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Disquiet Junto Project 0289: Ancient Artifacts

Imagine a forgotten instrument and make music with it.

July 13, 2017July 14, 2017 / 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 this playlist for the duration of the project:

This project’s deadline is 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, July 17, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, July 13, 2017.

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 0289: Ancient Artifacts

Imagine a forgotten instrument and make music with it.

Step 1: Imagine an instrument that has been lost in the sands of time.

Step 2: Imagine what that instrument sounded like.

Step 3: Record a piece of music employing that instrument. (Be sure to describe your instrument’s history in an accompanying note.)

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 “disquiet0289” (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: In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co please consider posting your track:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0289-ancient-artifacts/

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 wherever you are on Monday, July 17, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, July 13, 2017.

Length: The length is entirely up to the participant, though roughly three minutes is suggested.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0288” 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). Keep an eye on the license of the audio you source, as that may determine the license you end up using.

Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information, along with details of your source audio, including links to it:

More on this 289th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Ancient Artifacts:
Imagine a forgotten instrument and make music with it. — at:

https://disquiet.com/0289/

When Tats Met RDJ

A Korg leader and Aphex Twin talk synths, and share some new ambient recordings

July 12, 2017 / By Marc Weidenbaum

A conversation appeared online this week between an esteemed Japanese engineer of musical equipment and a beloved British musician who exploits that equipment to its unanticipated ends. The engineer is Tatsuya “Tats” Takahashi, who recently stepped down from a senior role at Korg, the Japanese instrument manufacturer. The musician is Aphex Twin, born Richard D. James, who returned to active public duty in 2014 after a long quiet period. The discussion might have been between one person fading out and another person enjoying a highly mediagenic resurgence. But career matters play virtually no role in the lengthy discussion. Instead it is two men well into life geeking out in public. It reads more like something we’re eavesdropping on that it does like something initially intended for public consumption. They dive deep, quickly, into matters that are certainly esoteric to the general public: microtuning agency, hardware economics, aftermarket software, 440 Hz politics, and polyhedra synaesthesia, just to name a few of the subjects.

The full piece, published [warp.net](http://item.warp.net/interview/aphex-twin-speaks-to-tatsuya-takahashi/), the website of Aphex Twin’s record label, is very much worth a read. One major topic in the article is the Monologue, a monophonic synthesizer recently introduced by Korg. At the time of its release, about a year ago, news broke that Aphex Twin had consulted on its development. In this new conversation, Takahashi and James talk a lot about the microtuning that the latter inspired the former to add as a feature. Says Takahashi at one point:

>”Well, my initial impression was that microtuning is a really niche thing that wouldn’t be needed for a mass market synth, especially a monophonic one, but if you try shifting the tuning while running a sequence, you can hear that it gives it another dimension even if it’s subtle. I’m not super-sensitive to pitch or anything, but you can still hear it change. To me, it feels like casting light on a rough surface and seeing different patterns as you move the light.”

Replies James:

>Yep, on a monophonic instrument, what you just described will be more pronounced if you use a delay with plenty of feedback or reverb, so you can hear the differently tuned notes overlap each other.

As if the interview wasn’t enough of a treat, Korg uploaded to its SoundCloud account six tracks that Aphex Twin made with its equipment. Five of the tracks are deeply ambient, some of them quite reminiscent of the great *Selected Ambient Works Volume 2* album, which Aphex Twin mentions briefly at one point in the discussion, again in reference to microtuning:

> I was always interested in sound and how it affected me, especially the tuning. It wasn’t until my *Selected Ambient Works Vol. II* album that I actually made my own full custom tunings, although there were a few scattered things before that.

The sixth of the new tracks is something of a banger, so I excluded it when adding the five others, which are suitable for background listening, to my longstanding playlist, [*Selected Ambient Works 3 (beta)*](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/aphex-twin-saw-iii-beta). The list initially was comprised of a dozen or so tracks Aphex Twin uploaded to SoundCloud when he renewed his public activities back in 2014. Most of those tracks have since gone offline, but I add to the playlist occasionally, such as now, when new ambient Aphex Twin audio surfaces.

Read the full article at [warp.net](http://item.warp.net/interview/aphex-twin-speaks-to-tatsuya-takahashi/). Listen to [*Selected Ambient Works 3 (beta)*](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/aphex-twin-saw-iii-beta) at my [SoundCloud account](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/aphex-twin-saw-iii-beta). And, of course, consider reading my 33 1/3 book on *Selected Ambient Works Volume 2* ([amazon.com](https://www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Works/dp/1623568900), [bloomsbury.com](https://bloomsbury.com/us/aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii-9781623568900/), [pitchfork.com](pitchfork.com/features/paper-trail/9388-aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii/)).

Pursuing the Omniscient Ear

How does a VR album compare with a live concert recording?

July 11, 2017July 12, 2017 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Live concert albums are formal documents of a given night. At their best they represent a platonic ideal of the evening in question, not presenting the experience of any single individual, but providing an optimal representation. Sometimes they don’t even reproduce a specific evening, but instead draw from multiple nights along a tour, and in any case may be tweaked and clarified in post-production.

