Disquiet Junto Project 0564: Octave Lept

The Assignment: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Cover image of this Disquiet Junto project is a DALLE2 text-to-image shot of four young people wearing school uniforms jumping in a gymnasium

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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, October 24, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 20, 2022.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the [llllllll.co discussion thread](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0564-octave-lept/).

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0564: Octave Lept
The Assignment: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music.

This project has just one step: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music.

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “octave leap.”

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0564” (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 “disquiet0564” (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-0564-octave-lept/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0564-octave-lept/)

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:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, October 24, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 20, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0564” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

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 564th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Octave Lept (The Assignment: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0564/

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-0564-octave-lept/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0564-octave-lept/)

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “octave leap.”

Mystery Train

A field recording as readymade score

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

While working, I often have something playing on a secondary computer screen just for ambient visuals, like a live [airfield webcam in Chicago](https://www.earthcam.com/usa/illinois/chicago/midwayairport/) (which is silent) or a live [watering hole in a Kenyan national park](https://www.skylinewebcams.com/en/webcam/kenya/taita-taveta-county/voi/tsavo-east-national-park.html) (which pipes in the wind and bird calls, plus occasional mammalian utterances), or the great [Listen to Wikipedia](https://http://listen.hatnote.com/), which both visualizes and sonifies (“sonificates”? — nah) occurrences, in real time, from the highly used communal encyclopedia.

Increasingly over the past three or four years, my secondary-screen peripheral viewing has consisted of videos from the burgeoning assortment of YouTube channels run by people who wander around cities (my preference), as well as nature, recording as they go. Unlike the webcams and live data sonification mentioned above, these YouTube channels don’t contain “live” videos. That is, they record live, but they don’t stream live (i.e., in real time). There’s something quite pleasing about having [Seoul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aas-RT7Ul8) (on a sunny day) or [London](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__Eo-dvEH7g) (during heavy rain) or the [Black Forest](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpFDqZ1Hx3I) (crunchy leaves underfoot, and planes overhead just as [Gordon Hempton warned us](https://www.newsweek.com/2021/07/23/saving-worlds-last-quiet-places-1606979.html)) pass by as you sit in your chair attending to your computer-fixated duties.

These videos can be comforting in unexpected ways. This past year I’ve had to travel more than I expected, for family reasons, and sometimes sitting with the same familiar footage of [Madrid at night](https://youtu.be/D0VDg_tvtvw) by my side served as a digital mutation of [Ray Oldenburg’s concept of a Third Place](https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/04/13/the-pros-and-cons-of-gentrification/every-community-deserves-a-third-place): it was neither my home or work, nor where I was presently, but another location I could virtually transport to easily from either. (And I’m fully aware that my bastardization of Oldenburg’s richer observation proposes a solitary venture rather than the intended social one. Forgive me. I’m just thinking out loud.)

At a low volume level, the sounds from these YouTube flâneur/voyeur videos become truly ambient: neither focus nor absent. Your ear may prick up to an unfamiliar emergency siren from a faraway land or to some pedestrians kibitzing while waiting for the traffic light to favor them, but by and large the sounds, like the visuals, are pleasingly secondary.

Sometimes, though, there is a true surprise, and a delightful one.

For example, something magical happens at the 58:16 mark (that is, just shy of an hour) in a newly posted video by Rambalac titled [“Japan – Wandering in countryside Iruma, Saitama.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifa6yXTWOVs) Rambalac is the name of a prolific (one of the channel’s playlists has nearly 600 videos) and popular (584,000 followers to date) exponent of this YouTube flâneur category. In the Iruma video (named for the city in which it was shot), Rambalac, as always out of view, wanders around slowly, capturing the local environment with a keen eye (and ear), here for back alleys and urban parks. We never see Rambalac, though sometimes we catch [a shadow, complete with film equipment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifa6yXTWOVs&t=857s) (timecode: [14:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifa6yXTWOVs&t=857s)), or a hand playfully holding up a bottle of newly purchased tea ([54:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifa6yXTWOVs&t=3252s)).

It may very well have been the sounds from that vending machine transaction that woke me from my work trance. This beverage stop occurs very close to the end of the video. Ramblac then begins heading back to the train station. At almost exactly 58:00, someone with a backpack comes into view after running across the narrow street ahead, and this person’s presence — at the risk of getting all film theory about it — seems to relocate the video’s point of view, briefly becoming a sort of stand-in for Ramblac. They’re walking down the same street, their paces evenly matched.

We hear footsteps and chatter, and then at [58:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifa6yXTWOVs&t=3496s), a repetitive tone emerges. It sounds like nothing so much as if the minimalist composer Philip Glass had been hired to score the closing scene for a willfully quotidian spinoff of *Koyaanisqatsi*. What it is (and I confirmed this with Rambalac via the video channel’s Discord, and with a friend who lives in Japan) is the sound of the train crossing signal. It gets considerably louder as Rambalac (along with the person in view) approaches the station, and then it gets almost entirely subsumed by rail noise and conversation.

