downstream – Page 230

Disquiet Junto Project 0317: Triadic Awareness

The Assignment: Record the third part of a trio, adding to a pre-existing track of two parts.

January 25, 2018January 25, 2018 / 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-0317) for the duration of the project.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, January 29, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 25, 2018.

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 0317: Triadic Awareness**

The Assignment: Record the third part of a trio, adding to a pre-existing track of two parts.

Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the third in a sequence that explores and encourages asynchronous collaboration. This week you will be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project ([disquiet.com/0316](http://disquiet.com/0316)). Note that you are finishing a trio — you’re creating the third part of what two previous musicians created. Keep this in mind.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to a pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are 56 tracks in all to choose from, 54 as part of this playlist:

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0316-el

And then the 55th is a video by Bassling (aka Jason Richardson), in asynchronous collaboration with Benn DeMole:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnFXRlCCKL4

And the 56th is Samarobryn (interestingly based in Australia, as is Richardson), in asynchronous collaboration with jwhiles:

https://samarobryn.bandcamp.com/track/the-mutable-truth-disquiet0316

To select a track, you can listen through all that and choose one, or you can use a random number generator to select a number from 1 to 56, the first 54 being numbered in the above SoundCloud playlist, and 55 being the Bassling/DeMole track, and 56 being the Samarobryn/jwhiles. (Note: it’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece.)

Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2. It should fit both sonically and compositionally between the two parts that constitute the pre-existing track. When composing and recording your part, do not alter the original piece of music at all. In your finished audio track, your part should be panned center. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours. It will be a trio.

Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because that is the nature of share-alike licenses in the Creative Commons, and also because there may yet be more projects in this sequence.

Background: The title of this project, “Triadic Awareness,” comes from an idea I learned about when I was reading a book by Frans de Waal, the primate scientist. The concept correlates nicely with such ideas as “ambient awareness” and “parallel productivity” that have long been underlying concepts in the Disquiet Junto projects.

Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0317” (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 “disquiet0317” (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: Please consider posting your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0317-triadic-awareness/11271/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process. Be sure to name the track to which you’ve added music and the name of the two musicians who recorded it, and include a link to it.

Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Other Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, January 29, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 25, 2018.

Length: The length of your track will be roughly the length of the track to which you are adding something.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0317” 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: It is essential for this specific project that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 317th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Triadic Awareness: Record the third part of a trio, adding to a pre-existing track of two parts) at:

https://disquiet.com/0317/

Synthesized Frivolity

From mafgar of Portland, Oregon

January 24, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a frivolity at the root of this track that makes it stand out. The little blurp of sonic gymnastic play with which it opens slowly repeats and then expands excitedly as it goes. It runs through the first time, then pauses, and then begins its looping transformations, at times settling down to something approaching ease, and then suddenly bounding about. It has a sweet disposition, like a little robot plaything running free, out of the clutches of the overly affectionate child it spends daylight hours attending to. It flutters and burbles, pings gleefully and flits about with an infectious eagerness. “Rings into Clouds (an obligation)” by mafgar presumably takes its name from the synthesizer technology from which it was made: a ring modulator and a granular sound processor. The melody doesn’t develop so much as it veers wildly while still adhering to a core tonality, much of it with a plectrum-like quality.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/mafgar](https://soundcloud.com/mafgar/rings-into-clouds-an-obligation). More from mafgar, who is based in Portland, Oregon, at [mafgar.bandcamp.com](https://mafgar.bandcamp.com/), [spotify.com](https://open.spotify.com/album/6gW3SoysJ7zWIDqmZnx5ps), and [Google Play Music](https://play.google.com/music/m/Av52vmxvkpaff3wjoe2ffia4gqa?t=Mafgar).

The Voice as Sound Source

Brona Martin puts her mouth where her synthesizer is.

January 23, 2018January 23, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Electronic musicians searching for interesting sound sources need only look in the mirror. There they should easily find one of the most underutilized yet readily available tools: a mouth. Brona Martin explores the potentials for vocal processing made possible by digital audio software in her track “Lament.” Part of the processing here isn’t even electronic. It’s simply a matter of the tones that Martin elects to perform, from her soft breaths, to high choral o’s, to throaty gurgles, to occult moaning, just to give reference names to a few of the myriad sounds that make themselves heard in “Lament.”

