Disquiet Junto Project 0752: Pong Pings

The Assignment: Contribute sounds to a 2026 Musikfestival Bern installation.

/ 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.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0752: Pong Pings
The Assignment: Contribute sounds to a 2026 Musikfestival Bern installation.

As part of Musikfestival Bern 2026, which takes «Blitz» (flash/lightning) as its theme, a ping pong table will be set up in the newly renovated PROGR courtyard for passers-by to play quick matches against musicians, artists, and each other. During lunch hours, matches will be dynamically scored with outsized storm sounds, triggered with piezo mics and/or game controllers. In this week’s Junto you are invited to contribute to the sound library that will be used for this project. Think “tiny impacts, large sound effects.”

The assignment: Compose abstract storm events: single impacts (rumbling thunder, lightning strikes, etc) and/or textural sounds (wind, rain, hail, etc). Each event or texture should stand on its own. Record one or more. If you record a sequence of these, please make a single track of them and include a brief clean silent break between each. All musicians whose work is included in the installation will be credited on-site. And please be sure to set your track as downloadable.

More on Musikfestival Bern at https://musikfestivalbern.ch. Many thanks to the festival’s Tobias Reber for the invitation to again collaborate. This is the eighth consecutive year of Bern x Junto collaborations. This project is the first of four planned this year.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0752” (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.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0752-pong-pings/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The number of sounds you contribute is up to you. Please keep each sound brief, given the nature of the installation, as described above.

Deadline: Monday, June 1, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

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 752nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Pong Pings — The Assignment: Contribute sounds to a 2026 Musikfestival Bern installation — disquiet.com/0752. More on Musikfestival Bern at https://musikfestivalbern.ch. Many thanks to the festival’s Tobias Reber for the invitation to again collaborate. This is the eighth consecutive year of Bern x Junto collaborations.

The Acoustic Ecology of Video Games

To Hela and back

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The video game Hela is not due out until later this year, and in the lead up to that release, the developer has been posting videos, most of them short glimpses of gameplay. Hela is described as “a cozy co-op adventure where you play as a tiny mouse exploring a magical world inspired by the forests and wilderness of Northern Sweden.” It’s not natural, at least not in the sense of being realistic. Reads the description appended to one or more of those videos: “It will be up to you to help a kind witch care for the land she has protected for generations, while you explore, experiment, and create your own adventure.”

And among these promotional videos is a expansive, continuous, three-hour segment showing some of the mice characters resting out in nature. The point is less what you see, as the camera remains in the same position throughout, than what you hear. Sounds of running water, bending trees, and birdsong fill the air. Given the immersive nature of this sort of game, the advance taste of the world of Hela makes a certain amount of sense. There is, in effect, an acoustic ecology to modern video game playing. One can gauge the health of a given game — in the sense of its world-building cohesiveness, its level of detail, its version of realism — by just listening to it.

Hamburg Glitch

From Hamburg, Germany–based keinseier

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Very nicely done, slow-build, ambient-infused glitch track from keinseier, all the better because it’s a live video, a precise work-out on the Tonverk, a polyphonic multi-sampler, with each step in plain view. Listen as the held tones give way to a rising momentum, dotted with these little short-circuit snaps of firecracker disruption. More from keinseier, based in Hamburg, Germany, at keinseier.bandcamp.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0751: Gastropod Meter

The Assignment: Go slow for an imagined nature documentary.

/ 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.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0751: Gastropod Meter
The Assignment: Go slow for an imagined nature documentary.

Imagine you’ve been invited to compose music for a nature documentary about slugs. Record a track for one of the film’s slower scenes.

Note: Cover photo shot at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, California.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0751” (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.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0751-gastropod-meter/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Maybe 3 to 5 minutes?

Deadline: Monday, May 25, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

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 751th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Gastropod Meter — The Assignment: Go slow for an imagined nature documentary — disquiet.com/0751.

On Repeat: Cello, Verticality, Feedback

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Solo ambient cello, heavy on the texture, from Ukrainian musician Fedir Tkachov:

▰ On July 17, Kate Carr will release Vertical London (New Year’s Day), a collection of field recordings that aim to collate the sounds of London from minus 20 metres below sea level to 240 metres above, hence the album’s title. As of this writing, four of the set’s 22 tracks are online:

  • “Early birds and planes in Loughborough Junction”
  • “I am not sure which tube station is the furthest below sea level, but I am visiting quite a few”
  • “Under the Thames with cyclists, joggers and echoes in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel”
  • “Popping up at Island Gardens.”

▰ The two-track EP Graceless is driving industrial noise, made with no-input feedback loops, from Chia-Chun Xu, based in Taipei City, Taiwan.