Disquiet Junto Project 0652: By the Tale

The Assignment: Set a favorite story to music.

/ 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 0652: By the Tale
The Assignment: Set a favorite story to music.

Step 1: Choose a favorite short story.

Step 2: Compose a piece of music that follows the arc of the story’s narrative or otherwise conveys something about the story you want to express. You may closely follow plot points, or convey an overall atmosphere, or incorporate related sound effects, or do something else entirely.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0652” (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-0652-by-the-tale/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. Your finished recording needn’t last as long to listen to as the story does to read.

Deadline: Monday, July 1, 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 652nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, By the Tale — The Assignment: Set a favorite story to music — at https://disquiet.com/0652/

On Repeat: Oval, Henriksen, Owl Song

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. I had this entry mostly done last night, but the book reading I attended went later than I’d expected, so I’m finally posting it today.

▰ Space Man: Glitch progenitor Oval has delivered the 8th in his series of occasional mini-EPs, under the Now / Never / Whenever umbrella, the title seemingly related to the bits largely being archival. This time around that means a 1998 remix of Japanese duo Cappablack, a 2000 piece inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a previously unreleased track from a scrapped 2012 EP.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=719932288 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

▰ Taking a Break: The track title “Morphine flutes all over the place” hints at what’s going on. Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen broke his leg skiing, and recorded an album of edgier-than-usual Fourth World jazz-inflected electronica, Break a Leg!, while recuperating, reworking material he’d stored up on his laptop.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=442595357 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

▰ Two Out of Three: On Friday I attended a great trio set by trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, guitarist Bill Frisell, and drummer Herlin Riley at the Bing hall at Stanford (their album Owl Song is highly recommended), and while I can’t find much in the way of live footage of them online, there is this clip from 10 years ago of two of the three of them, when the concept was just getting started.

Disquiet Junto Project 0651: Why Compute?

The Assignment: Respond to a prompt from George E. Lewis.

/ 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 0651: Why Compute?
The Assignment: Respond to a prompt from George E. Lewis.

This project is the first 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. 

This week’s prompt was proposed by George E. Lewis, musician, music theorist, music professor at Columbia University, and artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. Lewis is the composer-in-residence at this year’s Musikfestival Bern. 

Lewis asks, “Why do we want our computers to improvise?”

This week’s project: record a piece of music that responds in some way to Lewis’ question.

For background, this week’s prompt question is the title of an article that Lewis contributed in 2018 to the book The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0651” (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-0651-why-compute/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, June 24, 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 651st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Why Compute? — The Assignment: Respond to a prompt from George E. Lewis — at https://disquiet.com/0651/

The cover image for this project uses a photo by Ioan Sameli, thanks to a CC BY-SA 2.0 license; it’s been cropped and text has been added to it.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Intel_8742_153056995.jpg

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

2 New Aphex Twin Tracks

Aren't exactly new

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It looks like you can listen to the two newly announced Aphex Twin songs right now. In fact, they appear to have been available for almost a decade. Warp Records has announced a set of new pressings of Aphex Twin’s classic Selected Ambient Works Volume II, originally released 30 years ago, in 1994 (my 33 1/3 book on it came out 10 years ago, in 2014).

The new Warp editions contain 27 tracks each, including the original 24 tracks, and the formerly vinyl-only “Stone in Focus,” and two that appear at the end of the new release: “th1 [evnslower],” which is glacially slow, and “Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev,” which features operatic vocal elements and qualities that suggest parts of it, if not the entirety of it, are being played in reverse (hence the “Rev” in the title). By the way, “Stone in Focus” wasn’t vinyl only, per se, as it was also on the 1994 Astralwerks CD compilation Excursions in Ambience (The Third Dimension), which also had tracks from Seefeel, Spacetime Continuum, Future Sound of London, and Air, among others.

Both of those tracks appeared previously on Aphex Twin’s own SoundCloud accounts. The first is on his famed @user18081971, on which he posted heaps of tracks when he reemerged (culminating in the album Syro) from a long period of relative silence, and the other at his eponymous @aphextwin/@richarddjames account. Judging by the time codes for those tracks on Warp website and on the individual track pages (11:07/11:08 for “th1 [evnslower]” and 6:41 for “Rhubarb Orc. 19.53 Rev”), these are the same pieces of music.

And several enterprising people have, of course, reversed the “Rev” track so we can hear it before it was flipped. Here it is:

Disquiet Junto Project 0650: Doppler, Interrupted

The Assignment: Record a piece of music in which a passing siren blossoms into something else entirely

/ 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.

These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com). 

Disquiet Junto Project 0650: Doppler, Interrupted
The Assignment: Record a piece of music in which a passing siren blossoms into something else entirely

There is just one step this week:

Record a piece of music in which a siren — such as that of an emergency vehicle — passes by, across the stereo spectrum, from left to right, but as it passes through the center, it transforms into something else entirely, and that sound continues to evolve as it proceeds to the right and eventually fades into the distance.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0650” (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-0650-doppler-interrupted/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long does it take to pass, and what happens after?

Deadline: Monday, June 17, 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 650th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Doppler, Interrupted — The Assignment: Record a piece of music in which a passing siren blossoms into something else entirely — at https://disquiet.com/0650/