Disquiet Junto Project 0445: Aare Tribute

The Assignment: Read maps of a river as a graphic score.

/ 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 Monday, July 13, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 9, 2020.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0445: Aare Tribute
The Assignment: Read maps of a river as a graphic score.

This project is the second of three that are being done over the course of as many months in collaboration with the 2020 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 2 through 6 under the motto “Tektonik” (“Tectonics”). For this reason, a German translation is provided below. We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the second year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern. Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects will be played on a listening booth at the Steinatelier on September 5, as well as being aired on Radio RaBe (rabe.ch), an independent local radio station partnering with the festival.

Step 1: Look at the three maps below, all of the river Aare, a tributary that circumnavigates the city of Bern. One is from the late 18th century. The other two are modern renditions from Google Maps.

Step 2: Use one or more of those images by interpreting them as graphic scores and composing a resulting piece of music.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0445” (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 “disquiet0445” (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-0445-aare-tribute/

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 Monday, July 13, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 9, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0445” 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 445th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Disquiet Junto Project 0445: Aare Tribute — The Assignment: Read maps of a river as a graphic score — at:

https://disquiet.com/0445/

This is the second of three projects in collaboration with Musikfestival Bern 2020 which will take place in Bern, Switzerland, from September 2 to 6. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/

https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern/

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-0445-aare-tribute/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Continue reading “Disquiet Junto Project 0445: Aare Tribute”

Cortini Plays with a PlayStation Score

Remixing Ghost of Tsushima

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The forthcoming PlayStation game *Ghost of Tsushima* has an original score by Ilan Eshkeri (veteran of such movies as *Still Alice* and *Dr. Thorne*) and Shigeru Umebayashi (whose lengthy career includes *House of Flying Daggers* and *2046*, the latter by Wong Kar-wai). The releasing game studio, Sucker Punch, has enlisted some big names in popular electronic music to rework cues. These include Alessandro Cortini (best known as a member of Nine Inch Nails), the Glitch Mob, Tokimonsta, and Tycho. The resulting EP is due out Friday on the record label Milan. Cortini posted his remix to his YouTube channel. It’s a thrilling, cinematic piece, at once densely atmospheric and yet also pulse-rising. Absolutely gorgeous. It’s as much an alternate cue as it is a remix.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ent0MYKwGw4). More on the game, due out July 17, at [playstation.com](https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/ghost-of-tsushima-ps4/).

Hainbach on Asynchronous Loops

Courtesy of Ableton

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This isn’t a performance video, per se, but it’s a brief, informative spotlight on the musician Hainbach talking about something central to his music-making process. That thing, the “One Thing,” per the title of this series from the music equipment (software and hardware) company Ableton, is asynchronous loops: two or more loops that are of different lengths, as a result of which, they don’t overlap in a consistent manner, leading to an ever-changing series of sonic instances. I love asynchronous loops, which is why I have two foot pedals that are simple loopers, and why I’ve been confused over the years as various highly functional music-making tools I’ve tried out (such as the Teenage Engineering OP-1 and, more recently, the Synthstrom Deluge) don’t support asynchronous loops.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RW6XZLbVDgc).

Rob Walker Shares a “Sound Shot”

From his New Orleans office

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Time passes, and it’s awhile since you’ve seen a friend. And then you get a sense of their life that fills in the gaps a bit. Sure, there’s phone calls, and email, and voice conferencing, not to mention second-hand glimpses of them through their work. But then there’s something special, something unusual: a field recording of what their daily life sounds like — say, for example, what their office sounds like on a Sunday morning. Such a recording was posted by Rob Walker yesterday, a week after it was captured. The brief track, just a minute, is a glimpse of quiet from somewhere else. (He lives in New Orleans. I used to. We both lived there at the same time, then we both moved away, and then he moved back.) The track is tagged “sound shot,” a term that will be familiar to readers of Walker’s book, *The Art of Noticing* (which included some nice words about some of my work with sound). It’s from a chapter about “sonic journalist” Peter Cusack, and the idea is to record the sound of a place much as one might take a photo of a place: a sound shot, in lieu of a snapshot.

Read more about “sound shots” in Walker’s [email newsletter](https://robwalker.substack.com/p/taon-no-45-snapshots-but-with-sound). Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/murketing](https://soundcloud.com/murketing/office-sunday-morning-june-27-2020).

Current Listens: Instrumental Hip-Hop, Non-Performance Samples

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is my 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. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)

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NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases

▰ Caminauta collaborates, on “ambient piano,” with cellist Federico Motta for the lilting “Distance Memories.”

▰ Chris Herbert reworked the non-musical moments from live performances into a pair of extended atmospheric tracks: “transformations of fragments of dead air, non-performance squeaks, hiss, hum, and stray organ notes.” (Available for free download, too.)

▰ Anwar HighSign (formerly known as Has-Lo) did listeners the favor of including the instrumentals on their recent hip-hop EP, *Fleece*, two of which were instant favorites, both downtempo tracks featuring beats from cut-up organ and drums (“Whole Lotta Trouble,” “When I Write”).

▰ Carl Stone renders two very different avant-pop tracks (“Ganci” and “Figli”) from the same set of samples, both heavily altering a pre-existing vocal line.

▰ A highlight of Olivia Block’s three untitled tracks of music for piano, organ, and unspecified objects is the first, its spare chords bringing to mind Morton Feldman. The album was made available as a digital download this past week, though it was first released back in 2017 (on the Another Timbre label).