Disquiet Junto Project 0667: Neighbor of the Beast

The Assignment: What's it sound like when the devil lives across the street?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This is the cover image for the latest Junto project. It shows a purple devil-face emoji against a grey background and it has the name and title of the project on it, also in purple.

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 0667: Neighbor of the Beast
The Assignment: What’s it sound like when the devil lives across the street?

There is just one step for this project. The devil happens to live across the street from you. What’s it sound like on an average evening?

Thanks to Paolo Salvagione, who proposed this project many hundreds of projects ago. 

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0667” (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-0667-neighbor-of-the-beast/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How late and long does your neighbor rage?

Deadline: Monday, October 14, 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 667th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Neighbor of the Beast — The Assignment: What’s it sound like when the devil lives across the street? — at https://disquiet.com/0667/

Buddha Boxing Day

Grzegorz Bojanek mixes it up

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Enjoy nearly a quarter hour of a bunch of Buddha Machines mixing it up, along with the sounds of the environment in which they are present. Writes the Polish musician responsible for the recording, Grzegorz Bojanek: “Aside from the Buddha Machine loops, every sound you hear comes directly from my garden — from the gentle hum of insects and the chirping of birds to the soft crunch of my footsteps.”

Jeff Parker Goes Silent (Way)

A new one from the ETA IVtet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

We’ve now gotten a taste of the forthcoming The Way Out of Easy album due out November 22 from Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, a jazz ensemble featuring Parker (Tortoise, Isotope 217, Chicago Underground Trio) on guitar, Josh Johnson on saxophone, Anna Butterss on bass, and Jay Bellerose on drums. Titled “Late Autumn,” the slowly simmering track — it purposefully never reaches a boil — is one of four on the album, and at merely 17 and a half minutes, it’s the shortest of them. Echoing Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way and the work of the Necks, it has a steady pulse above which the musicians ease their way around each other. Both Parker and Johnson are credited with amplifying their instruments with electronics, and Parker also, according to the liner notes, employs a sampler. Those effects are quite subtle, and like the musicianship in general, never try to command attention.

On Repeat: Husebø, Seidel, More

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’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

And let’s be clear: given the semi-methodical processing of all the old posts on this website — and the addition of other old stuff that’s coming online for the first time ever — I’ve been doing a lot of retrospective listening, revisiting old Funki Porcini and Matmos and so forth, and being alarmed by how much music from not even 30 years ago is not (officially) online. 

Meanwhile, some more recent favorites:

▰ I’ve spent a lot of time with Kjetil Husebø’s Years of Ambiguity since it came out in 2023, and he’s now followed it up with Emerging Narratives, which again teams him with guitarist Eivind Aarset and trumpeter Arve Henriksen for a slate of Fourth World wonders. 

▰ Post​-​Orientalism No. IV: Dream Inside a Dream is an intense drone work by Dave Seidel, who is based in New Hampshire. If the word “arpeggio” in the accompanying descriptive text puts the fear of automated cascades into your imagine, don’t worry. These come in slow motion.

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▰ The EP MEMO by mr.coon is an excellent concoction of beats and samples, echoing at the intersection of dub, noise, and big beat.

[bandcamp width=642 height=373 album=583875369 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

Nobuto Suda’s Private Space

Ambient from San'yō-Onoda, Japan

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Some of the best ambient music can sound simply like music blocked in part by a thick wall. There’s a party going on, and you’re in the next room over, and the sounds are muffled, but you’ve got some much needed personal space and the trade-off is well worth it. “Cloud Streams” by Nobuto Suda involves no trade-offs. The piece is the piece, as intended by the Japanese musician (who is based in San’yō-Onoda), but the pleasant sense of isolation connects to the chance variety described above. Everything moves slowly, which in this case transmits the underlying vibe that any potential urgency has been dispensed with. The effect is calming, all the more so because the sounds have all the hard edges wiped away. It’s more than a wisp, and still lighter than air.