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.
▰ A rich industrial drone performed live on an AE Modular setup by Belgium-based pt3r:
▰ Lovely live cello + synth performance by Brooklyn-based Serafim Smigelskiy:
▰ Norwegian violinist Mari Samuelsen performs works by a who’s who of largely post-classical and minimalist composers — among them Olivia Belli, Bryce Dessner, Ludovico Einaudi, Nils Frahm, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Mário Laginha, Hania Rani, Max Richter and Steve Reich — on her album Life, out last month on Deutsche Grammophon. This is her Rani piece:
The Assignment: Record a piece of drone music using sounds from your home.
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0661: Consumer Drone Product The Assignment: Record a piece of drone music using sounds from your home.
There is just one step this week: Record a piece of drone music constructed entirely from sounds that are byproducts of consumer electronics products (e.g., alarm, refrigerator, clock, HVAC, etc.) in your home.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0661” (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.
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 661st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Consumer Drone Product — The Assignment: Record a piece of drone music using sounds from your home — at https://disquiet.com/0661/
The Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen’s new album, Kvääni, is the latest in his growing collection of digital-only releases, ones that complement the physical (LP, CD, etc.) albums he records for such labels as ECM and Rune Grammofon. While the arrangements on Kvääni are quite fleshed out at times — there’s Henriksen’s own electronically processed trumpet, plus backing pads, and percussion, and voices, and myriad other elements — the record is entirely of his own making. He has the sole credit as performer. It’s a solo record in the literal sense, but here he is very much a one-man band. There are echoes of Peter Gabriel in “The Mountain Plateau” and of course of Jon Hassell (it’s hard to send a trumpet through a guitar pedal and not being him to mind as a forefather) throughout, but it’s also very much Henriksen’s music: elegiac and wintery, blurring the lines between the analog embouchure and the digital processing, between studio recording and field recording. Some track titles provide a sense of their origin: “My Father from Isolahti” indeed includes the recorded speaking voice of an elderly man, and “On a Riverboat to Bilto” sounds like it was recorded outdoors, bits of wind noise and a lower fidelity than much of the rest of the album. With 20 tracks total, Kvääni feels like a collection of snapshots of Henriksen’s recording process, which provides its own sort of intimacy, a peek into his process.
The Assignment: Break a public domain song into parts and reorganize them.
/ 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.
Step 2: Listen through the song, and familiarize yourself with its tempo and structure.
Step 3: Break the track into segments. While you may be inclined toward tiny granular slivers, consider emphasizing bars or phrases. Experiment with segments of equal length and of varying lengths.
Step 4: Take the segments resulting from Step 3 and make a new track out of them.
Label: Include “disquiet0660” (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.
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 660th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Louis Blues St. — The Assignment: Break a public domain song into parts and reorganize them — at https://disquiet.com/0660/
The Assignment: Re-record and re-compose an organ improvisation by Daniel Glaus.
/ 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0658: Re-Amplify The Assignment: Re-record and re-compose an organ improvisation by Daniel Glaus.
This project is the last of three that are being done over the course of as many months in collaboration with the 2024 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 4 through 8 (details at musikfestivalbern.ch). We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who manages the festival’s educational activities. This year is the sixth in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.
Step 1: Listen to “Kokytos” by Daniel Glaus, available for download here:
“Kokytos” is part of a series of organ improvisations that were recorded with a wide range of microphones placed both inside and around the instrument. This assignment will build on Glaus’ work and take it a step further.
Step 2: Re-amplify the recording, or elements of it, by playing “Kokytos” back over a loudspeaker in locations with unique sonic qualities, and re-recording it. Experiment with unusual placement of speakers and microphones, and with the distance between them. Record as many takes as you like to create a pool of derived samples.
Step 3: Use the pool of sounds resulting from Step 2, compose a piece of your own, perhaps adding further sonic treatment.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0658” (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.
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 658th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Re-Amplify — The Assignment: Re-record and re-compose an organ improvisation by Daniel Glaus — at https://disquiet.com/0658/
