Disquiet Junto Project 0697: First Third

The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio.

/ 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 0697: First Third
The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio.

Please note: While this project is the start of a three-part sequence that will unfold over the course of three consecutive weeks, you can participate in any or all three of those parts. 

Step 1: This week’s Junto project is the first in a sequence intended to encourage and reward collaboration. You will be recording something with the understanding that it will remain unfinished for the time being. Your part will be done, but more will happen. Read on.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music using any instrumentation of your choice. Conceive the piece as something that leaves room for something else — other instruments, other people — to join in. (Keep in mind that your piece resulting from this week’s project will be panned to the left in the second and third weeks of this sequence.)

Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly two to three minutes in length, as described in Step 2. 

Step 4: This is important: be sure to make your track downloadable because it may be used by someone else in the next Disquiet Junto project, and the one after that.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0697” (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-0697-first-third/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is usually up to the musician, but for this one, please, per the instructions, keep it to roughly two to three minutes in length. Thanks.

Deadline: Monday, May 12, 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 697th weekly Disquiet Junto project, First Third — The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio — at https://disquiet.com/0697/

A Tony Passarell Joint

Rough masters FTW

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Tired: Getting reminders on social media to say happy birthday to (or otherwise reconnect with) deceased friends.

Wired: Stumbling on newly uploaded recording sessions featuring deceased friends.

The prolific concert recorder who goes by 3.Cameras.and.a.Microphone on YouTube just posted a previously unreleased jazz fusion studio session featuring the late Tony Passarell, an old friend, with limited available details about the source material’s circumstances. The players are listed as, in addition to Tony: Stephen, Charles, and Robert, with no last names. There’s a scribbled addition in parenthesis, which appears to be “Davon.” The date given is “8/14/13” — August 14, 2013, a Wednesday. It’s a loose affair, featuring presumably Passarell’s sax, plus guitar, bass, and drums.

EVP Melodies

In a live piece by Lesjamusic

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The phenomenon called EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon — apologies for the redundancy there — is one in which voices are heard emanating from noise: signals in the static. For one type of listener alert to EVP, this can be accepted as a fascinating illusion, a demonstration of the mind’s capacity to identify patterns and to lend them meaning. For another listener, it can be experienced as a voice from beyond, perhaps from beyond the grave, or perhaps from across the event horizon to the singularity, a truly electronic voice. Either way: ghosts in the machine.

The word “voice” means something specific in the context of synthesizers, where a voice is an identifiable individual instrument within a larger system, or perhaps a standalone instrument. A “voice” in that context has enough source material and controls that it can be utilized for expression. There’s a difference between an oscillator, which simply emits a sound, and a voice, the latter concept invoking a collection of additional tools that allow it to be shaped and used to express something.

The concept of EVP comes comes to mind during this live performance by Nick Lisher, who records as Lesjamusic, because the noise is rich enough that the sense of something melodic-like happening does so, to a large degree, at a substrate level. The helpful thing about a performance like this one is that you can watch the technology be employed as you listen to the sounds, and thus get a sense of what’s happening, at least in terms of an alignment of cause and effect. In this case, the musician has done us the additional benefit of explaining a bit of what’s going on in an accompanying note. If you keep an eye on that yellow button toward the right of the screen, you’ll recognize moments at which changes occur. Explains Lisher, this is when “a new fragment is being captured and stretched.” At those instances, melodic cogency occurs not deep beneath but, instead, at the top level, and then the top level slowly becomes the drone within which other subtler sounds occur — or at least appear to.

Disquiet Junto Project 0696: Chain of Layers

The Assignment: Make music change by altering its layers.

/ 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 0696: Chain of Layers
The Assignment: Make music change by altering its layers.

This project is the first of three that are being done by the Disquiet Junto in collaboration with the 2025 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 3 through 7. The festival topic this year is « Kette » — which translates, as the organization explains, to “Chain”: “Chains connect but they also bind. They create relationships but also restrictions. As a gift they look nice, feared when used in vice, and yet they can span bridges across fire and ice.” All three Junto projects will engage with the work of Svetlana Maraš, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 festival.

We are working again at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the seventh year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

Step 1: Record 10 to 15 layers of continuous sound.

Step 2: Create a piece of music in which you only change the relative presence of those individual layers from Step 1 over time. Some light effects and panning are certainly fine, but the majority of the impact should be how the prominence of the individual layers changes.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0696” (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-0696-chain-of-layers/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, May 5, 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 696th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Layers — The Assignment: Make music change by altering its layers — at https://disquiet.com/0696/

On Repeat: Beats, Live, Score

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

▰ Very much enjoying the recent Barker album, Stochastic Drift (released by Smalltown Supersound on April 4), especially the heavy Selected Ambient Works Volume II vibe of the track “Positive Disintegration.” (Barker is British, and lives in Berlin.)

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▰ Fantastic live set from jazz bassist Linda May Han Oh (Malaysia-born, Australia-raised), with Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet — Oakland, California) and Pulitzer Prize winner Tyshawn Sorey (drums, New Jersey), recorded at the Keith Haring Theater, Performance Space, NY, back in January. Akinmusire is a somewhat recent favorite of mine, and I love hearing my instrumentalist favorites in supporting, or at least non-leading, roles.

▰ Dutch musician Rutger Hoedemaekers’ score for the science fiction TV series Moresnet is moody and dramatic — cinematic, for sure, but also pleasingly touched by the weird. Hoedemaekers previously worked on, among other projects, Trapped (with Jóhann Jóhannsson and Hildur Guðnadóttir) and The Last Berliner.

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