downstream – Page 233

Disquiet Junto Project 0314: Cold Start

The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.

January 4, 2018January 5, 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-0314) above 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 8, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 4, 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 0314: Cold Start**

The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.

Welcome to a new year. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one sentence:

Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each year since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. At the start of the seventh (!) year of the Disquiet Junto, it is a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: If your hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0314” (no spaces) in the name of your track. If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to my locating the tracks and creating a playlist of them.

Step 2: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 3: Please consider posting your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0314-cold-start/

Step 4: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, January 8, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 4, 2018.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0314” 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 preferable 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 314th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Cold Start: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it) at:

https://disquiet.com/0314/

Colleen, Revisited on Richard Houghten’s Guitar

A cover from his mid-2017 album

January 3, 2018January 3, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="http://bloomypetal.bandcamp.com/album/all-guitars-2">All Guitars 2 by Richard Houghten</a>

Richard Houghten plays guitar and has a way with covers of electronic tracks. His mid-2017 album, *All Guitars 2*, included two Aphex Twin pieces (“Vordhosbn,” off *Drukqs*, and “On,” the single whose release was Aphex Twin’s first on the Warp label) rendered with a mix of often heavily processed guitar and seemingly automated rhythm tracks, as well as pieces by Orbital, Bonobo, David Lynch, DJ Krush, and others, plus some originals.

That was preceded by the 2014 *All Guitars*, which had covers of Squarepusher, Flying Lotus, Grimes, Burial, and Nosaj Thing, as well as another pair of Aphex Twin pieces: “Jynweythek Ylow,” also from *Drukqs*, and “Girl/Boy,” off the 1996 EP of the same name and the *Richard D. James Album*, which followed that same year. (The latter is the one album [I got to interview Aphex Twin](https://disquiet.com/1997/04/15/eponymous-rex/) for.) The “Girl/Boy” rendition popped up today on Houghten’s [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz5p_O1dUgk):

Listening to that on repeat brought me to the full album, and then to the more recent set, which includes an interesting point of comparison. Much of Houghten’s cover work involves taking electronic sounds — melodies, beats, and textures — and rendering them with guitar. However, in the case of the track by Colleen (aka Cécile Schott), “Geometría del Universo,” off her 2013 album, *The Weighing of the Heart*, Houghten is actually playing on guitar a piece of music that originated on another string instrument.

In Houghten’s version, the intense rhythms of the original remain, but they’ve seen the more visceral aspects softened. Houghten isn’t a replicator, much as his transcriptions bear the imprint of dedication and affection to the source material. He brings his own sensibility to his covers, and in the case of Colleen that involves invoking an aesthetic that the original was somewhat in opposition to. Where Colleen’s had the beating heart of a flamenco outburst, the Houghten is more quietly minimalist — the same patterns, rendered with a silken palette.

For comparison’s sake, here is Colleen’s original version of “Geometría del Universo”:

<a href="http://colleencolleen.bandcamp.com/album/the-weighing-of-the-heart">The Weighing of the Heart by Colleen</a>

More from Houghten, who is based in Los Angeles, at [twitter.com/HoughtenRichard](https://twitter.com/HoughtenRichard). The full album *All Guitars 2* is at [bloomypetal.bandcamp.com](https://bloomypetal.bandcamp.com/album/all-guitars-2.)

The Water Memory of Emily A. Sprague

Five tracks of humid music from synthesizers

January 2, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="http://mlesprg.bandcamp.com/album/water-memory">Water Memory by Emily A. Sprague</a>

Released at the tail end of 2017, three quarters of the way through December, long after most best-of lists had been filed, published, and amended online with reader comments, the New York-based musician Emily A. Sprague released *Water Memory*, a cassette/digital release of original synthesizer pieces. At the bottom of the album’s Bandcamp page she lists the technology with which it was composed and performed, but knowledge of the boutique manufacturers — Monome, Mannequins, and Xaoc among them — isn’t necessary for an appreciation of the seesawing, nature-infused, artfully somber music the album contains.

From the morphing glisten of “A Lake” to the muted glitches of “Your Pond,” the album’s five tracks share a form that is genteel and economical and, yet, richly emotional. The album’s title is appropriate. There is something seemingly humid about the music, in the way the various elements congeal and amass, how the separations between parts get foggy, how the whole thing unfolds in a manner that suggests the presence of an environment: not just organic — the term employed frequently to suggest machines losing their machine-ness — but prone to the consequences of organic: irreversible decay and unforeseen growth.

Get the full album at [mlesprg.bandcamp.com](https://mlesprg.bandcamp.com/). More from Sprague at [mlesprg.info](https://www.mlesprg.info/). I wrote here about her work previously when she was a guest of the excellent [Sound + Process](https://disquiet.com/2017/09/23/the-self-education-of-synthesist-emily-sprague/) podcast.

A Spy’s Fractured Recollections

Piano and electronics by Berlin-based musician Hainbach

January 1, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

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-).

It’s quite likely that the slow piano line at the heart of this track, “Growing Backwards” by Hainbach, would suggest the music of Erik Satie even if it weren’t being processed by myriad small electronic devices that extracted all the nostalgic intensity possible. The reduced pace, the elegiac intonation, the gentle minimalism — all those things in combination would have likely brought to mind the composer whose life straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, and whose music sounds more current in the 21st than perhaps ever before.

Here, though, that familiar, celebrated mode is reinforced with techniques that emphasize a reflexively backwards-minded affect. The warping of the melody and the shimmer of adjacent chords lend an ethereal quality, and the snippets of voices suggest half-remembered conversations. (According the musician, the theme comes from the score he composed to a play about “spies, family, memories and dementia.” He confirms that the voices are intended to suggest past occurrences bleeding into the present: “words that sound sound like flickering memories.”)

As with many of Hainbach’s recordings, the video is a full live performance, allowing the listener to watch as his hands move from gadget to gadget, from knob to knob, coaxing sounds and effects as he proceeds.

Video originally posted at Hainbach’s [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOXBTbJKlX0) page. Hainbach is Berlin-based composer Stefan Paul Goetsch. More from Hainbach at [hainbach.bandcamp.com](https://hainbach.bandcamp.com/) and [instagram.com/hainbach101](https://www.instagram.com/hainbach101/).

Disquiet Junto Project 0313: Audio Journal 2017

The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen five-second segments.

December 28, 2017December 29, 2017 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, January 1, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, December 28, 2017.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0313) 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 0313: Audio Journal 2017**

The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen five-second segments.

As has become the tradition at the end of each calendar year, this week’s project is a sound journal, a selective audio history of your past twelve months.

Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2017. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, and not drawn from third-party sources.

Step 2: You will then select one five-second segment from each of these dozen audio elements.

Step 3: Then you will stitch these dozen five-second segments together in chronological order to form one single one-minute track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.

Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.

(Level Up: Alternately, you can use more than 12 audio segments — do two a month, or one a week, or one a day. Whatever you choose, just keep them evenly distributed across the year. You might make the segments shorter, to keep the full track length to 60 seconds.)

Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: If your hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0313” (no spaces) in the name of your track. If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to my locating the tracks and creating a playlist of them.

Step 2: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 3: Please consider posting your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0313-audio-journal-2017/

Step 4: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Length: The track will likely be 60 seconds long, though you might elect to some other approach.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0313” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Download: It is preferable 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 313th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Audio Journal 2017: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen five-second segments) at:

https://disquiet.com/0313/