<a href="http://machinefabriek.bandcamp.com/album/fight-score">FIGHT score by Machinefabriek</a>

But what of virtual reality, the long-fledgling medium in which the matter of the individual’s perspective is even more central than at a concert? VR is closer to a video game, theoretically with an even greater implicit emphasis on the user’s co-authorship of the experience. Forget for a moment how the full run of a VR environment might be documented in fixed media — how about just its score? The question surfaces during a listen to Machinefabriek’s music for FIGHT a VR artwork by Memo Akten. As Machinefabriek explains in a brief accompanying liner note:

>Wearing an Oculus Rift headset, the viewer experiences an exceedingly psychedelic, 3D trip. The video shows different patterns and colours to each eye, causing ‘binocular rivalry’, an effect in which the brain makes its own fluctuating mix of the images.
>
>In the virtual reality version, the music was spatialized, reactive to the movements of the viewer. This soundtrack EP presents the music as a mixed stereo version.

The soundtrack to FIGHT is track one (“FIGHT score”) of this two-track EP. Track two (“FIGHT ambient”) is “the soundscape that played in the room in which the installation was exhibited.” One listen to the VR’s music, with its rich, spacious display of stereoscopic noises and episodic environmental scenes, and the original context is clear. Even if we can’t nudge the score this way and that through our own digitally induced wayfinding, the sense of a non-linear narrative is self-evident. There are textured drones and dank industrial flourishes, suffocating synthesized white noise and lovely aquatic set pieces. It’s sound to get lost in.

FIGHT is, in fact, an experience not only to get lost in, but to lose your sense of self in. It’s an intense work of op-art, in which different images are fed to your two individual eyes, leaving your brain to make sense of it all. FIGHT [had its premiere at STRP Biënnale](https://strp.nl/en/portfolio/fight/), which commissioned it, in the Netherlands, where Machinefabriek lives, and was also presented at [Sónar in Barcelona](https://sonarplusd.com/en/programs/barcelona-2017/areas/realities-d/fight-by-memo-akten). The second track on the EP, the installation score, is a womb embrace of long ambient tones. Chances are, after you take off that VR headset it’s exactly what the body needs.

Album originally posted at [machinefabriek.bandcamp.com](https://machinefabriek.bandcamp.com/album/fight-score). More from Machinefabriek, aka Rutger Zuydervelt, at [machinefabriek.nu](http://www.machinefabriek.nu/). More on Memo Akten’s FIGHT at [memo.tv/fight](http://www.memo.tv/fight/).

Lulled, and Not

A trick of the ear via West Virginia

July 10, 2017July 10, 2017 / By Marc Weidenbaum

“Local Presence” by Evasdad is one of those blissfully center-less pieces of music. On initial glance, it bears various hallmarks, all of them always slightly out of reach. Tonally it has touches of loungey techno. Rhythmically it feels downtempo. Melodically it has elements of the post-classical. At any given moment you might register it as ambient. In the end it’s both none and all of those. It outright refuses any metric rigidity, to the extent that it removes techno from the running. It is in many ways far too anxious, brimming with elements and teetering on chaos, to provide the comfort of downtempo. It may arguably be post-classical, what with its marimba-like instrumentation, but it never feels part of a literature. And while it’s ambient at any given instance, the shifts between those instances are each more glitchy than the previous. It’s a great piece that continuously tricks the ear into thinking it’s being lulled when, in fact, it is being concertedly challenged.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/evasdad](https://soundcloud.com/evasdad/local-prescence). Evasdad is George Cicci of Morgantown, West Virginia.

Disquiet Junto Project 0288: Interspecies Duet

Make music from samples of two different animals.

July 6, 2017July 7, 2017 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:

This project’s deadline is 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, July 10, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, July 6, 2017.

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 0288: Interspecies Duet

Make music from samples of two different animals.

Step 1: We’re going to use samples of two different animals and have them make music together. It’s recommended that you source the audio from the excellent site freesound.org, in part because it’s a great resource, and in part to raise awareness about the site’s existence. Donating a bit to the service would be appreciated, as well, but of course isn’t required.

Step 2: Locate audio of two different animals. It will help if they make sounds that are distinct from each other (e.g., cat and bird, not two breeds of cat).

Step 3: Isolate material from each of the source recordings that can be used to make a new musical recording. It’s preferable that you isolate not only tonal material, but bits that have melodic, rhythmic, or other elements signature to the given animals.

Step 4: Create a short piece of music that suggests a duet between the two animals you’ve selected.

Bonus: Make it a trio by adding a third animal — and perhaps that animal is you.

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 “disquiet0288” (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: In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co please consider posting your track:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0288-interspecies-duet/

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 wherever you are on Monday, July 10, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, July 6, 2017.

Length: The length is entirely up to the participant, though roughly three minutes is suggested.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0288” 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, along with details of your source audio, including links to it:

More on this 288th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Interspecies Duet:
Make music from samples of two different animals — at:

https://disquiet.com/0288/