downstream – Page 170

Disquiet Junto Project 0427: Music 4 Airplanes

The Assignment: Make music that blends in with the industrial drone of modern air flight.

March 5, 2020March 6, 2020 / 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, March 9, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 5, 2020.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0427) for the duration of the project.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0427: Music 4 Airplanes**

The Assignment: Make music that blends in with the industrial drone of modern air flight.

Step 1: Airplanes are noisy places, especially when at 35,000 feet. Consider the noise, especially the dense white noise, experienced by an airline passenger.

Step 2: Record a short piece of music that is intended to blend in with the industrial drone of modern air flight.

**Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:**

Step 1: Include “disquiet0427” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0427” (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 track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

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

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0427-music-4-airplanes/

Step 5: Annotate your track 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, March 9, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 5, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better, but then again, flights are long. Perhaps make something that readily loops.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0427” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Consider setting 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 427th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Music 4 Airplanes / The Assignment: Make music that blends in with the industrial drone of modern air flight — at:

https://disquiet.com/0427/

Filling Out a Silhouette

A drone by Cousin Silas

March 4, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Sometimes the drone is the text, and sometimes it’s the subtext. It’s the text when it’s the overarching sound. It’s the subtext when it fills out some other overarching construct. The latter is the case with “Emporium Drone 005” by Cousin Silas. In it, the contour of a lush melody — halfway between neo-classical and popular song — played at a sedate pace is treated as if it were a silhouette, a shape left to be filled by an assembly of Silas’ drones. The overall effect is that of an orchestra heard through a thick, velvet scrim.

More from Cousin Silas, aka the English musician David Hughes, at [cousinsilas1.bandcamp.com](https://cousinsilas1.bandcamp.com/), as well as at [wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_Silas), which lists the over 80 albums he has released since 2001.

In Situ

By Haik, from Japan

March 3, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

You can play this video in lots of contexts. You can play it on your phone, or your laptop, maybe in a little side window, or real big. You can project it to a screen. Or you can play it on a tablet. I recommend tablet. The reason I recommend tablet, specifically iPad, is this video was performed in the software called Samplr on an iPad. To play the video on an iPad is to play it on the same device where the music was performed and recorded — in situ, as it were. (The Samplr app recently received an update for the first time in something like half a decade. It had continued to work fine, but its developer finally modernized it, resulting in a deserved resurgence of popularity, resulting in videos like this one.) Here the sampling app is put to ambient purposes. As the musician Haik works through the samples, you can track the correlation between actions and sounds.

This is the latest video I’ve added to [my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-). Video originally published at [YouTube](https://youtu.be/I-nWN31uW2E). More from Haik, who is based in Japan, at [twitter.com/haik_am](https://twitter.com/haik_am) and [instagram.com/haikmusic_](https://www.instagram.com/haikmusic_/).

Deep, Fluxing Pulse

A cello-less track from the OO-ray, aka Ted Laderas

March 2, 2020March 3, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The OO-ray is Ted Laderas, best known for his shoegaze-drenched cello music, wherein he runs his trusty analog four-string instrument through a shifting array of loopers and synths. Laderas is also handy with synths on their own, as this gently throbbing, tastily peaked-out ambient track displays. Listen as the deep, fluxing pulse pushes past its breaking point at times, and then how the spirited rasps of noise get folded back into the greater whole.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/ooray](https://soundcloud.com/ooray/rings-and-whole-tones). More from Laderas, who is based in Portland, Oregon, at [15people.net](https://www.15people.net/) and [waveguideaudio.bandcamp.com](https://waveguideaudio.bandcamp.com/music).

Mursyid’s Exploration

Synth + loops = deep space

February 28, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

There are periods of time when, for one reason or another, my listening focuses on an individual musician. Twice last week and, now, today, where my listening has settled is on the work of Fahmi Mursyid. I receive a lot of correspondence about music from publicists and musicians, and I balance the inbound recordings with what I myself come across online. To my mind, the feeds on my Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and YouTube accounts are just as valid as — if not more so than — the queries in my inbox. This live performance video shows Mursyid layering tones and sequences on his portable synthesizer. There’s a light, exploratory quality, in part because the song has a childlike aspect to it, and in part because the music sounds like the score to footage of an unmanned research vessel headed out to the great unknowns of deep space. All of Mursyid’s YouTube videos are explorations of a sort, pursuing sounds on a variety of devices and software applications. Highly recommended to add to your YouTube feed.