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.
▰ “There are cars, pigeons and aircraft!” warns Mark David Hadley in a brief liner note for his collection Recordings of the Rain, which contains exactly that. Also: church bells. “Metal Garden Chair 3” is a banger.
▰ I mentioned recently the phenomenon of doing some research while writing a review of a concert and stumbling on a video of that very same concert. This is one of the four sets from a great recent show I saw here in San Francisco. The quartet, playing a kind of ambient chamber jazz, is Ross Hoyt, keyboards, electronics; Ryan Honaker, violin, electronics; Leila Abdul-Rauf, trumpet, voice, electronics; and Ed Lloyd, contra bass. Pay attention particularly to Abdul-Rauf, who runs her voice thorugh the same technology that transforms her trumpet. The music is apparently all drawn from Hoyt’s upcoming album, Peregrinari.
▰ And let’s be honest, I spent much of the week listening to the late Sinéad O’Connor. Her debut record, The Lion and the Cobra, came out at the start of my senior year of college. She was barely four months younger than I am. To suggest she had an impact on my Gen X cohort would be an understatement. More specifically in the context of the sort of music I focus on at Disquiet.com, her version of the 17th-century Irish poem “I Am Stretched on Your Grave,” with an underlying Amen break augmented by bass line and fiddle, off I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, her sophomore album, came out in 1990. That’s the same year as Enigma’s “chant and beat” MCMXC a.D (brainchild of Michael Cretu, a decade older). This left a mark, and we’re all the richer for it. Fold in Dead Can Dance’s own cover of “I Am Stretched on Your Grave,” a few years later on Toward the Within (1994), and these seeds — among many others — of cultural impact are pretty clear.
This went out on Wednesday as a weekly bonus — a thank-you to people who financially support This Week in Sound. It’s a supplement to the free Tuesday and Friday issues: an annotated playlist of recommended music. I wrote about (1) an excursion by Christina Giannone, (2) an emergence in the music of Jeannine Schulz, and (3) a pivot by Jim Wallis, working with pedal steel player Henry Senior and trumpeter Will Dollard.
The Assignment: Use a picture of the clouds as a plan for adjusting your sound.
/ 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 just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, July 31, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 27, 2023.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.
Disquiet Junto Project 0604: Heaven’s Gate The Assignment: Use a picture of the clouds as a plan for adjusting your sound.
Step 1: Think about the use of a gate in music production. A gate can be described as an “on/off switch, allowing signals over threshold to pass while muting everything below.” (It’s likely that discussion will occur during this project regarding useful explanations of the concept.)
Step 2: Take a picture of some clouds.
Step 3: Think of how to interpret the clouds as a model of a gate.
Step 4: Record a track employing the approach you determined in Step 3 using the picture from Step 2.
I took the cover photo in Ashland, Oregon, earlier this year; no filters were employed. Regarding the title, I’m a Michael Cimino admirer.
Step 1: Include “disquiet0604” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0604” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.
Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. How fast are those clouds moving?
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, July 31, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 27, 2023.
Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.
Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).
For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 604th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Heaven’s Gate (The Assignment: Use a picture of the clouds as a plan for adjusting your sound), at: https://disquiet.com/0604/
I mentioned this in advance of its publication, but mistakenly not afterward. Last month I had the pleasure of reviewing the great new Caterina Barbieri album for Pitchfork. Titled Myuthafoo, it’s a follow-up to her 2019 album Ecstatic Computation, with the added benefit of muting her voice in favor of a sound-first exploration (per the review, nothing against her voice in general — the simplicity just works well here). Here’s my opening paragraph:
Nothing signals synthesizer psychedelia quite like the combination of an arpeggio and a delay. The arpeggio divides a chord into looping sequences of notes. The delay allows those sequences to overlap. Once set in motion, the pairing can sound like a hall of mirrors receding toward infinity. When employed by dilettantes, it’s a simple trick that gets tired fast, but in the right hands, it’s magic. Caterina Barbieri is a wizard—and she knows a lot of other spells, as well.
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.
▰ Another great performance by Andrew Tasselmyer, using an iPad. I picked up the app he employs here to glitchy effect (one with the great name LO-FI-AF). I love how the beat emerges from the opening ambient drone.
▰ Another solid Aphex Twin transcription from Simon Farintosh. This one is “Raglan Holon” off Drukqs, reworked for solo eight-string classical guitar.
▰ Lorenz Weber has a new album, Zeiten, due out in mid-August. Half of it is online for preview currently. It’s elegant, quiet music — one track, “return,” a held tone like an angelic chorus heard through a dense fog; another, “spring,” like an ever so slowly played piano while open windows let in birdsong.
▰ There’s utter chaos, and then there’s chaos that keeps stumbling but never quite collapses. C. Reider (aka Vuzhmusic) commits the latter expertly with “071923.”
