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.
▰ A short live video by Andrew Tasselmyer that I had on loop for quite a while, a beading ambient techno piece with chamber music overtones:
▰ I’m a sucker for lengthy collections of short snippets of experiments. Book of Golden Furrows by Bushel is such a thing. A lot of it is like instrumental hip-hop sheared to within a millimeter of its life.
▰ I watch — and more to the point listen to — a lot of video game footage on YouTube. This particular approach, which a friend shared with me, is new to me. They are long-form videos intended to be watched by people while on exercise machines. The idea is, while you’re running, it’s like you are in Mirror’s Edge, which is one of my favorite games ever, even though I was terrible at it. Speaking of which: I don’t understand why playing the game gave me motion sickness yet watching the video doesn’t. The channel is named Video Game Run Club. Join in, whether vicariously, or “vicariously vicariously.”
The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year.
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0680: Reverse Resolution The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year.
This project has just one step: finish something you started last year, likely a piece of music you left unfinished.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0680” (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 680th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Reverse Resolution — The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year — at https://disquiet.com/0680/
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0679: Ice Age The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.
Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto communal music projects. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one step:
Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.
Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each January ever since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. By now, it qualifies as a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0679” (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 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/
The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0678: Commonplace Playlist The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.
As has become the tradition at the end of each calendar year, this week’s Junto project is a sound journal: a selective audio history of your past 12 months.
Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2024 — or you might opt for even more elements, choosing a segment for each week, or each day, for example. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, your own devising, and not drawn from third-party sources.
Step 2: You will then select one segment from each of these (most likely) dozen audio elements. If you’re doing a dozen items, one for each month, then five-second segments are recommended, for a total of one minute. Ultimately, though, the length of the segments and of the overall finished track are up to you.
Step 3: Then you will stitch these segments together, equally weighted, in chronological order to form one single track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.
Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0678” (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 678th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Commonplace Playlist — The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments — at https://disquiet.com/0678/
The Assignment: Make music inspired by a children's toy or game.
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0677: Jeux d’enfants The Assignment: Make music inspired by a children’s toy or game.
Step 1: In the early 1870s, the composer George Bizet wrote a suite of short pieces, each inspired by one or another toy or game beloved by children. The first in the series, “L’escarpolette,” suggested a swing, and another, “La toupie,” a spinning top. There were pieces for soap bubbles and leap-frog, as well. Read up on and listen to Bizet’s suite, which was titled Jeux d’enfants, or Children’s Games.
Step 2: Choose a suitable toy or game, perhaps one from your own childhood, or perhaps something even more modern.
Step 3: Record a short piece of music inspired by the subject you selected in Step 2.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0677” (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 677th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Jeux d’enfants — The Assignment: Make music inspired by a children’s toy or game — at https://disquiet.com/0677/