Those sounds are, in turn, turned into other things entirely: a tender vowel stretched beyond its capacity, a breath set on mechanical loop, a warm utterance that dissipates into pure atmospherics — a hush, made soundscape. Some of the transformations, from severe insectoid noise to supple bell tones, leave behind entirely where it was that they originated. To Martin’s credit, this all comes together. “Lament” isn’t a parade of effects, or a survey of possibilities. Part of why the piece works is how it is all layered, lending congruences and a sense of verticality to the progression.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/brona-martin](https://soundcloud.com/brona-martin/lament). More from Martin, a composer and sound artist based in Irleand, at [bronamartin.org](https://www.bronamartin.org/).

The Systems Music of Marcus Fischer

An automated ambient performance for synthesizer, guitar, and tape loop.

January 22, 2018January 22, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Music that slowly develops as it proceeds is often described as “generative,” due to the way that development is autonomous, and the way we as humans have a tendency to attribute sentience to things that seem to act under their own guidance. Another useful rubric might be “systems music,” which is to say music that is the result of some combination of technological apparatuses working in tandem free of the continued presence of human agency. This “systems music” consideration puts aside, or at least lessens, the emphasis on an organic functionality, and looks instead at the functions, at the congruent parts and the whole that they constitute.

In the case of this video, that combination consists of guitar, tape loop, and modular synthesizer, the modular synthesizer being itself a system, a collection of interconnected devices. This is the work of Marcus Fischer, whose music often sits at the intersection of performance and installation, happening and recording, technology and sculpture.

The music here is a digital guitar loop, 11 seconds long if you want to keep pace at home, which is then being lent an echo thanks to that large reel-to-reel machine. The birdsong is a separate digital audio source, and all of it is being filtered, per the brief note accompanying the video. The music is sing-song, warbling, at time pushing well past the edges of what would commonly be thought of as audio fidelity, and in the process pushing into a whole new sensibility where artifacts are surfaced and left to be considered for all their newfound sonic loveliness.

Fischer’s mix of loops and tonalities, textures and reference points has no firm structure. It’s simply and elegantly a sequence of elements transforming as they proceed. This is music that is the end product of a system set up and then left, quite literally, to its own devices.

This is the latest video I’ve added to [my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-). The video originally posted to Marcus Fischer’s new [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9TPk2ILB6M) channel, which launched in mid-December of last year and currently has five segments, all worth taking in. Fischer is based in Portland, Oregon. More from him at [twitter.com/marcus_fischer](https://twitter.com/marcus_fischer), [marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com](https://marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com/), and [mapmap.ch](http://mapmap.ch/). I should mention that Fischer was the composer on a science fiction film, *Youth*, for which I was the music supervisor and, with him, co-sound designer.

Disquiet Junto Project 0316: El Segundo

The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio, adding to a pre-existing track.

January 18, 2018January 19, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0316-el) for the duration of the project.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, January 22, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 18, 2018.

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 0316: El Segundo**

The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio, adding to a pre-existing track.

Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second in a sequence that explores and encourages asynchronous collaboration. This week you will be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project ([disquiet.com/0315](http://disquiet.com/0315)). Note that you aren’t creating a duet — you’re creating the second third of what will eventually be a trio. Keep this in mind.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to the pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are 50 tracks in all to choose from, 49 as part of this playlist:

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0315

And then the 50th was a video by Bassling (aka Jason Richardson), also available as an audio track download here:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0315-first-chair/11022/34?u=disquiet

To select a track, you can listen through all that and choose one, or you can use a random number generator to select a number from 1 to 50, the first 49 being numbered in the above SoundCloud playlist, and 50 being Bassling’s track. (Note: it’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece.)

Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and leave room for an eventual third piece of music. When composing and recording your part, do not alter the original piece of music at all, except to pan the original fully to the left. In your finished audio track, your part should be panned fully to the right. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.

Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it will be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.

Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0316” (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 “disquiet0316” (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: Please consider posting your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0316-el-segundo/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process. Be sure to name the track to which you’ve added music and the name of the musician who recorded it, and include a link to it.

Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Other Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, January 22, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 18, 2018.

Length: The length of your track will be roughly the length of the track to which you are adding something.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0316” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 316th weekly Disquiet Junto project (El Segundo: Record the second third of a trio, adding to a pre-existing track.) at:

https://disquiet.com/0316/