Disquiet Junto Project 0666: Beauty and the Beast

The Assignment: We've hit a devilish numerical milestone. Do your thing.

/ 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 0666: Beauty and the Beast
The Assignment: We’ve hit a devilish numerical milestone. Do your thing.

This week marks the 666th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project. Many numbers along the way, since the Junto first began in January 2012, have inspired interpretation. This particular one has hovered on the horizon for a long time. And now we’ve arrived. Take a moment to go dark and make some noise.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0666” (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-0666-beauty-and-the-beast/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, October 7, 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 666th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Beauty and the Beast — The Assignment: We’ve hit a devilish numerical milestone. Do your thing. — at https://disquiet.com/0666/

Insectoid Raga

New organ work from Marco Lucchi

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A gorgeous free-flowing piece by the prolific, broadly talented Marco Lucchi of Modena, Italy, combining pipe organ and synthesizers into a kind of insectoid raga. The track, five minutes or so long, is a whirring drone inside which cascades of organ notes, up and down the scale, pushing through for relative prominence. It tastes of Terry Riley in particular, and in a good way. There’s a remarkable amount of new music for organ being created currently, and this is a splendid addition — both the piece itself, and the combination of instruments.

On Repeat: Clarinet, Stasis, Crimson

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.

▰ Just Duet: The musician Linus Fung, born in Hong Kong, has been doing some fantastic work folding his clarinet playing into a modular synthesizer format, essentially dueting with himself and transforming his melodic approach live. Here he is heard — and seen, bird’s eye view — building on the Canonic Duets of composer Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767).

▰ ’Tis the Season: Glacial stasis these days doesn’t necessarily come too easily. I’m not certain I would put it that way. But with so many available tools to achieve it, listeners can benefit from recordings that explore now common granular lushness as an element or a context rather than an end unto itself. Case in point, the way metallic slurry and vibrant shifts in tonality push beyond standard harmonic haze on autumnal_city_01 by autumnal_city.

[bandcamp width=642 height=472 album=3321026013 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

▰ Back in Court: Half of the classic early-1980s lineup of King Crimson is currently touring music from that trio of great albums: Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair. I’ve been spending a lot of time tracking fan uploads of video from the various concerts, and a highlight is this rendition of “The Sheltering Sky,” with original guitarist Adrian Belew and bassist (and Chapman Stick player) Tony Levin, plus Steve Vai riffing on Robert Fripp’s work, and Danny Carey (of Tool) playing — literally, I believe — Bill Bruford’s drums. The quartet goes simply by the name Beat.

Disquiet Junto Project 0665: Clicks + Cuts Music Factory

The Assignment: Record a track in honor of the late Achim Szepanski.

/ 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 0665: Clicks + Cuts Music Factory
The Assignment: Record a track in honor of the late Achim Szepanski.

Background: Achim Szepanski (1957-2024), founder of the Mille Plateaux record label, among numerous other accomplishments, died this week. This project is in his honor. You needn’t know much if anything to begin this project; just follow the instructions. As always, discussion of the topic at hand in the project’s llllllll.co message thread is encouraged.

Step 1: Listen back to the first Clicks + Cuts compilation album (originally released in 2000). It is streaming on YouTube (the first hour or so of that playlist).

Step 2: Consider the common elements in various tracks: the glitch effects, the sense of space, the attention to tiny details, the industrial minimalism, the emphasis on sampling, the tempo, the groove. What else do you hear?

Step 3: Record a track in the spirit of that first Clicks + Cuts album.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0665” (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-0665-clicks-cuts-music-factory/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, September 30, 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 665th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Clicks + Cuts Music Factory — The Assignment: Record a track in honor of the late Achim Szepanski — at https://disquiet.com/0665/

The image associated with this project was created by Lubomir Panak in 2011. Originally posted on Flickr, it is used thanks to a CC BY-NC 2.0 license. This is a detail of the original image, and it has been tilted at an angle, with the project information superimposed.

Tony Passarell’s Hang Time

New music from one of Sacramento's greats

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=1308921412 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

Tony Passarell gathers a quartet on the album when that isn’t his usual jazz outing. It’s pure outing, as in outward bound — and like much outward bound music, inward as well. The record’s title suggests both a manner of being and a rhetorical question. The music is peaceful, languid, and somehow also unnerving. It has the vibe of snippets left behind by the late legendary producer Teo Macero after a long overnight fusion session: pure mood, pure tone. Building blocks to be admired and experienced rather than employed as mere elements of construction. Chords hang in the air, as does time itself. The group features Passarell on keyboards and percussion, instead of his usual horns, along with Kim Nguyen (flute, voice), Robert Kuhlman (guitar, effects), and Tim Onorato (bass, effects). A times, as with the ceremonial crashing cymbals at the start of “shins to orion,” there is a consciously vexatious quality, but in general the music here is more harmonic than rhythmic, more static than active. From the slow vamp of “galaxy blues,” to the meandering flute line of “whats that up there,” to the feedback-edge guitar on “resolve,” the album is track after track of slow exploration, and a testament to the group’s mutual attentiveness. Get when on Bandcamp.