Disquiet Junto Project 0640: Time Vault

The Assignment: Record a track for eight months in the future.

/ 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.

There is usually a playlist for these projects. This week is kind of an exception, more on which below.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0640: Time Vault
The Assignment: Record a track for eight months in the future.

Step 1: Record a piece of wordless music for yourself eight months from now. Think of where you are now and where you will be — or may be — then.

Step 2: Send the track to me ([email protected] — as a private link, not as an attachment) with your artist name, the track title, and a brief description (up to roughly 200 words) you’d like to annotate it with. The idea is the track will not be available to you or anyone other than me for the next eight months.

Step 3: When I reply to confirm receipt of the material from Step 2, delete the file from your laptop. (This step may feel drastic, so if you’re not comfortable doing so, please don’t.)

In eight months, on December 9, I’ll post a playlist of all the tracks, and you can then listen with fresh ears to what you — and everyone else — recorded.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0640” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Don’t Upload: Usually you would upload your track. Instead, per the above, send it to me.

Share: You won’t be posting your audio publicly now, but you might make a comment in the thread on Lines about what you were thinking and doing when you recorded your piece: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0640-time-vault/

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you, but please consider keeping it to under six minutes.

Deadline: Monday, April 8, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: When I post the track in eight months, I’ll do so as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license), unless you request otherwise.

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 640th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Time Vault — The Assignment: Record a track for eight months in the future — at https://disquiet.com/0640/

Disquiet Junto Project 0639: Path Ways (4 of 3)

The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways.

/ 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 appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0639: Path Ways (4 of 3)
The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways.

These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully. Originally this trios sequence of projects would have ended with the completion of the trios after three consecutive weeks. However, those went particularly well, so let’s see if we can push it a little further.

Please note: You needn’t have participated in any of the prior Junto projects to participate in this one. 

Step 1: In the previous project, we completed musical trios. Project 0638 was the third of three consecutive projects. In the first one, 0636, musicians recorded solos. In the second, 0637, musicians took those 0636 tracks, nudged them to the left side of the stereo spectrum, and then added their own music to the right, forming duets with a hole in the middle. In project 0638, other musicians introduced a third track down the center of the 0637 recordings, completing the trios. You can revisit the music via the blog posts disquiet.com/0636, disquiet.com/0637, and disquiet.com/0638, and you can follow the forking paths through the related Google Drive spreadsheet.

Step 2: The goal of this project is to rework the material that accumulated over the course of the previous three projects. There are two main ways to go about this. One is to simply choose one or more tracks and remix, combine, mash-up, or otherwise transform them. The other is to move on to Step 3.

Step 3: Choose one 0636 track, a solo, that yielded more than one 0638 trio. (These are highlighted in light blue, or maybe it’s teal, in the leftmost column of the spreadsheet.) Trace the various routes that 0636 track took. Perhaps it also led to some 0637 tracks that never went any further. Perhaps there are various 0638 versions based on varied 0637 versions. In any case, record a piece of music that lets the listener experience the branching paths that the original 0636 track took over the course of the three phases of the trios project sequence. Clearly you will be using a linear form to represent variations, so how to achieve that will require some compositional ingenuity. But you’re up to the task.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include either “disquiet0639remix” (if you follow the loose rules of Step 2) or “disquiet0639paths” (if you follow the more specific rules of Step 3) 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-0639-path-ways-4-of-3/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is entirely up to you.

Deadline: Monday, April 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 required for this sequence of projects 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 639th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Path Ways (4 of 3) — The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways — at https://disquiet.com/0639/

Kelly Moran’s Ice Breaker

An advance listen to the pianist's upcoming album, Moves in the Field

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This first appeared in the March 21, 2024, issue of the This Week in Sound email newsletter, also the newsletter’s 22nd Listening Post.

Just over a year into the pandemic, Kelly Moran marked most electronic music fans’ favorite annual holiday, April 14, in honor of the Aphex Twin song “Avril 14th,” with the requisite solo piano cover. She recorded her video with a camera that she set to look directly down on her keyboard, and at first all we see is the piano — even after the music starts playing. Magically, the keys move without anyone touching them, and then her hands — slender, sensual, nails gleaming colorfully — appear alongside the ghost accompaniment and flesh out her own version of the song. 

It turns out that she was performing on a Disklavier, on loan from Yamaha, the same instrument on which Aphex Twin reportedly recorded the original version. “Avril 14th” appeared on his 2001 album, Drukqs; Moran’s cover marked the 20th anniversary. 

