Disquiet Junto Project 0664: Mother Beat

The Assignment: Record a piece of music in 29/16 time.

/ 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 0664: Mother Beat
The Assignment: Record a piece of music in 29/16 time.

There is just one step to this project: Record a piece of music in 29/16 time.

Background: This project was proposed by Jason (Bassling) Richardson and his son, Oscar. The inspiration for the time signature that we’re employing is the track “Strong One (Masked Man),” used for the final level of Mother 3, a 2006 Game Boy Advance video game created by Shigesato Itoi. The complexity of the music increases throughout the game, with players finding that the rhythm-based combat system rewards those who can understand the musical patterns, and this allows them to complete encounters more easily. There are some differing opinions online about the specific time signature, but for the sake of this project we’re going with 29/16. Certainly feel free to come to your own conclusion.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0664” (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-0664-mother-beat/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, September 23, 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 664th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Mother Beat — The Assignment: Record a piece of music in 29/16 time — at https://disquiet.com/0664/

Disquiet Junto 0663: Drive Way

The Assignment: Record a piece of music that complements the hum and whir of a hard drive.

/ 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 0663: Drive Way
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that complements the hum and whir of a hard drive.

This week’s project was proposed by novelist Robin Sloan (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Sourdough, Moonbound) in response to a post I made on social media about the annoying sound of an HDD drive I accidentally purchased. I had mistakenly thought it was an SSD drive. We previously did a project inspired by Sloan’s work almost exactly 7 years ago, at the end of August 2017 (more details at disquiet.com/0296).

Step 1: Either record the sound of an HDD drive or use a field recording available online, such as this one from Freesound:

https://freesound.org/people/eardeer/sounds/401271

Step 2: Consider how that drive sound, even when quiet, could be irritating if heard while one is listening to music.

Step 3: Per Sloan’s proposal, “record music to harmonize with, or play against, the whirr.” (It’s up to you if you want to include the sound of the drive along with your music.)

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0663” (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-0663-drive-way/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, September 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 663rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Drive Way — The Assignment: Record a piece of music that complements the hum and whir of a hard drive — at https://disquiet.com/0663/

The image associated with this project is licensed thanks to a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. It was taken by Evan Amos — whom Popular Science has reportedly referred to as “gaming’s most famous photographer” — as a part of Vanamo Media.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Laptop-hard-drive-exposed.jpg

On Repeat: Granular, Schulz, Suda

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.

▰ Quanta is the name of a granular synthesizer developed by Audio Damage, and a new version, Quanta 2, is due out soon. This is a demo in which a slow melodic sequence is echoed and otherwise blurred in real time.

▰ I believe the title of the new Jeannine Schulz release, Kanso, is from the Japanese for “simple.” It’s a pair of elegant ambient pieces, one gently industrial, the other more aqueous. Schulz is based in Germany.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=264905439 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

▰ Nobuto Suda’s “Gazing the Sun Fading” is a hazy, loping ambient track that sounds like the sonic version of light glistening off a dirty windshield. And to be clear, that’s a compliment. Suda is based in Kyoto, Japan.

Disquiet Junto Project 0662: Spin Cycle

The Assignment: Record a piece of music that pits one bicyclist against another.

/ 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 0662: Spin Cycle
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that pits one bicyclist against another.

Step 1: Imagine a bicycle race underway. Picture two competitors in the lead, running neck and neck for a long distance.

Step 2: Record a piece of music in which two prominent musical elements align, one each, with the two bicyclists in Step 1. How would you depict their rivalry as it unfolds, the give and take as each bicyclist strains to pull ahead of the other?

Note: You need not continue to the end of the race, when one or the other wins. You could simply focus on a segment of the race.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0662” (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-0662-spin-cycle/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Is it a sprint or a marathon? How many loops?

Deadline: Monday, September 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 662nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Spin Cycle — The Assignment: Record a piece of music that pits one bicyclist against another — at https://disquiet.com/0662/

Perhaps “Brass Noise”

An id m theft able joint

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The musician who goes by the name id m theft able, and who is based in Portland, Maine, does these incredible videos where he places a tuba, amplified by a mic, in the environment and just records the resulting resonance. He does this with other instruments, as well, like the sound of light snow on a drum and freezing rain on a guitar. There’s a lengthy playlist of his tuba videos, which generally have prosaic titles, such as “A tuba by the falls (with a microphone in it) at dusk, April 19th 2020” and “A tuba at Whitney’s Falls (with a microphone in it), September 1st 2024.” The most recent id m theft able tuba video, “A tuba at one of the falls revealed when Dundee Pond was drained (with a microphone in it)” (note the absence of a date), was uploaded on September 3, 2024, and features a metallic drone that has the threatening vibrancy of a distant buzzsaw. It’s nearly 25 minutes of the deeply raspy rumble. The sound is sufficiently routinized and static to qualify as a colored noise, perhaps “brass noise,” rather than merely white or brown.