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Disquiet Junto Project 0422: Chapter Cascade

The Assignment: Make a piece of music made up of tiny alternating parts.

January 30, 2020February 1, 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 3, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 30, 2020.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0422) 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 0422: Chapter Cascade**

The Assignment: Make a piece of music made up of tiny alternating parts.

Step 1: This week’s project is inspired by the rapid, short chapters of William Gibson’s new novel, *Agency*, and the micro-compositions of John Zorn’s Naked City. Consider hyper-brevity as a creative pursuit.

Step 2: Compose a piece of music made of up lots of very short bursts. You will have an A line and a B line, which will be tonally and aesthetically distinct from each other. These will alternate back and forth for however long you desire. Consider a length of about a second, or less, for each sliver of sound. And then finally at the very end, have the A and B lines combine.

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

Step 1: Include “disquiet0422” (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 “disquiet0422” (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-0422-chapter-cascade/

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 3, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 30, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0422” 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 422nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Chapter Cascade / The Assignment: Make a piece of music made up of tiny alternating parts — at:

https://disquiet.com/0422/

The Musical Equivalent of Eavesdropping

Ryan Kunkleman, aka esc, live

January 29, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

This 20-minute live performance video is by Ryan Kunkleman, who goes by the name esc, which is to say the key way over in the upper-left-hand corner of your computer’s keyboard. Like his moniker, the music played here is deliberately lowercase. There is conflict and tension within the sounds, certainly, but they are pitched to a near hush. It’s the musical equivalent of eavesdropping. You know there’s trouble next door, but you need to stoop, push your ear against the wall, and concentrate to get some sense of what’s going on. What’s going on here is, apparently, a single source sound being looped and mangled in real time by a variety of different devices that constitute esc’s synthesizer. You don’t need to know that or, for that matter, think about it to enjoy the subtle shifts, but if you do choose to pay attention, you can appreciate, as well, the divergent variations and their root interconnectedness.

Video originally posted to esc’s [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGhGeyNeZz0&t=274s). This is the latest video added to [my ongoing YouTube playlist of live performances of ambient music](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-).

Stanched Pads & Crystalline Haze

From the Saint Petersburg (Russia) musician Sa/Samwell

January 28, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

What seems to be a wind chime made of shells spends more than a minute taking pauses amid a curt little melody that sounds like a fine Angelo Badalementi sketch. Then come stanched pads, brief chords out of a Jon Hassell venture, somehow sharp and muted at once, little stabs of crystalline haze. The track, “Sa – YY” by Saint Petersburg (Russia) musician Sa/Samwell, has the vibe of a horror-movie theme, tension mounting up until the final jab.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/levmas00](https://soundcloud.com/levmas00/sa-yy). More from Sa/Samwell at [sasamwel19.bandcamp.com](https://sasamwel19.bandcamp.com/).

Voids Your Ear Can Feel

Courtesy of Jimmy Kpple's Patzr Radio podcast

January 27, 2020February 12, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The shifts in sound seem too sudden to be happenstance. The way the audio cuts from left to right to silence to stereo, and alternate wayward transitions within, doesn’t merely shape and direct the sound. It create voids your ear can feel. Don’t put this on headphones. Play it at room temperature on a pair of speakers, your head comfortably in between. Let the found sounds — all white noise and public-address mumble, not to mention echoing high heels and distant whistles — of the field recordings dance around your skull as well as within. This is the 176th entry in Jimmy Kpple’s ongoing Patzr Radio podcast, [“noise and a relative or friend can hold,”](https://soundcloud.com/patzr-radio/patzr-radio-one-hundred-and-seventysix-noise-and-a-relative-or-friend-can-hold) a great ongoing musique concrète wonder.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/patzr-radio](https://soundcloud.com/patzr-radio/patzr-radio-one-hundred-and-seventysix-noise-and-a-relative-or-friend-can-hold). Get the feed directly at [patzrradio.podbean.com](https://patzrradio.podbean.com/). More from Kpple at [twitter.com/jmmy_kppl](https://twitter.com/jmmy_kppl).

Granular (Granular Guitar)

A live performance from Daniel McGinn (aka All These Wires)

January 24, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

All These Wires employs just a few in this video, a purposeful few. Daniel McGinn, the musician behind the All These Wires channel on YouTube, is seen, and heard, enhancing his guitar via a modular synthesizer. Half the sound is the guitar itself, and half is the guitar processed, not once but twice, in succession, by a pair of granular synthesizer modules. The modules echo and smudge the input. Watch McGinn’s hands, and you can trace the cause and effect, the pacing and impact. As has become a performance custom, his synthesizer is tipped forward, so the audience can see what he’s up to. Watch carefully enough, and you might find lights whose on and off align with the music’s internal metronome.

Video originally posted at [the All These Wires YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaDpSE8SQkk). This is the latest video added to [my ongoing YouTube playlist of live performances of ambient music](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-). More from McGinn on [instagram.com/all\_these\_wires](https://www.instagram.com/all_these_wires/).