Disquiet Junto Project 0582: X Techno

The Assignment: Make a new subgenre.

/ 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.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 23, 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.

These following instructions went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).

Disquiet Junto Project 0582: X Techno

The Assignment: Make a new subgenre.

Step 1: You’re going to make a new subgenre of techno. Think for a moment about what makes techno techno.

Step 2: Choose a word and put it before “techno.” Those two words in combination are your new subgenre.

Step 3: Record a piece of music in the style of the subgenre you came up with in Step 2.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0582” (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 “disquiet0582” (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: 

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0582-x-techno/

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. What’s the norm in your new subgenre?

Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 27, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 23, 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 582nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, X Techno (The Assignment: Make a new subgenre), at: https://disquiet.com/0582/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0582-x-techno/

Full-Throttle Ambient

From Norah Lorway

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Norah Lorway has a new album coming out on Xylem Records, the label she runs from Falmouth in Cornwall. “Like Nothing Before” serves as a preview track. It’s nearly 10 minutes of full-throttle ambient, all the earmark textures — white noise, drone, shimmer, chorus — turned all the way up, in turn exuding a sense of tension and even, somehow, speed. At some point along the way, a core tone deep amid the piece shifts down an octave — perhaps there’s a subtle leap, or perhaps a filter just slowly trims enough of the overtones to give the impression. The effect is quite beautiful, like a sunrise, or a sunset, or something akin but entirely other.

More from Lorway at norahlorway.com and from Xylem at xylemrecords.bandcamp.com.

On Repeat: Beats + Ambience

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:

▰ When Arckatron released blango! v. 1.0 last year, his fantastical (and fantastic) instrumental hip-hop set, he promised an update that would make good on the 1.0 nomenclature. That update has arrived, blango! v. 2​.​0, breaking the original track, nearly 13 minutes long, into six constituent parts (with “actual track names”), and adding a bonus five-minute track, all lolloping downbeats and kitchen-clatter percussion, at a sedate 80 bpm.

https://arckatron.bandcamp.com/album/blango-v-20

▰ Karen Vogt’s album Losing the Sea is due out toward the end of February. The opening, title track, featuring the heavily concealed guitar of Guillaume Eymenier, is available for an advance listen. It blends shadowy drones with diaphonous vocals.

https://marenostrumlabel.bandcamp.com/album/losing-the-sea

▰ A beautiful live rendition by guitarist Jamie Stillway, abetted by a small pedal collection, of “Wood and Windows,” off her recent Lullaby for a Stranger album, one of my favorites of 2022.

▰ Spencer Tweedy’s drumprints vol. 1: 2301 collects 10 drum parts, ranging in length from 16 sections to just shy of five minutes. They’re funky and spare, and available for creative reuse thanks to an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Creative Commons license — and they’re entirely listenable to on their lonesome, too. I’d love to hear DJ Krush go to town on the opening of track two, “DP2301 Contact Sheet 167.”

https://spencertweedy.bandcamp.com/album/drumprints-vol-1-2301

Hania Rani’s On Giacometti

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Hania Rani’s On Giacometti contains material from her score to a new film about the artist Alberto Giacometti and Giacometti’s broader family. It’s a gorgeous collection of quiet, contemplative music — the sort of music that fills the space in a film and yet is, through the strange received logic of film-making, intended to signify the presence of silence, the absence of sound. Start with “Knots,” in which a stoic piano part — the score is essentially all piano all the time — gets lightly embroidered with bits of synthesized filigree. Then try “Storm,” which is only stormy at a distance; to listen to its echoing patterning is to witness, purposefully, something through thick glass and grim darkness that is transpiring quite far away. One highlight is the occasional appearance of Dobrawa Czocher’s cello, notably on the opening track. Some of this material will draw comparisons to Nils Frahm (the muffled pads of “Mountains,” for example) and Philip Glass, but this is Rani’s music through and through: the gracious pacing, the lithe development, the ambiguous mood. The movie, The Giacomettis, was directed by Susanna Fanzun.

https://haniarani.bandcamp.com/album/on-giacometti

Disquiet Junto Project 0581: Helsinki Downspout

The Assignment: Use a rhythmic field recording as the foundation for a new track.

/ 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.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 20, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 16, 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.

These following instructions went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).

Disquiet Junto Project 0581: Helsinki Downspout

The Assignment: Use a rhythmic field recording as the foundation for a new track.

Step 1: This is a shared sample project, one in which all the participants will utilize the same provided recording, about a minute and a half long, as the rhythmic element for their own music. Access the track, originally recorded by Scott Fletcher and used with his permission, here:

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/helsinki-downspout

Step 2: Listen to the provided track several times. Think about ways to map its content, perhaps making notations about when certain unique, momentary aspects surface.

Step 3: Record an original piece of music for which the provided music is the underlying rhythm. You might take this quite literally, using the source as it is, resulting in a track that is precisely 1:35 long. Alternately, you might elect to sample and rework the source material. If you go the latter route, make certain that the original sound is, at least at some point in the finished track, recognizable.

Step 4: Because this is a Creative Commons resource, be sure to identify Scott Fletcher as the original recorder of the source material, and include a link to the source track. Identify the license as: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0581” (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 “disquiet0581” (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: 

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0581-helsinki-downspout/

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 long did the rain last?

Deadline: Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, February 20, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 16, 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 581st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Helsinki Downspout (The Assignment: Use a rhythmic field recording as the foundation for a new track), at: https://disquiet.com/0581/

Thanks to Scott Fletcher for having provided the original material. It is used thanks to a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0). Original track at: https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/helsinki-downspout/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0581-helsinki-downspout/