It’s been nearly three years since the excellent synthesizer musician r beny posted a video on his YouTube channel, and he returned on June 9 with an exploration of a specific approach, using a popular module to simulate low-fidelity tape delay. The result is the slowly decaying sound of what originates as a clearly plucked instrument. The plucking remains for a while, but it is eventually all but smothered by its processed aftermath. More from beny at Instagram and Bandcamp. Oh, and there’s no talking in the video. He just plays.
Disquiet Junto Project 0701: Gap Ear
The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces.
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 lllllll.co discussion thread.
Disquiet Junto Project 0701: Gap Ear
The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces.
Step 1: Choose a piece of music (whether your own or something in the public domain) and break it into sequential pieces. You might do this to a recording, or you might place gaps between parts of a notated melody (just to provide two different ways this instruction might be interpreted).
Step 2: Now, fill the various gaps, however many there may be, resulting from Step 1.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0701” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.
Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0701-gap-ear/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. The finished track will likely be maybe 50% larger than the source material.
Deadline: Monday, June 9, 2025, 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 701st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Gap Ear — The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces — at https://disquiet.com/0701/
Chaos and Precision
The frantic glitchcore of MTCH's hkyrbnnpkmdtvovgjr (EVEL)
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Half of an upcoming glitch/beats album by MTCH, hkyrbnnpkmdtvovgjr (if something is encoded in that letter slurry, please lemme know), is up now for streaming, and it’s a fantastic set of frazzled IDM, full of heady echoes of Autechre and Monolake, with a vibrant arrhythmia that suggests live coding at work. Here and there are ominous drones, from which snatches of whirling effects, bounding percussion, and cybernetic beats emerge. It’s sound-design techno, breaking noises into fragments and moving them around with the subgenre’s trademark mix of chaos and precision — artisanal pick-up sticks tossed into a cyclone. Tracks like “kjbg” and “5_bstrckt” resemble a sonification of a subroutine attempting to take matters into its own hands (or lack thereof). The full album comes out Friday, June 6, on the label EVEL, which — at least based on its social media and Bandcamp pages — maintains a geographic ambiguity.
Listen to the Code
And watch
In a manner of speaking, much electronic music is made entirely in code, whether within standalone physical devices that provide tactile means to control sound digitally, or in software that runs on, say, laptops or phones. And then there are coding systems that allow one to, from the ground up, create what might be thought of as raw software, such as the work GrundTon does in Pure Data (a visual programming language), here making what he calls ambient breakcore. And for a bonus, he posts some of his code on his GitHub. Below you can see (and listen to) a slightly spruced up version of the visual system he is developing. GrundTon is an art and technology student based in Vienna, Austria.
On Repeat: Score, Drone, Shadow
Home/office playlist
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.
▰ I end up listening to a lot of scores to films I never end up seeing. From the strength of the fragile ambient and minimalist music that Chris Gestrin recorded for his collaboration with filmmaker Jeff Carter, I’ll definitely be tracking down So Below, which is described as “A contemporary reflection on the utopian vision of Charles Fourier (1772-1837), framed in a multi-format cinema landscape variously local, regional, global, and cosmic.” Gestrin is based in British Columbia.
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▰ Dreunen, by Magnetic Loops, is a series of quite varied drones recorded for International Drone Day, May 24, 2025. Magnetic Loops is based in Bristol, UK.
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▰ Christopher Hanlon’s gentle “Thought Shadows” hides little glitches and beat-like plosives in its embrace. Hanlon is based in Belfast, Northern Ireland.