On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ Part of the fun of the new Jeff Parker ETA IVtet track, “Like Swimwear (part one),” off the forthcoming Happy Today album, is it kinda sounds even more like a Battles track than like one by Tortoise, of which Parker is a member.
▰ I’ve been following trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire for quite a while now, and it’s a slow-burn thrill to hear him in a quintet led by the legendary Herbie Hancock on piano, also featuring Walter Smith III (saxophone, and whom I saw at Smoke in Manhattan a couple years back), Ben Williams (bass), and Mark Merella (percussion). The song, “Footprints,” by Wayne Shorter, is associated with trumpeter Miles Davis, as it appeared on, with Hancock as part of a very different quintet, the 1967 album Miles Smiles. Hancock turns 86 a week from today, on April 12.
▰ João Ricardo, aka OCP, has a new album out, titled POC. It’s lowercase noise, rattly systems ambience and utterly fractured dub techno, spare elements dangling in the digital wind. The embed isn’t working, so check it out on Bandcamp.
The Assignment: Turn a shared sample into something refreshing.
/ 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: Sampling the above audio, record an original piece of music that you feel sounds refreshing.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0744” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
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 744th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Cold Chocolate — The Assignment: Turn a shared sample into something refreshing — disquiet.com/0744.
The Assignment: Do something you’ve been meaning to do.
/ 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 0743: Make It Happen The Assignment: Do something you’ve been meaning to do.
There is just one step this week. The year is still young. Think of something musical you’ve been meaning to drive, and do it.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0743” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
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 743rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Make It Happen — The Assignment: Do something you’ve been meaning to do: disquiet.com/0743.
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ “Deep Green” is a fantastic, slow-burn track off Eivind Aarset’s new album, Strange Hands, which features the electric guitarist with bassist Audun Erlien and the dual drums/percussion team of Wetle Holte and Erland Dahlen. Aarset is based in Oslo, Norway.
▰ Blissful slice of everyday sound and granular synthesis, from Caustic Gates, of Nottingham, United Kingdom:
▰ Axercism 2: No Cuts is subterranean guitar noise, just shy of half an hour of experiments from Parker Weston (based in Phoenix, Arizona), who describes it as “Folded times of extension and preparedness.” (The automated embed is failing, which happens on occasion, so just click through to the recording’s Bandcamp page.)
When I travel, I’m more likely to stay in one place for an extended period of time than to go from place to place. You still travel in one place, because the world passes by you, instead of the other way around. A lot of video game ASMR channels — that is, footage collections that highlight the diegetic, which is to say in-scene, sound of a given game — tend toward the latter, wandering through towns, touring amid landscapes, meandering the depths of dank tunnels. But some do take a chance at just plopping the virtual camera on a corner and seeing (and, more to the point, listening to) what happens past.
This is a tricky mode, because video games don’t match either the pixel density or the chaotic complexity of reality. Stand at an intersection of Cyberpunk 2077 for long, and you’ll see variants of the same characters, and hear the same sounds. The YouTube account Video Game Weather ASMR explores the potential of static recording in a recent video from Resident Evil Requiem, much as the Atmospheric Gaming channel did earlier this month in the same game, albeit in a hallway; this newer one is shot outside. Cars and pedestrians make their way by, while rain soaks everything. Inevitably, you do see the same faces, the same outfits. At least once I could swear a pair of the same character nearly collided on the sidewalk. Likewise, little disturbs the monotony of the weather, though as background white noise, it works well. Per the channel’s description, “Due to the nature of ASMR, any comments or narration will be minimized. The idea is to offer viewers and listeners a calm, relaxing atmosphere.” Pull up a stool and pay attention to the world, and to the attempts to simulate a world, as it goes by.
