Bracing. Ecstatic. Borderline impossible. Impeccably minimalist on the surface. Substantively abstract down below. This is often the experience of listening to the music of Kenneth Kirschner, and it’s most certainly the case with July 19, 2024, which he posted on Bandcamp late last month. The album, which consists of four tracks, is nearly three and a half hours long, and I will not claim to have yet listened to the full thing myself, but I do recommend starting, as I did, with the first — and shortest — track, “July 19, 2024 – i.” This opening section sounds like a quintet for strings and piano as reflected in the freshly wiped screen of a broken cellphone, turning everything into a frenetic kaleidoscope. It’s brittle and lively, vibrant and exploratory, and impossible to pin down. The themes flow by rapidly, and your ear has to retrain itself to a different sort of listening, not so much following as succumbing. Highly recommended.
The Assignment: Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.
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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.
Disquiet Junto Project 0718: Planet Jam It The Assignment: Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization.
The year is 2126, and your spaceship is on a routine science expedition of the outer reaches of previously unexplored parts of the universe. Your crew has encountered, for the first known time in human history, a planet that is home to sentient life that has developed an advanced civilization not unlike our own. After settling into geosynchronous orbit, you send down a stealth drone to explore. The drone captures audio and video. Please share the audio of your drone’s reconnaissance mission.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0718” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 718th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Planet Jam It — The Assignment: Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization — at https://disquiet.com/0718/.
In advance of the album’s release on October 17, the first track off North Woods from composer Scott Ordway and Lorelei Ensemble, conducted by Beth Willer, Lorelei’s artistic director, is up on Bandcamp. Lorelei is an adventurous group of vocalists who have recorded and performed music by such maverick composers as David Lang, Maggi Payne, Steve Reich, and Toru Takemitsu. Ordway’s North Woods has, apparently, been part of the group’s repertoire for more than a decade. The eight voices come across like sweeping winds, layers ever-shifting, as tones come in and out of sonic focus. Its lyric was sourced from Tacitus, Roman historian whose life bridged the first two centuries AD. More from Lorelei ensemble at loreleiensemble.com and Ordway at scottordway.com.
A lovely solo piano piece from Roger Eno, “Alembic Distillation,” appears in advance of his forthcoming album, Without Wind / Without Air, due out October 31, 2025. The album features a host of collaborators (among them soprano Grace Davidson, sisters/vocalists Cecily and Lotti Eno, Jonathan Stockhammer conducting the Scoring Berlin strings, and musician/arranger Christian Badzura). This, however, is just Eno (younger brother by more than a decade to Brian) on his lonesome. I particularly love solo compositions that feel almost like sonic essays, and that’s what you hear here, themes explored for what they are: ideas in the form of sound.
The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.
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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.
Disquiet Junto Project 0717: Generation Gambit The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary.
Step 1: Imagine some long ago ancestor of yours, one who also made music. This doesn’t have to be a real person.
Step 2: Record a rough track that is supposedly by your ancestor from Step 1. It should be evident in the sound that this recording is quite old (e.g., warble, surface noise, degradation).
Step 3: Record something on top of the ancestor track from Step 2, so the result is a combination of your contemporary sounds and your (perhaps fictional) ancestor’s antiquated sounds.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0717” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 717th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Generation Gambit — The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary — at https://disquiet.com/0717/.
