Disquiet Junto Project 0676: Sub Melody

The Assignment: Bury a slow melody deep inside a drone.

/ 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 0676: Sub Melody
The Assignment: Bury a slow melody deep inside a drone.

Step 1: We did a drone project last week and it went well, so let’s do another one. You needn’t have done last week’s to do this week, as is always the case. Again, you may, yourself, be experienced recording drone music, or you may never have recorded any. You may not even be sure what drone music is, in which case read up a bit. Not matter your experience and familiarity, please give some thought as to what constitutes drone music.

Step 2: Think about what makes a melody, even a very slow and simple melody, different from a drone.

Step 3: Now record a piece of music that is, objectively, a deep drone, but somehow within it, somewhere well below the surface, include a slow-moving melody. 

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0676” (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-0676-sub-melody/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, December 16, 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 676th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Sub Melody — The Assignment: Bury a slow melody deep inside a drone — at https://disquiet.com/0676/

Incident at Sainsbury’s

A York field recording

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A field recorder — field recordist? — in England happened upon a light infrastructural tonality of interest, taped it, and shared the resulting audio online. The individual, named Andy, who noted it on a forum recently, describes the incident as follows: “Stumbled across an aircon unit and fridge harmonising together in the Sainsbury’s at York Railway Station. Placed my Zoom H5 in the fridge next to some milkshakes and hit record. Bought a meal deal.” This recording isn’t Andy’s first from York Railway Station. At the website where the track is shared, two others appear nearby, one from later that same year, 2023, and one from the year prior. The website is aporee.org, which is sort of like if freesound.org crossbred with Google Maps. The adjacent recordings are evident on the satellite map page, each marked by a red circle. As for the site’s homepage, it is a textual heat map of recent uploads.

And Andy is right about the recording. The naturally occurring drone — well, “naturally” may be stretching it — is captivating, both transparent and insistent. It’s a fine recording of the sort of sound that can feel either like a fleeting presence or a claustrophobic one. I can’t seem to embed it, so click through to the website to listen. If it doesn’t pop up immediately, click on the leftmost of the three red circles. Of course, there may be more such red circles in the future, should Andy return to the location and hear something of interest.

Satellite ASMR

Some spacious sounds from BRiES

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Synthesizer workstations can look like the inside of NASA command modules for spaceflights, so it makes perfect sense that a synthesizer session could be used to create an ersatz field recording of an orbital space station. Such “space ambience,” or satellite ASMR, is heard here as an array of clanking and voices and beeps and signals, and an overall metallic reverberance that lends the whole thing a sense of place. It’s the work of a musician who goes by BRiES, and this piece is one of seven tracks that make up a recent album, simply titled binaural, which emphasizes the spaciousness, the space-ness, of the work. BRiES writes of the recordings: “The tracks are an effort to create realistic sounding ambiences with binaural beats and music mixed in.” There’s also a recognition that work like this can have utility: “The album can be used as a masking tool in loud environments, for relaxation or even to fall asleep to.”

[bandcamp width=640 height=373 album=3444934592 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

BRiES is based in Sint-Gillis-Waas, Belgium.

Disquiet Junto Project 0640 Update

Eight months later

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This coming Monday, December 9*, will mark that we have gone eight months since project 0640, which means that it will then be time for me to post the audio that was recorded for it. If you don’t recall — or weren’t around for — that project, the idea was to record a piece of music, send it to me, and then delete it from your hard drive. (Yeah, kinda scary — for me as well as for the musicians.) When I post the music this coming week, none of the resulting 27 tracks will have been heard by the musicians who made them since they were recorded. (Project 0640, which was titled Time Vault, is highly unusual for the Junto. Every other project since we started, back in January 2012, involved participants more or less immediately posting a track online.) My original plan was to simply post the Time Vault tracks myself on my soundcloud.com/disquiet account, attributing the music to the individual artists, but it occurs to me that some participants may want to post the tracks themselves, in which case I can return the tracks to them directly. Either way is fine. I’ll be in touch, and you can let me know if you want me to post it myself, or if you want me to return it to you so you can post it.

*I accidentally had this as January 9, rather than December 9, in the email and initial Lines BBS announcement. Thanks to RPLKTR for pointing that out.

Disquiet Junto Project 0675: Arc of the Drone

The Assignment: Record a drone that goes from simple to complex to simple.

/ 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 0675: Arc of the Drone
The Assignment: Record a drone that goes from simple to complex to simple.

Step 1: You may, yourself, be experienced recording drone music, or you may never have recorded any. You may not even be sure what drone music is, in which case read up a bit. Not matter your experience and familiarity, please give some thought as to what constitutes drone music.

Step 2: Now think about what makes a drone simple and what makes a drone complex.

Step 3: Now record a piece of drone music that begins simple, gets complex, and then gets simple again. And note: The simple drone at the end needn’t necessarily be the same sort of drone with which the piece opens.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0675” (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-0675-arc-of-the-drone/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long is your arc?

Deadline: Monday, December 9, 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 675th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Arc of the Drone — The Assignment: Record a drone that goes from simple to complex to simple — at https://disquiet.com/0675/