downstream – Page 195

Disquiet Junto Project 0374: Glitch Glitch

The Assignment: what happens when you glitch something that's been glitched?

February 28, 2019March 3, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the [Disquiet Junto group](https://disquiet.com/junto/), 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.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0374) for the duration of the project.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, March 4, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, February 28, 2019.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0374: Glitch Glitch**

The Assignment: what happens when you glitch something that’s been glitched?

Step 1: Take a recording. Glitch it.

Step 2: Glitch it a second time, in some different manner, and try to have moments where the initial glitch remains evident and untarnished (well, un-further-tarnished).

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

Step 1: Include “disquiet0374” (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 “disquiet0374” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation 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-0374-glitch-glitch/

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 4, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, February 28, 2019.

Length: The length is up to you. Short is good.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0374” 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: Please for this project be sure to set 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 374th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Glitch Glitch / The Assignment: what happens when you glitch something that’s been glitched? — at:

https://disquiet.com/0374/

Diva of the Sublime

A track from Ana Roxanne's new album

February 27, 2019February 28, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The Leaving Records label selected the lovely song “Nocturne” as its [SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com/leavingrecords/ana-roxanne-nocturne) post to represent the seven tracks that comprise *~~~*. That’s the new solo album (and that is, indeed, three tildes in a row) from Ana Roxanne. It’s a beautiful performance, Roxanne’s elevated voice — a mix of choir-schooled, pitch-perfect tonality and casual, approachable, often speech-like intonation — filling the track from start to finish. There is a vaguely Celtic sensibility to Roxanne’s singing at times, but its primary quality is a kind of ethereal affection. There’s a definite solitariness to it, but it is by no means remote or rarefied. Roxanne’s vowels are echoed deeply into the vast distance, sometimes with a pleasingly artificial rigidity to the rippling effect, and all the while a slow, percussive drone under⁣girds the piece, thrumming at a low level.

Get the full album at [anaroxanne.bandcamp.com](https://anaroxanne.bandcamp.com/album/-). It’s available digital, and while the first pressing of 69 cassette tapes sold out, a new run is now available. The website lists March 15 of this year as the release date, but it’s all already streaming in full. More from Roxanne at [instagram.com/frincess](https://www.instagram.com/frincess/).

The Form of the Longform Abstract

In the form of Geneva Skeen's new album, Dream State

February 26, 2019February 27, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="http://genevaskeen.bandcamp.com/album/dream-state">Dream State by Geneva Skeen</a>

Say what you will about the mix of nostalgia, fossil-fuel products, and subpar sound quality that is employed with some finger-pointing regularity to characterize the resurgence of the tape cassette as a 21st-century conveyance of music from recording artist to listener, one positive service has certainly been accomplished: the rise of long-form compositions.

It seems more common today than it has been since the heights of the progressive rock era for commercially released albums to contain suite-length pieces, symphony-dimensioned (horizontally if not vertically) explorations longer than extended 12″s, longer than medleys, longer than the attention span attributed (malignly) to a generation raised amid screens.

Geneva Skeen’s many-layered collage of a new album, *Dream State*, on the label Crystalline Morphologies, is such a recording. It has two sides, each nearing 20 minutes — and far longer if taken into account is the time required to extract oneself from the artfully grim environment in which the music deposits its audience. The tracks amass mumbling tones and field recordings of clammy spaces, industrial noise and angelic singing, interrupted occasionally — or more to the point, layered further — by the barking of dogs. It is music that would make far less sense in the confines of a pop song. It is long enough to get lost in. This is the form of the abstract, a space suggested by throwback technology, and put to work for new purposes.

Timely purposes, truth be told. In a note describing the circumstances in which the music was made, Skeen depicts a world “heavier and more opaque” than it was just a few years earlier. She acknowledges circumstances one doesn’t take comfort in waking to. Her music wrestles with this new reality by exploring it for both its real and surreal qualities, its details and its incongruences, its shapes and its shadows.

Album released earlier this month at [genevaskeen.bandcamp.com](https://genevaskeen.bandcamp.com/album/dream-state). More from Skeen at [twitter.com/geneeves](https://twitter.com/geneeves) and [soundcloud.com/geneeeeves](https://soundcloud.com/geneeeeves). The work was recorded at a [Land and Sea](http://landandseaeditions.virb.com/) residency in Oakland, California, in 2018. More from the record label at [crystallinemorphologies.com](http://www.crystallinemorphologies.com/).

