The Assignment: Share a peek out your window and some sounds inspired by the view.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
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 0700: View Frame The Assignment: Share a peek out your window and some sounds inspired by the view.
Step 1: Take a photo out your window, with a little bit of the frame in view. Show people a glimpse of your world.
Step 2: Record a short, simple piece of music inspired (or otherwise informed) by what you see.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0700” (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.
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 700th weekly Disquiet Junto project, View Frame — The Assignment: Share a peek out your window and some sounds inspired by the view — at https://disquiet.com/0700/
“Fabulation for K”, from a forthcoming album, New Environments & Rhythm Studies, by Andrew Pekler, delays the delivery, to the point where the delay turns out to be the point. Almost a full two minutes of teasing chords and glitchy wisps (or wispy glitches) into “Fabulation,” after what on any other such track would have been the mere five to ten seconds prior to a steady beat kicking in, there’s a hint of a white noise pause — and then all over again it holds back, until quite suddenly it’s over. The track is a study in avoiding the obvious. “Cumbia Para Los Grillos,” the other currently available pre-release track, has a somewhat similar vibe, that of being stems of a whole other song, more parts than whole, and as a result more rewarding than what it might have become. “Cumbia” feels somewhat more fleshed-out than “Fabulation” is, mixing water-drop xylophones and moody organ-like haze, but it leaves plenty of room for the imagination. “Los Grillos” is Spanish for crickets, so perhaps the piece’s title is an acknowledgement of the backgroundedness of what Pekler is up to.
The album is due out June 27, 2025, on the label Faitiche, founded by Jan Jelinek. I saw the two of them play in San Francisco earlier this month.
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.
▰ The musician keinseier posted this gorgeous little ambient glitch recording on YouTube, and I had it running in the background for much of the week. He’s based in Hamburg, Germany. More of his music at keinseier.bandcamp.com.
▰ Tom Whitwell, the inventive London-based guy behind various music technological wonders — like the Turning Machine, the 8MU MIDI controller, and the Music Thing Modular Workshop System — posted nearly 60 short recordings of shortwave radio frequencies. Shortwave Scan May 2025, as the collection is titled, comes with a great licensing statement: “NO rights reserved, use these sounds how you like” (albeit with a qualifier: “Raw radio recordings include audio material that might be copyrighted by other people – no license to use that material is implied”).
▰ The Internet Archive (archive.org), about half an hour by foot from where I live in San Francisco, is now live-streaming its archival activities, and when it’s not business time, they put up archival footage. I vote for ASMR hours, during which they just put mics next to some of the equipment.
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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0699: Third Third The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio.
There are two versions of the instructions for this week’s project — one very short, the other very long.
Very short version (roughly 25 words): Select a track from last week’s duet project (disquiet.com/0698) and add a third part dead center between the left and right stereo channels to complete a trio.
. . .
Very long version of the instructions (about 550 words):
These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully.
Please note: While this is the third part of a three-part project sequence, you can participate in one, two, or all three of the parts, which have occurred over the course of three consecutive weeks.
Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the third in a sequence that encourages and rewards 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/0698). Note that you are finishing a trio: you’re creating the third part of what two previous musicians began, filling the space between them. Please keep this in mind.
Step 2: The plan is for you to record an 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 tracks by numerous musicians to choose from. The majority of these tracks, 55 at the time of publishing this post, are in this playlist:
To select a track, you can listen through all those and choose one, or simply look around and select, or you can come up with a random approach to sifting through them.
When choosing a track, consider checking out the two previous projects’ discussion threads, as there may be additional information in them that could be of use, such as BPM or key signature:
Step 3: Record a 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 it should be placed dead center between the left and right stereo channels. When composing and recording your part, do not alter the original piece of music at all. 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 may be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.
Step 5: In normal circumstances, Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. However, as with the preceding project that led up to this one, you can contribute more than one track this week. You can do up to three total this time. For your first, you can choose any track from the duets, no matter how many times others may have employed it. If you choose to do a second or third, please do a track no on else has used yet (it’s understood that between when you select a duet track and finish your trio, someone else may have popped up and used it, which is perfectly fine). Throughout the project I will keep an updated list in this Google Drive document of what has been utilized:
The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. That, foremost, is the spirit of this project.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0699” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required).
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 699th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Third Third — The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio — at https://disquiet.com/0699/
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.
Today, that means two live sets.
▰ If this live set by the Jeff Parker ETA IVtet was an EP, it’d be one of my favorite releases thus far this year. And if you’d told me any of the other players (in addition to guitarist Parker: Josh Johnson, alto saxophone; Anna Butterss, bass; Jay Bellerose, drums) was actually the leader, I’d have believed it.
▰ I very much enjoyed Nicolas Collins’ recent book, Semi-Conducting — Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket, and think with some regularity about the anecdote in it when a young Collins walks bt Miles Davis‘ home in Manhattan and hears the trumpeter experimenting with a wah wah pedal. It’s a common element in Davis’ electric-era work, and especially central to this live concert, which was recorded at Chateau Neuf in Oslo, Norway, on November 9, 1971. That’s in between the two albums he released that year: Jack Johnson and Live-Evil. Davis’ band is: Keith Jarrett, keyboards; Gary Bartz saxophone; Michael Henderson, bass guitar; Leon “Ndugu” Chancler, drums; and on percussion, both Don Alias and James Mtume.
