Disquiet Junto Project 0686: Catch Your Breath

The Assignment: Listen to yourself inhale and exhale; make music from what you sense.

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 0686: Catch Your Breath
The Assignment: Listen to yourself inhale and exhale; make music from what you sense.

Step 1: Sit for a moment and slow your breath.

Step 2: Continue with Step 1 for a bit longer.

Step 3: Pay attention to your breathing, in and out, in and out. Don’t record yourself. Just listen, and feel.

Step 4: Consider how the process of breathing in and out slowly can lend shape to a piece of music. Again, just do this through personal consideration of the act of breathing. This project isn’t an exercise in audio sampling.

Step 5: Record a piece of music that engages with the ideas that surfaced in Step 4.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0686” (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-0686-catch-your-breath/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long does one sit and just breathe?

Deadline: Monday, February 24, 2024, 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 686th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Catch Your Breath — The Assignment: Listen to yourself inhale and exhale; make music from what you sense — at https://disquiet.com/0686/

On Repeat: Gorge, English, Clayton

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.

▰ With track titles like “a concrete corridor,” “jagged branches,” and “tungsten bulbs,” the excellent new score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, for The Gorge, could be easily mistaken for a Nine Inch Nails album. (The Gorge is the one with the woman from the chess movie and the guy from the drumming movie. The best thing about it, besides the score and it having a very small cast in a very large landscape, is that Netflix positioned it as a Valentine’s Day movie.)

▰ Lawrence English’s new album, Even the Horizon Knows Its Bounds, is like an orchestra of pianos tuning up forever. Includes source material from Amby Downs, Chris Abrahams, Chuck Johnson, Claire Rousay, Dean Hurley, Jim O’Rourke, JW Paton, Madeleine Cocolas, Norman Westberg, Stephen Vitiello, and Vanessa Tomlinson.

[bandcamp width=640 height=472 album=86643838 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

▰ Archival Entry: Look out. Old man Weidenbaum is listening to James Newton Howard’s Michael Clayton (2007) score on repeat again.

Disquiet Junto Project 0685: Pick-Me-Up

The Assignment: Treat a set of sounds like a game of pick up sticks

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 0685: Pick-Me-Up
The Assignment: Treat a set of sounds like a game of pick up sticks.

Step 1: Think about pick up sticks, the children’s game.

Step 2: Assemble a small collection of sounds.

Step 3: Record a piece of music in which you employ the sounds from Step 2 as if in a game of pick up sticks.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0685” (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-0685-pick-me-up/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long of a game is it?

Deadline: Monday, February 17, 2024, 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 685th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Pick-Me-Up — The Assignment: Treat a set of sounds like a game of pick up sticks — at https://disquiet.com/0685/

The photo, by Heurtelions, associated with this project is used thanks to a CC BY-SA 4.0 Creative Commons license (photo repeated in a grid with text superimposed).

A Cure

Jason Calhoun and Foresteppe team up

Minimal instrumentation (piano, bass) combine with rhythmic bits of everyday sound. The result, both fragile and engaging, melds post-classical, ambient jazz, and lowercase. This is the first track, “i,” off the forthcoming duo album, A Four Part Cure, from Jason Calhoun and Foresteppe (the latter aka Egor Klochikhin), on Ned Milligan’s Florabelle label. Can’t wait to hear the rest.

[bandcamp width=640 height=274 album=3318240616 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

Disquiet Junto Project 0684: Early Bird

The Assignment: Record not so much an alarm as a guided wakening.

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 0684: Early Bird
The Assignment: Record not so much an alarm as a guided wakening.

Step 1: You are going to record a piece of music intended for someone to listen to almost immediately upon waking up. Think about your mornings, and what a more optimal morning might entail.

Step 2: Consider a scenario in which someone wakes up and, rather than look at their work or check the news, they take a period of time to just get centered. Think about how long you might want this to take, say three minutes, or five minutes, or twenty minutes.

Step 3: Consider the stages of awakening, from quiet to loud, from slow to fast (or a middling pace), from simple to complex. Perhaps the sounds go full circle, returning to where they started.

Step 4: Consider what sound at the end — a gong, a bell, a bird call, etc. — might signal that the waking process has concluded.

Step 5: Having reflected on the topics brought up in the instructions thus far, record a track that might guide someone slowly into consciousness upon waking each morning.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0684” (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-0684-early-bird/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long does it take you to wake up?

Deadline: Monday, February 10, 2024, 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 684th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Early Bird — The Assignment: Record not so much an alarm as a guided wakening — at https://disquiet.com/0684/