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Disquiet Junto Project 0424: Fluctuating Rhythm

The Assignment: Employ nature as your conductor.

February 13, 2020February 14, 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, February 17, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 13, 2020.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0424) 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 0424: Fluctuating Rhythm**

The Assignment: Employ nature as your conductor.

Step 1: Compose or choose a work of music. (The work can involve any number of instruments or can be purely electronic.)

Step 2: Perform the work outdoors, employing nature as your conductor. (Any natural phenomenon may be enlisted to keep time during your performance. Examples include the sway of a tree in the wind, the flow of a stream, or the circling of a flock of birds before a storm. Consider a phenomenon that fluctuates with environmental conditions, such that your rhythm varies in ways that situate your work in the landscape.)

Background: This is a collaboration with the artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, who is working on a global initiative to enlist natural systems as official time standards. Read more here:

http://nautil.us/issue/79/catalysts/philosophy-is-a-public-service

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

Step 1: Include “disquiet0424” (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 “disquiet0424” (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-0424-fluctuating-rhythm/

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, February 17, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 13, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better. Let nature take its course.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0424” 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 424th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Fluctuating Rhythm / The Assignment: Employ nature as your conductor — at:

https://disquiet.com/0424/

This is a collaboration with the artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats.

Hallmarks of Space Music

A track by Léo Pensette, who goes by #T.one

February 12, 2020February 12, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Like some sort of interstellar cowboy music, the track “;) collection of inadaptable flint” (the title also includes an emoji or emoji-like image of what appears* to be a cat with a red headband riding a dinosaur), merges flanged-out vapor trails that fill your speaker spectrum and closely mic’d instrumentation that plucks out a slow, reflective melody. The recording is at once sprawling and intimate, broad as the sky, and yet also close as your shoulders gathered tight in front of a campfire. Throughout there are rattly, earthy sounds, and (again, a stark and somehow welcoming contrast) the sort of whispy weirdnesses that are hallmarks of space music intended for headphones only. The recording is by Léo Pensette, who goes by #T.one.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/dark_tone](https://soundcloud.com/dark_tone/collection-of-inadaptable-flints).

*And, yes, I did look it up and learned all about ninja cats and dino cats. Because, as the saying goes, internet.

This Abiding Flow

A study in contrasts from Suss Müsik

February 11, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

“Dovum” by Suss Müsik is a study in contrasts: static against hum, broken melody against stately backdrop, gentle swells against fractured pulse, and overall a digital purity of sound that is employed to present materials whose cumulative chaos strives to approach that of the natural, analog, flesh-and-blood world. This balance of varied powers occurs over the course of 10-plus minutes, throughout which a sense of development, drama, and change are self-evident, but with none of the section markers that classical or pop music would employ. There is no brief chapter-break silence, no shift in key. There is, instead, simply this abiding flow. Only at the end does “Dovum” alter its pace, settling in for an extended denouement that presents its own, final contrast: it is at once quiet, peaceful to situate oneself amid — and yet in its attenuated quieting it makes the ear strain for every last, fading, fraying nuance.

Track originally posted to [soundcloud.com/suss-musik](https://soundcloud.com/suss-musik/dovum). More from Suss Müsik at [sussmusik.com](http://sussmusik.com/) and [sussmusik.bandcamp.com](https://sussmusik.bandcamp.com/).

Not Frozen, but Froze-ish

Stray Wool's granular synthesis

February 10, 2020February 10, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="http://straywool.bandcamp.com/album/you-were-away">You were away by Stray wool</a>

Granular synthesis lends itself to music that is at once majestic and circumspect. By capturing the tiniest slivers of sound and holding them for extended moments, it puts the listener in a place akin to near stasis: not frozen, but froze-ish. It gives your ears the chance to luxuriate, and contemplate, sound as a surrounding expanse. The mingling of experiences, when implemented well, can balance the breadth of a landscape painting with the focus of a haiku. The new album *You Were Away* by Stray Wool is well implemented in this regard. Its four tracks — some a leisurely five minutes, others nearly twice that length — take their time, and ours, to explore crevices within piano samples and, presumably, other sources. The results range widely between emotional states. The collection opens (“A1”) with what sounds, at times, like fog horns pushed to the breaking point, and ends with platonic ideal of pastoral ambience (“B2”). For all the slow motion, though, it is not without a sense of humor. The penultimate track, “B1,” begins with a sample of what appears to be an ethnographic researcher interviewing a musician who performs Celtic mouth music: “There are no instruments at all?” we hear her ask in amazement. The piece then moves forward like metal being bent by a powerful force, moaning under the pressure. Depends, apparently, on your definition of “instrument.”

Stray Wool is Pedro Figueiredo, a Portuguese musician and software developer. More on the album at his blog, [coruscate.xyz](https://coruscate.xyz/you-were-away/). *You Were Away* was posted at [straywool.bandcamp.com](https://straywool.bandcamp.com/album/you-were-away).

Synth Satie

A performance by Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner)

February 7, 2020February 7, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

I half-joked when Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) posted this synthesizer cover of Erik Satie’s classic “Gnossienne No 1” to YouTube yesterday that it will, someday, be the theme song to a TV show. Half, because the drama he elicits from the melody is palpable. This is a more full-bodied rendition than a Satie performance usually engages in. It’s not remotely difficult to imagine a showrunner might appreciate the combination of antique composition and only slightly less antique technology (Scanner employed the Buchla Music Easel to record this), and how one works in service of the other. There is so much more going on at any given instant of this piece than would occur in, say, a solo piano rendition. The reverberations of the synthesized tones and the sheer breadth of coloration are remarkable. It’s been over half a century since Wendy Carlos’ classic *Switched-On Bach*. We’re long overdue for *Switched-On Satie*.

Video originally posted to [Scanner’s YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRLmDp5mPNc). More from Scanner at [scannerdot.com](http://scannerdot.com/).