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Disquiet Junto Project 0423: Hold Noise

The Assignment: Record music intended to sound just as garbled as the hold music on a phone call.

February 6, 2020February 8, 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 10, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 6, 2020.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0423) 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 0423: Hold Noise**

The Assignment: Record music intended to sound just as garbled as the hold music on a phone call.

Step 1: Think of a time when you were put on hold by customer service or waiting for a conference call to begin. Think about such a situation when the hold music sounded like it had been run through a washing machine, or put through a bit crusher, or photocopied 100 times in sequence before it got to your ear.

Step 2: Record a short piece of music intended to sound just as garbled as the hold music on a modern phone call. Think of this as “hold noise.”

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

Step 1: Include “disquiet0423” (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 “disquiet0423” (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-0423-hold-noise/

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 10, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 6, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better. Then again, you could end up stuck on hold for a long time.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0423” 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 423rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Hold Noise / The Assignment: Record music intended to sound just as garbled as the hold music on a phone call — at:

https://disquiet.com/0423/

Closer to the Code

Closer to the source

February 5, 2020February 5, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Each year, my listening seems to get a little closer to the source. This habit, this tendency, goes back to my earliest music explorations. Enamored of a given album in my teens and early 20s, I’d track down music by the individual players on it. In part this pursuit was to expand my horizons, but in part, especially I recognize in retrospect, this was to narrow them; I had the sense that if I gained a comprehension of the individual player’s sound, I’d better understand their contribution to the initial album that seeded my interest.

Fast forward to 2020, and much of my listening is to sketches, to rough drafts, to works-in-progress that people post to SoundCloud and, increasingly, to YouTube of the most inchoate of musical inventions. In the case of [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjv_m370hyw&t=0s), it is Nathan Wheeler documenting his participation in a coding circle. (That’s a social, mutual-improvement scenario adopted online from the classic sewing circle, in which people gather to do solitary creative work in a communal situation. The sewing circle was an influence on the Disquiet Junto, as well.) The circle in which Wheeler is participating originated [on the excellent llllllll.co](https://llllllll.co/t/norns-circle-01-drone-in-three-worlds/) music community. Members were given about a month and a half to write a script for a shared hardware device — the details don’t matter, but if it’s of interest, click through above to llllllll.co and learn more — based on a few guidelines. These amount to a provided set of audio samples, and some broadly defined parameters: volume, brightness, density, “evolve,” and a switching between “worlds” (switching that the accompanying visuals are then intended to represent distinctly). The project is titled “drone in three worlds.”

Understanding those briefest of guidelines is more that sufficient to interpret the video, in which the worlds are depicted as eclipse-like, a receding perspective, and a rapid starfield. If you have more interest, you can read the llllllll.co discussion, and click through to the the GitHub repositories where the source code of the various project responses will be stored. GitHub being where, according to my lifelong trajectory as described above, much of my listening will likely being taking place within a few more years.

Corrption in Space

A Radiophonic episode from Japan

February 4, 2020February 4, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

When the audio that Japan-based composer Corruption/Corrption uploads regularly to SoundCloud isn’t snippets of [alienated urban field recordings](https://disquiet.com/2020/01/03/japanese-eavesdropping/), it ventures into music, more properly understood. Which isn’t to say the results are any less esoteric, or less enticing. “VUHDRL” is a series of Radiophonic motifs, sound design for a science fiction film that is not only set in deep space, but shot there on location. Which is to say, it isn’t merely alienated; it’s actually alien. Speaker-threatening garbled noise lets through sharp bits of haunting organ, then dissolving amid phaser bursts and an overall sense of otherworldly drama.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/corrption](https://soundcloud.com/corrption/vuhdrl).