I realized, when I went back to watch the video again, that this same sound occurs, briefly and more quietly, at the very opening — by all appearances when Rambalac first arrives in Iruma. As we learn from watching such videos — and considering field recordings as compositions unto themselves — the two appearances of the signal/Glass sound are quite distinct. At the opening, it’s happenstance, but at the end, it takes on a narrative quality. The whole video is recommended, but if you just want to witness (and appreciate) the music’s arrival, start a little earlier, at around [57:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifa6yXTWOVs&t=3462s). Doing so sets the room tone, as it were, for the city, before what might be thought of as the readymade score appears. I never actually thought this was music, but I did — and do — think that in the context of the video, it has been meaningfully transformed into something more than merely overheard locomotive-operation detritus. Which is to say: it’s quite beautiful.

Album Club

Like a book club, now in the Disquiet Junto Slack

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Over in the Disquiet Junto Slack, we’re going to try having an album club, which is like a book club but for, you know, albums.

The plan is to rotate through moderators, and each moderator will propose the record for their session. There will be both a scheduled “group listen” and then discussion in a Junto Slack channel dedicated to Album Club — or #album-club. You don’t have to do the group listen to participate in the discussion, and you don’t have to participate in the discussion to do the group listen.

The first Disquiet Junto album club record is … Dettinger’s Intershop, released by the Kompakt label in 1999. From the Bandcamp description:

>Intershop is one of our most renowned pre-millennium offerings, a surprise best seller and a style-defining predecessor of the then-nascent pop ambient genre. A massive fan favorite even after 16 years, it was originally released on CD only and held seven masterfully crafted cuts introducing the listener to a new blueprint for electronic music. Wayfaring somewhere in between field recordings, pop stylings and dreamy textures, sonics like these were simply unheard of: indeed latching onto early ambient experiments from artists like Wolfgang Voigt, but taking a different path to pop epiphany, Dettinger carved out a niche on his own that was soon to become the breeding ground for a whole generation of ambient-minded artists.

The album was selected by Jet (aka Michael Upton), who will moderate the discussion and who shared this memory when proposing the selection on the Junto Slack:

>In 1999 I flew to Europe and kicked about for almost 6 months. I went to the Kompakt shop in Köln and picked up this and Jan Jelinek’s first album as Gramm. The Gramm album is 55 minutes, so I’m subjecting you to the shorter one. I travelled across Europe by train, listening to this on Discman, and I loved it (the whole experience). So, yeah, I thought rather than pick a new release, I’d go with something I have a pretty nostalgic attachment to and which I happily listen to >20 years on.

The group listen will occur at 1pm Pacific this Saturday, October 15. Here’s a handy way to figure out when that is wherever you will be at the time:

[everytimezone.com/s/d41d16e1](https://everytimezone.com/s/d41d16e1)

You can find the album here, among other places:

[dettinger.bandcamp.com/album/intershop](https://dettinger.bandcamp.com/album/intershop)

Disquiet Junto Project 0563: Digital Magical Realism

The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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, October 17, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 13, 2022.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the [llllllll.co discussion thread.](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/)

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0563: Digital Magical Realism
The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?

Step 1: Think about what a genre means, where it begins, where it ends, what makes a genre a genre.

Step 2: Familiarize yourself with the concept of magical realism, most often associated with the fiction of such authors as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Hoffman, and Haruki Murakami, among others.

Step 3: Imagine what “digital magical realism” would sound like, were it the name of a genre.

Step 4: Record a piece of music that sounds like what you think “digital magical realism” sounds like.

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “sleeping person floating horizontally above suburban home, night, streetlight, highly realistic photograph.”

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0563” (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 “disquiet0563” (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-0563-digital-magical-realism/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/)

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:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, October 17, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 13, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. Probably not as long as a novel.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0563” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

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 562nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Digital Magical Realism (The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?) — at: https://disquiet.com/0563/

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-0563-digital-magical-realism/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/)

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “sleeping person floating horizontally above suburban home, night, streetlight, highly realistic photograph.”

Ryoji Ikeda’s Blissfully Frantic New Track

A taste of the forthcoming Ultratronics

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a new song out from Ryoji Ikeda, the Japanese musician and installation artist who likes to flood massive spaces with immersive minimalist visuals that resemble test patterns for imaginary technologies. When it comes to more intimate zones, such as the space between our ears, he can really edge into the blissfully frantic. This new track, “ultratronics 01,” is everything I love about Ikeda’s music compacted into a strident, glitchy five minutes that sounds as if a dying alien civilization of anxious androids only knew about the idea of music from stray Earth signals carrying Dizzee Rascal and Cliff Martinez albums to their distant, fading star. The constant fritter of vocal cut-ups finds common ground between telecom packet switching and a spin of the FM radio dial, while the underlying rhythms suggest that someone with a PhD in 20th-century percussion music decided to make an EDM record. If data poisoning is your drug of choice, this is for you. The full album, Ultratronics, comes out on the Noton record label, run by Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nicolai), on December 2.

Track originally posted at [YouTube](https://youtu.be/XwtdfAtqNsA).