Current Favorites: Tuscany, Los Angeles, Prague

Another round of Instagram favorites

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Like [last week’s round-up](https://disquiet.com/2022/07/31/current-favorites-stillway-knobs-mursyid/), this post is a reminder of some of the inspiring music housed at Instagram. It’s also the latest in a series of occasional answers to a frequent question: “What have you been listening to lately?” These are annotated, albeit lightly, because I don’t like reposting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.

▰ Tuscany, Italy-based Federico Chiesa, who goes by Oora (“pronounced like Aura”), at [instagram.com/ooramusic](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg9p8CePQXD/), shared a live sequence of tender, lush synthesizer mood music.

▰ Sarah Belle Reid ([instagram.com/sarahbellereid](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg4fctLFfT3/)), based in Los Angeles, does incredible things with her horn, processed live by racks of synthesizer modules. As she explains, “I am constantly exploring ways to add breath and organic motion into my synth patches, looking for ways to make my oscillators blend with and play off of my trumpet more, and so on.”

▰ Thinking too much about the potential for something akin to a proper “metaverse” can diminish the melding of physical and virtual already in full flower. This video by Prague-based Digiklvb ([instagram.com/digiklvb](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg7oQbuDHaK/)) combines the synthesizer seen in real life with an overlayed image that is produced by the same system. Yes, these don’t appear in the “real world” as such, except through post-production editing, but I think the increasing prominence of such combinations is a glimpse into how musicians like Digiklvb experience such work as they produce it.

Disquiet Junto Project 0553: Break That Cycle

The Assignment: Record in a steady tempo but break it on occasion.

/ 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, August 8, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 4, 2022.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0553: Break That Cycle**
The Assignment: Record in a steady tempo but break it on occasion.

This is a one-step project: Record in a steady tempo but break it on occasion. For example, you might record a piece of music in 4/4 at a steady pace, but occasionally break it by including an extra bar or a stray three-bar sequence, or a segment that’s notably faster or slower.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0553” (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 “disquiet0553” (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:

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0553-break-that-cycle/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0553-break-that-cycle/)

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, August 8, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 4, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0553” 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 553rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Break That Cycle (The Assignment: Record in a steady tempo but break it on occasion) — at: https://disquiet.com/0553/

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-0553-break-that-cycle/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0553-break-that-cycle/)

The image shows a detail of a mural painted by the artist Pablo “Raíz” Ruiz Arroyo at the record store Noise in San Francisco.

Lanois at the Piano

A glimpse at a forthcoming album

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Apparently Daniel Lanois has a new album — its title, Player, Piano, featuring an attention-getting comma — due out on the fairly new label Modern Recordings (a BMG company whose roster includes Nils Petter Molvaer, Robot Koch, and Meredi). “I got to visit with the ghosts of Erik Satie and Oscar Peterson and Harold Budd,” Lanois said in a pre-release statement. This short video is a live snippet of him at his heavily used instrument, carefully selected chords worked through with soulful patience.

According to the [pre-release announcement](https://modernrecordings.de/player-piano/#0): “Lanois and [co-producer Wayne] Lorenz set about transforming each of the three pianos in the studio, dampening the strings with tea towels and dulling the percussive impact of the hammers by adding small felt pads to the heads. When it came time to record, they used vintage ribbon mics and arranged them behind the instruments rather than in front in an effort to further soften the sound.”

That glimpse at his approach explains the muted quality of the piano, the way it both echoes with a pronounced softness and yet feels constrained, controlled. The softness is itself a sort of constraint, in that it presents the piano at a remove from how one normally hears the instrument — thus the sound is both warm and alien. In other words, very much Daniel Lanois territory.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbzfBtd81Sc). More at [modernrecordings.de](https://modernrecordings.de/player-piano/#0).

Current Favorites: Stillway, Knobs, Mursyid

On Instagram

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s been quite an odd week for Instagram, which has reportedly been testing out a variety of shifts to its interface and focus. This post is a reminder of some of the good that can be found amid the … well, everything else. It’s also the latest in a series of occasional answers to a frequent question: *“What have you been listening to lately?”* These are annotated, albeit lightly, because I don’t like reposting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.

▰ It’s been four years since, in 2018, the highly talented guitarist Jamie Stillway released *City Static*, which included some beautiful ambient soundscapes. A new live studio performance (at [instagram.com/jamiestillway](https://www.instagram.com/p/CgmzMeVlWEE/)) shows her back at it, writing, as she jokes, “the kind of music that puts cats to sleep.”

▰ Knobs, aka Scott Harper, best known for some of the most simultaneously whimsical and informative videos about guitar pedals, has an album due out. Get a listen to preview videos, such as this one, at [instagram.com/knobs.creative
](https://www.instagram.com/p/CghwrIAuj91/).

▰ Fahmi Mursyid (at [instagram.com/\_fahmi\_mursyid\_
](https://www.instagram.com/p/CgoD6w1hsrA/)) records with a wide variety of tools, some of them software-based, such as this droning, pulsing music (that’s half downtempo techno and half space-station infrastructure A.S.M.R.) in the visual coding tool known as Pure Data.

Disquiet Junto Project 0552: The Radio in My Life

The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation.

/ 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, August 1, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 28, 2022.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0552: The Radio in My Life**
The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation.

This project is the second of three that are being done in collaboration with the 2022 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 7 through 11. The topic this year is “unvermittelt,” which is a little tricky to translate. Literally it’s “unmediated,” but it can also mean “sudden,” “abrupt,” or “immediate.”

We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the fourth year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects will be played and displayed throughout the festival.

Step 1: There’s a great moment in the recorded conversations of composers John Cage and Morton Feldman when they discuss a trip to the beach. Feldman isn’t pleased by the way transistor radios let music, and sound in general, appear in places it hadn’t previously. Cage jokes that having composed music that involves multiple radios, whenever he hears them he thinks, “[W]ell, they’re just playing my piece.” You can listen to it in the first 2.5 minutes of this excerpt:

[https://youtu.be/chEvxoypyUo](https://youtu.be/chEvxoypyUo)

Step 2: Think about Cage and Feldman’s conversation, in particular about the idea of what is and isn’t a sonic “intrusion” in our lives.

Step 3: Record a piece of music that reproduces or otherwise suggests the sympathetic (i.e., non-intrusive) commingling of radio and everyday sound.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0552” (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 “disquiet0552” (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:

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/)

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, August 1, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 28, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0552” 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 552nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Radio in My Life (The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation) — at: https://disquiet.com/0552/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

[https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/](https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/)
[https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern](https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern)
[https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern](https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern)

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-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/)