More time has passed. In the years since that simple (if deceptively so) Aphex Twin experiment of hers, Moran has come to wield the Disklavier not just expertly but ferociously. She has pushed its feature set further. The instrument allows her to record parts and play along with them, and record that and play along with that. Her deep pandemic studies have yielded impossible, post-human music that is truly hyperactive, with chords that no human could accomplish on their lonesome in cadences no human could play for a prolonged period. The works are crystalline paradoxes at warp speed. It’s absolutely perfect that “Butterfly Phase,” the lead video for her forthcoming record, Moves in the Field (due out March 29), involves figure skating, because aesthetically that’s what Moran’s current music is: calisthenic, showy, muscular, and deeply competitive. (Regarding that last point, the title comes from the term in skating for the tests of a competitor’s abilities.) 

Both “Butterfly Phase” and another track, “Sodalis (II),” are available as previews in advance of the full album’s release:

https://kellymoran.bandcamp.com/album/moves-in-the-field

Nils Frahm Retreats

Stepping back from studio-on-tour mode

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This appeared in the March 21, 2024, issue of the This Week in Sound email newsletter, also the newsletter’s 22nd Listening Post.

Nils Frahm has become one of today’s great one-man bands. He travels the world with enough equipment to fill a professional recording studio, hauls it from city to city, venue to venue, sets up shop for a day or two, and then noodles live to the adoration of fans who marvel at his ambidexterity, his technological fluency, and his theatricality. Brian Eno once suggested that the studio was itself an instrument, and while what Frahm does these days with that concept is in many ways the opposite of what Eno meant, it still works. 

It’s also, by all appearances, exhausting. Hence Frahm’s recent album, Day (it came out March 1), on which he retreats from overkill, returning to the simple solo acoustic piano compositions that made him something of an emo ambient heartthrob in the first place. 

https://nilsfrahm.bandcamp.com/album/day

The close microphones capture his playing in all its evocative interiority: the mechanisms of the keys, the ins and outs of his breathing, and creaks in the floorboards. At one point you hear a dog barking, echoing down a hallway. The album feels like a series of wordless entries in a wordless diary from a stint in tech-addiction rehab. The intimacy is kind of intoxicating in its own way, though you do have to sort out if these are compositions or one-time noodly improvisations — and whether that matters, given how great it is to listen to.

Team-Up Marvels

Exploring the multiverse within the Disquiet Junto music community

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This appeared in the March 21, 2024, issue of the This Week in Sound email newsletter, also the newsletter’s 22nd Listening Post.

I don’t talk about the Disquiet Junto too often in my This Week in Sound emails, but each Tuesday I do list the latest project. Today I want to mention the current project while it’s just getting underway. 

For background, the Disquiet Junto is a music community I initiated back in January 2012. Each Thursday I send out a music composition creative prompt, and then participants — as many as 70 and roughly as few as 20 — record tracks responding to those instructions. When describing the Junto, I usually take a moment to paraphrase music educator and longtime Junto participant Ethan Hein, who said that the Junto is a situation where I review records that don’t exist, and then internet strangers go ahead and record them.

One of my favorite Junto experiences each year is a sequence of projects that unfold over the course of three weeks. The first week, everyone records a solo piece. The second week, musicians take the resulting solo works, pan them to the left speaker, and then record their own addition, which they pan to the right, resulting in a duet with a lot of space in between. The key thing is that, all along, these musicians know that they’re working — collaboratively and asynchronously, very much in the spirit of the Creative Commons, as I discussed as a guest on a recent episode of the Artists & Hackers podcast — toward eventual trios. The first musician leaves room for two others, and the second for an imminent third. Come the final week, which began today, March 21, participants listen to the duets from the previous week and begin to turn them into trios. This time around, they have nearly 65 to choose from, built on nearly 50 solos from the first week.

Part of what I love about these projects is the multiverse-like listening experience. As the second week proceeded, when the duets were being recorded, you could hear the same initial track in numerous settings. Here, for example, are four different duets from last week’s project, all based on a solo piece by encym: 

There’s also a fifth version of the encym original, by the Australian musician bassling, on YouTube rather than SoundCloud:

Right now, musicians are turning many of those duets into trios. Already two trios have resulted from duets based on encym’s original piece:

As the three weeks proceed, these projects become a sort of listening garden of forking paths. You can listen along as the trios surface in the discussion forum at llllllll.co. The project ends on Monday night, March 25, just before midnight.