October 2020 ([onnow.tv](https://www.onnow.tv/livestream/soundwave-festival-3-0/2020-10-10/)). More from Dong Zhou at [dongzhou.live](https://dongzhou.live/) and [soundcloud.com/shimo_zhou](https://soundcloud.com/shimo_zhou).

Current Favorites: Icelandic Viola, Processed Piano

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

January 17, 2021 / 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. (This weekly feature was previously titled Current Listens. The name’s been updated for clarity’s sake.)

▰ [*Sola*](https://annelanzilotti.bandcamp.com/album/sola) is Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti performing a three-part piece by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir. If hyper-attenuated, ghostly strings are your thing (they are mine), this is ideal listening. As a bonus (and a model for other labels), the three tracks are followed by seven containing a conversation between composer and performer. Releaed on the New Focus Recordings label.

<a href="https://annelanzilotti.bandcamp.com/album/sola">Sola by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti</a>

▰ Solo live performance by Raffael Seyfried for piano, complemented and transformed by synthesizer. The track is titled [“Haptic,”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV-2rzg19gM&list=LL&index=4) and it is recommended you watch as he touches the equipment throughout.

▰ A fine synthesizer piece, titled [“Frozenfir.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRVZtdNhMLo&list=LL&index=10) A lot of current synth material can over rely on plucked and warped sounds, but this performance by Ambalek, who has quickly become a personal favorite, strikes a smart balance.

▰ Due out in mid-March, the upcoming Devin Sarno album, [*Evocation*](https://devin-sarno.bandcamp.com/album/evocation), offers welters of noise and a brief expanse of ether in its two preview tracks.

<a href="https://devin-sarno.bandcamp.com/album/evocation">Evocation by Devin Sarno</a>

▰ Also spending a lot of time with two pieces I wrote about in a bit more detail this past week, both solo live synthesizer performances, one by [Orbital Patterns](https://disquiet.com/2021/01/15/orbital-patterns-live-in-the-studio/) and the other by [Electric Kitchen](https://disquiet.com/2021/01/11/13-16-on-01-10/).

Orbital Patterns Live in the Studio

Celebrating Jamuary with "Found in the Fog"

January 15, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Opening with the scattery noise associated with wind on an exposed microphone, before fading into what appears to be backward-masked strings, “Found in the Fog” is the first video of the year from Orbital Patterns (aka Michigan-based Abdul Allums). The camera moves around his studio as the piece plays, a glimpse of a synthesizer here, a standalone music-computer there, a guitar pedal, a laptop. (Also, note that at least one of the modules heard, visible at the two-minute mark, is from the Instruō company, whose founder was the subject of [an interview](https://disquiet.com/2021/01/09/instruo-vcv-rack-jason-lim/) I posted last weekend.) It all comes together with Allums’ trademark seesawing ease, a loping quality that is as mellow as it is mysterious, as casual as it is reclusive.

Video originally posted at [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrEl5H8XwVc) as part of Jamuary. More at [instagram.com/0rbitalpatterns](https://www.instagram.com/0rbitalpatterns/) and [twitter.com/orbitalpatterns](https://twitter.com/orbitalpatterns).