The Most Rudimentary Conception of a Marionette

A new museum installation from Zimoun

February 3, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s been almost exactly [a year](https://disquiet.com/2019/02/18/46-seconds-in-heaven/) since I posted one of the brief videos of the artist Zimoun’s tactile, economical, kinetic sculptures, sculptures whose impact — humorous, touching, majestic — is so out of proportion with the modest material from which they are constructed. Here’s a new one, posted today. A short video such as this is how Zimoun announces a newly installed work. Its title, as is generally the case for Zimoun, is little more than a list of the components, here “51 prepared dc-motors, 189 m rope, cardboard sticks 30 cm,” followed by the year of production: “2019.” The footage is a view from the Museum of Contemporary Art MAC, Santiago de Chile. And it’s not even 40 seconds long.

Vimeo, unlike YouTube, doesn’t have an easy way to allow for looped, repeated viewing, but you’ll be drawn in and hitting repeat almost for certain. Watch as the tiny cardboard sticks dance around in circles, suspended like the most rudimentary conception of a marionette. Their balletic footsteps suggest Amazonian rainfall: cardboard drops on a cold concrete floor.

Part of the beauty of Zimoun’s videos is how the sound is and isn’t in sync with what we see. The video cuts from one view to another: a closeup, giving us a sense of the mechanisms, a fuller one to give a sense of scale, a room view for sense of scope. Throughout the cardboard raindrops fall.

Video originally posted at [vimeo.com](https://vimeo.com/388946723). More from Zimoun, who is based in Bern, Switzerland, at [zimoun.net](https://www.zimoun.net/).

Listening Off-screen

To the semi-generative glitch of Johannes Hertrich, aka Unifono

January 31, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

At exactly two minutes and two seconds into this short video, there is some motion at the bottom of the screen. Look for it. Don’t dwell on it, but keep an eye out for it. There is other motion throughout, primarily the blinking of lights. Those lights coordinate with the sounds, because the lights emanate from the devices that produce and influence the sounds.

The lights are signals to the musician using the devices, but they can serve a purpose for the listener, as well. For example, look to the upper left, where the word “play,” all caps, appears to the right of a larger-than-average circle. Note how the appearance of that circle being illuminated corresponds with one of the central presences of sound surfacing momentarily. Likewise, look at the tiny horizontal array at the very bottom left, how it serves as a kind of visualization of a certain band of quick and brittle noises.

What’s seen here is a modular synthesizer, more specifically a virtual one. It is a modular synthesizer simulated on a computer. It’s being used by the German musician Johannes Hertrich, who goes by the moniker Unifono, to render what he terms a mix of IDM and glitch. There are, indeed, touches of Autechre’s bracing sonic torques here, but the music is very much Unifono’s. More importantly, the music is generative, or as Unifono puts it, semi-generative (more on the “semi” in a moment). This means that for all the development within the music, all the changes that take place, it is all happening based on a system that Hertrich set up and then sat back and listened to, just as you and I might.

Then there’s that “semi.” This brings us back to the motion two and a half seconds in. There may be other reasons Hertrich considers the music semi-generative, but a sure one is the motion at 2:02. See how the knobs turn a bit, and how the module itself seems to jerk up a little? That’s because even though we can’t see Hertrich’s hands manipulating the software, we can see evidence of it. The knobs turning are one example. The slight motion of the module itself is another. It seems that in touching the module, Hertrich has briefly nudged it out of place. It returns immediately (if you’ve used this software, which is called VCV Rack, you’ll recognize the magnet-like quality the module evidences as it rests quickly back into place).

I realize as I reread this before posting that it could be misconstrued as a critique of the performance. I want to be clear, therefore, that it as meant as nothing of the kind. The audio is great. I played it on repeat for much of the day, and took notes on some of the techniques, the play between modules, by which Hertrich achieved his sonic goals. What I wanted to do in focusing on the motion at 2:02 was to observe the presence of the human touch in a video that is, in essence, a screenshot-in-motion of a machine working automatically, one left, as it were, to its own devices. It’s like an incredibly subtle variant on the Twitch genre of videos, in which viewers watch someone else play a video game live. Except here the software is considerably more obscure, and motion is brief, exceptionally so.

More from Hertich at [unifono.bandcamp.com](https://unifono.bandcamp.com/). Try VCV Rack out at [vcvrack.com](https://vcvrack.com/).