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.
▰ Solo ambient cello, heavy on the texture, from Ukrainian musician Fedir Tkachov:
▰ On July 17, Kate Carr will release Vertical London (New Year’s Day), a collection of field recordings that aim to collate the sounds of London from minus 20 metres below sea level to 240 metres above, hence the album’s title. As of this writing, four of the set’s 22 tracks are online:
“Early birds and planes in Loughborough Junction”
“I am not sure which tube station is the furthest below sea level, but I am visiting quite a few”
“Under the Thames with cyclists, joggers and echoes in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel”
“Popping up at Island Gardens.”
▰ The two-track EP Graceless is driving industrial noise, made with no-input feedback loops, from Chia-Chun Xu, based in Taipei City, Taiwan.
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 0750: Let’s Get Heavy The Assignment: Record something epic.
This week’s project marks the 750th consecutive week of the Disquiet Junto music community. The instruction is simple: Record something epic.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0750” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
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 750th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Let’s Get Heavy — The Assignment: Record something epic — disquiet.com/0750.
Italian sound artist Emiliano Pennisi (aka Avenir) develops software instruments that range from complex drum machines (Assembly-7) to geographically determined environment generators (Interfera) to “unstable” noise sources (Vortessa). This example video features an instance of Envion, another Pennisi project, which he describes as an “ecosystem … designed for algorithmic and procedural composition, musique concrète, and experimental sound processing.” The Envion system allows for numerous opportunities to select presets and work on freely available internet-based audio samples. The example here explores “lowercase” music, in the spirit of the late Steve Roden, with an emphasis on extremely quiet and subtle sonic signatures. A hallmark of Pennisi’s work is that it is as visually striking as it is sonically. To get a sense of Envion’s potential, here’s another piece composed with it, an homage to Autechre:
Robert Henke’s new album, Signal to Noise – Volume II, is all about time, or more to the point, can be experienced as an expression of, a reflection on, time. To begin with the tracks are all drones, lengthy extensions of tone for its own sake. They aren’t just held notes. No, as drones, they are dense, ever-shifting totalities in constant sonic flow. The longest of these is nearly 13 minutes, and the shortest is more than half that. There is well over an hour of music on this album of just seven tracks. In addition, this second set of Signal to Noise reaches back in time, doubly: first to 2004, when Henke’s first Signal to Noise album was released, and second to 1989, when the instrument on which this music was made, the Yamaha SY77 FM, was introduced to the market. This is meditative music that is, itself, a meditation on these various interwoven concepts: immersive listening, harmony and texture as artistic ends unto themselves, the long influence of ancient machines, and the through lines of individual artistic legacy.
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 0749: And a Three (3/3) The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio.
Please note: While this project is the third of a semi-annual three-part sequence that unfolds over the course of three consecutive weeks, starting two weeks ago, you can participate in any or all three of those weekly parts.
There are two versions of the instructions for this week’s project — one very short, the other very long, should clarifications prove useful. (You can do three tracks this week, if you’d like, just be sure to read the longer set of instructions if you elect to.)
. . .
Very short version (roughly 25 words): Select a track from last week’s duet project (disquiet.com/0748) and add a third part dead center between the left and right stereo channels to complete a trio.
. . .
Very long version of the instructions (roughly 650 words):
These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully.
Please note: While this week’s project is the third part of a three-part project sequence, you don’t need to have participated in either of the first two parts to participate in this third part.
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/0748). 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, 76 at the time of publishing this post (note: my counting got screwy so the numerical order doesn’t exactly represent the order in which the tracks appeared, but the count is correct). There is a full list of them in this read-only spreadsheet:
(Note that it’s possible another track or two will pop up, and some may disappear. Things are fluid on the internet.)
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.
It’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece (more on this in Step 5 below).
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 one 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 the Google Drive document of what has been utilized:
You’ll note that in the spreadsheet, almost every track has two URLs. The first URL is where the given track appears online, so you can download it and add to it. The second URL is the place on the llllllll.co message board where the project discussion took place. It is strongly encouraged that you look at that discussion link for the track you select, because many of those posts include additional contextual information there, such as BPM, key, and instrumentation.
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 “disquiet0749” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one or two tracks this week (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If you feel inspired to post more than two tracks (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which are the two “main” renditions for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
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 749th weekly Disquiet Junto project, And a Three (3/3) — The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio — disquiet.com/0749.
