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Disquiet Junto Project 0231: Field Complement

The Assignment: Compose a piece to align with, from memory, 60 seconds of everyday sound.

June 2, 2016June 2, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

anthonyeaston

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on [SoundCloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) and at [disquiet.com/junto](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. 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 project 0213:

This project was posted in the late afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 2, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 6, 2016.

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 0231: Field Complement

The Assignment: Compose a piece to align with, from memory, 60 seconds of everyday sound.

This week’s project’s theme involves how composing relates to memory. It is recommended that you read through all the steps in the project before proceeding to attempt to execute it.

These are the steps:

Step 1: Find a place, preferably outdoors, where you can sit for 5 to 15 minutes without being disturbed. This place should have a fair amount of inherent noise to it, and that noise should be variable, not static — i.e., not the long held drone of an overwhelmingly loud HVAC system, but the bustle of a street corner, or of a playground, or, if weather or other circumstances keep you indoors, perhaps of a busy cafe.

Step 2: Bring with you a portable recording device as well as something on which you can quietly take a small number of written (or typed) notes. You may wish to do a test recording to be certain that your note-taking isn’t part of the audio recording.

Step 3: Settle into the space and get a sense of its sounds. Listening closely.

Step 4: Make a field recording of one full minute, or a little longer, of continuous sound in this place. While recording the sound, use time codes to make note of any memorable sonic instances. Keep track not only of when a sonic instance begins, but also of its duration.

Step 5: Trim the field recording to exactly 60 seconds.

Step 6: Without listening back to the field recording, compose and record a 60-second piece intended to complement it. Refer back to your time-code notes to align composed instances with those real-world instances that you recall having distinguished your field recording. You can use whatever instrumentation you like, but it is recommended that you use no more than one or two instruments. You should not employ any field recordings in your composed piece. Sonically, the “composed” material should be distinct from the field audio.

Step 7: When your composed piece is completed, layer the two tracks together into one new 60-second work. They should be played back at equal volume, more or less. You can adjust a little to achieve the impression of balance between the field recording and the composed work. The only editing you can do is to fade in and out, if that is so desired.

Step 8: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.

Step 9: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 10: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Background: Longtime Junto participants/listeners may recognize this as a light revision of a project from back in [March 2013](https://disquiet.com/2013/03/21/disquiet0064-halflive/).

Deadline: This project was posted in the late afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 2, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 6, 2016.

Length: The length of the finished piece should be about 60 seconds.

Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this project, 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.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please in the title to your track include the term “disquiet0231.”Also use “disquiet0231”as a tag for your track.

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, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 231st weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece to align with, from memory, 60 seconds of everyday sound”— at:

https://disquiet.com/0231/

To Evoke a Sense of Timelessness

A live performance by Copenhagen-based Fejld

June 1, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Uploaded in 2010, this is something of an artifact, but it’s a beautiful performance, and with barely 5,000 views on YouTube it deserves a broader audience. What it depicts is Copenhagen-based musician Fejld performing three and a half minutes of almost entirely tonal ambient music. It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine [“Ambient Performances.”](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/30/a-youtube-playlist-of-ambient-performances/) Part of what makes this notion of ambient performance so interesting is ambient’s popular association with the idea of stasis, of music that is apart from time rather than something that evidences progression or change over time. Now, affect and action aren’t necessarily directly correlated. It can take effort to achieve a semblance of a lack of effort. In each of the live performances in this [ever-growing YouTube playlist](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/30/a-youtube-playlist-of-ambient-performances/), various instruments and techniques are employed to evoke a sense of timelessness: to create an illusion of stasis. In this particular video, Fejld is working on the Monome, a grid instrument that’s the work of musicians Kelli Cain and Brian Crabtree. As in several other videos noted here recently, only part of the musician’s equipment, however, is on screen. Much as [Midera’s work on a dance-oriented Korg gadget](https://disquiet.com/2016/05/31/midera/) belied the essential presence of a reverb unit, and [two](https://disquiet.com/2016/05/23/ambient-footwork/) different [guitar](https://disquiet.com/2016/05/10/boards-of-canada-over-horizon-guitar/) pieces focused (literally) on roughly half of the guitar/pedal divide, Fejld’s video emphasizes the Monome but doesn’t feature the item the Monome is mediating, a keyboard synthesizer (the Nord Modular G2) whose sine waves are being adjusted live in the performance. In this case that makes sense, because the Monome is doing all the realtime work. The keyboard is simply sitting still somewhere off camera, receiving and emitting signals.