The Happenstance Ambience of Corruption

The Japanese noise musician, that is

February 25, 2019February 25, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

I went to Japan quite a bit in the latter half of the first decade of the 2000s, and I’m not sure when I’ll be back, but top of the list for some time now of musicians I would want to locate should/when I go again is Corruption, whose sprawling SoundCloud account — that’s [soundcloud.com/corrption](http://soundcloud.com/corrption/), minus the “u” — has accumulated a substantial (630 tracks as of this writing) and enigmatic (in a resolutely plainstated way) mix of messy, broken dubby noise music and snatches of everyday din, and at Corr(u)ption’s best it’s often difficult to tell into which of those two categories a given recording falls.

Take “170620_004lewe,” which surfaced a week and a half ago and plays like the score to a three-minute art film tracking some fleeting mid-morning moments of a dissolute urban life — and to be clear, should that ever need to be translated from English, the description is intended as the highest of compliments.

There are high-pitched noises that are either aliens among us or electrical interference amid an apartment packed with computer equipment, and hard clicks that suggest tape machines being manhandled, and for much of it a droning presence as if we’re listening in on someone else listening to something else the whole time.

There is, indeed, a voyeuristic aspect to Corruption’s work, in part because lacking any photographs of Corruption (the oeuvre comes across as deeply anonymous, at least from this side of the Pacific), everything that Corruption does seems to be from that individual’s point-of-view. This track’s title, resembling the timecode from a digital recorder, does nothing to diminish the impression.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/corrption](https://soundcloud.com/corrption/tracks). More from Corruption at [corruption-scrapbook.tumblr.com](https://corruption-scrapbook.tumblr.com/), though by “more” is meant [artfully affect-less city-dweller photography](https://corruption-scrapbook.tumblr.com/post/160283190393/%E5%A4%A7%E9%98%AA%E5%8C%97%E6%96%B0%E5%9C%B0%E6%96%B0%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C) and [short videos](https://corruption-scrapbook.tumblr.com/post/140268651368/%E9%B3%A5%E3%81%AE%E7%BE%A4%E3%82%8Cmorisia) replete with hissy, happenstance ambience.

Disquiet Junto Project 0373: Copernican Music

The Assignment: Record a piece of music intended for an alien species.

February 21, 2019February 23, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, February 25, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the late morning, California time, on Thursday, February 21, 2019.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0373) for the duration of the project.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0373: Copernican Music**

The Assignment: Record a piece of music intended for an alien species.

This week’s project was made as a proposition by the artist Jonathon Keats:

Step 1: Compose a work of music for sentient beings elsewhere in the universe. Aside from sentience, assume nothing about your audience culturally or cognitively. Make a connection by modulating frequency and amplitude over time.

Step 2: Share your work with the cosmos.

Here’s some additional background from Keats on his general premise: “Science is Copernican, but society remains Ptolemaic. Our behavior is self-centered. Our culture is bigoted, our politics tribal. Society needs a Copernican revolution. If we are to survive, we need to recognize that we are not special. If we are to have a peaceful relationship with one another and our planet, we must become humble. A Copernican revolution is achievable, but will not be accomplished through scientific education alone. Only culture has the potential to put us in touch with our cosmic insignificance, and to bring about a cultural paradigm shift. The Copernican revolution in culture will be realized with Copernican music.”

And here’s some additional background from Keats on his Copernican music: “Copernican music affords the opportunity to encounter something that we cannot directly experience, but that could potentially be experienced by beings other than us. It provides a means of getting outside of ourselves. We recognize that we are not special, that our position is not privileged. We perceive ourselves as average. Simultaneously we find ourselves to be part of a continuum, and therefore part of something greater than ourselves. This adjustment to our ego can change our behavior by making us less self-centered, more aware of others, and more aware of our larger selves.”

The image associated with this project is from one of Keats’ own instruments related to his Copernican artwork, a gravitational radio. Photo credit: Dora Tsui.

More information on Keats at this space.com interview:

https://space.com/41258-communicating-with-aliens-music-art-project.html

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

Step 1: Include “disquiet0373” (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 “disquiet0373” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation 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-0373-copernican-music/

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:**

Length: The length is up to you. Short is good.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0373” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

**For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:**

More on this 373rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Copernican Music / The Assignment: Record a piece of music intended for an alien species — at:

https://disquiet.com/0373/

This week’s project was made as a proposition by the artist Jonathon Keats.