Video originally posted on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmhsis_j_zQ). More from Fejld at [soundcloud.com/kuf-records](https://soundcloud.com/kuf-records/fejld-winter-in-trumansburg). Fejld’s home page [fejld.com](http://fejld.com/) is static and the [facebook.com/fejld](https://www.facebook.com/Fejld/) hasn’t been updated since 2014. Fejld is/was Rasmus NyÃ¥ker of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Space Music for Dance Machines

A performance by Midera of Minneapolis, Minnesota

May 31, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine [“Ambient Performances”](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/30/a-youtube-playlist-of-ambient-performances/) is a six-minute video of ambient music on an instrument not largely associated with ambient music: the Korg Electribe EMX1. The EMX1’s combination of drum machine, sequencer, and synthesizer has made it a dance-music favorite. Midera, instead, does away with beats and processes the EMX1’s tones and textures significantly with another instrument, the Eventide Space, a reverb effects unit. In the video, it’s the EMX1 being handled by Midera throughout, though the Eventide, offscreen, is arguably doing much of the heavy lifting — or, in this aesthetic realm, the light lifting. “It’s all in the Eventide Space,” Midera tells one commenter on YouTube, but clarifies in response to another: “The Space is doing a lot of the work, but the simplicity of the EMX makes it fun to write tracks like this.” It’s a flowing performance, threadbare wave forms ebbing from one to another, Midera occasionally adding a bit of drama with some modulation here or a touch of glitchy flare there, all of which has rightly earned the track several comparisons to Vangelis’ *Blade Runner* score.

Track posted at the [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIpv9_Xv2PY) of Midera, aka Michael Dennis Raleigh of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Found via [synthtopia.com](http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2016/05/29/deep-ambient-with-a-korg-emx-1-groovebox/). More from Midera/Raleigh at [soundcloud.com/midera](https://soundcloud.com/midera), [twitter.com/acemonvw](https://twitter.com/acemonvw), [michaelraleigh.bandcamp.com](https://michaelraleigh.bandcamp.com/), and [midera.bandcamp.com](https://midera.bandcamp.com/).

They’re Parts, Not Whole

A series of overlapping textural material by Leonardo Rosado

May 30, 2016May 30, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The track’s title mixes a cold date stamp with an ambiguous sentiment, and in turn “160515T01 the saddest morning glory” summons up a series of overlapping textural source segments. These include plucked string instruments and pulsing drones and some deeply echoing woodwind and sequences of held notes, among other aural delicacies. Those held notes, like the overall piece, travel at too slow a rate to be considered collectively as a melody, as of a piece. They’re parts, not wholes. The whole here is more experiential than developmental, less a matter of something that changes as it goes and more a matter of some things that illuminate each other through proximity. A seemingly rote drone gains rhythm when contrasted with an even more placid tonal companion; a semi-prominent rhythmic element recedes when faced with a more capacious contrast. Recorded by Leonardo Rosado, “160515T01 the saddest morning glory” is slow and subtle, evenly paced and emotionally remote, and utterly beautiful.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/leonrosado](https://soundcloud.com/leonrosado/160515t01-the-saddest-morning-glory). More from Rosado, who is based in Göteborg, Sweden, at [works-by-lr.tumblr.com](http://works-by-lr.tumblr.com/).

Uploaded: My Resonance FM Set

Music by Vladimir Conch, Cullen Miller, Erika Nesse, Marcus Fischer, and others

May 27, 2016May 26, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Earlier this month I put together an hour-long set for the excellent Resonance arts broadcast network (aka [resonancefm.com](http://resonancefm.com)). That set has now been archived at
[mixcloud.com](https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/free-lab-radio-7th-may-2016/) by Fari Bradley, the Resonance presenter who invited me to do it. There are thorough details on what plays in the set in the [initial post](https://disquiet.com/2016/05/07/disquiet-mix-for-resonance-fm-free-lab-radio/) here. The music is, in order of appearance, by Vladimir Conch, Cullen Miller, Erika Nesse, Julsy, Marcus Fischer, Stabilo (Speaker Gain Teardrop), North Americans, Yasuo Akai, nystada, Bassling, William Boldenreck, Scanner Darkly, ToÃ n, and R Beny.