I attended a weekend May Day performance, complete with a maypole, in the “Morris dancing” sense of May Day, though not in the “pole dancing” sense of dancing around a pole.
I think they should play the music backwards when they untangle the maypole at the end.
Also, is Morris dancing music considered a “reel”? Would that mean “un-reeling” (or “reeling out”) the reel?
The semi-annual “trios sequence” in the weekly Disquiet Junto music community is underway. We’re just past the midway point, with some time left (about a day and a half as of this writing, on the morning, Pacific time, of Sunday, May 3 — see further updates at the end of this article), for the second of the three consecutive projects.
The Junto has had many newcomers recently, so here is some background on the Junto in general and the trios sequence in particular:
The Disquiet Junto is a series of weekly projects in which a music composition prompt goes out (via email newsletter, among other means) early each Thursday, just after midnight. Anyone who wants to participate then has until the following Monday, at 11:59pm their local time, wherever they happen to be in the world, to upload a recording in response.
This week’s currently unfolding project is the 748th consecutive weekly Junto project, the overall community having begun its activities way back during the first week of January 2012.
Every single Disquiet Junto project can be considered as “standalone,” in that (1) you can begin a given week’s project without prior knowledge of or experience with previous projects, and (2) for the most part, you could probably log on a few hours before the Monday deadline and get something done in time (though a little more consideration is encouraged).
That all goes as well for the “trios sequence,” but there are some unique aspects at work for this subset of projects, and I’ll detail them here.
In the trios sequence, there are three consecutive projects. You don’t need to do all of them. You can do any one or two, or all three, or just listen and observe from the sidelines. In the first week/project of the trios sequence, musicians recorded solos, leaving room for the second week/project, currently underway, when other musicians might potentially add a second line to make it a duet — all that in advance of another musician, in the third week/project, to potentially turn a given duet into a trio.
Usually each Junto project just sort of happens: I post the project instructions, people read them and then upload music, conversation occurs on llllllll.co (aka Lines), and I add any SoundCloud-housed tracks to a playlist. That’s about it.
This trios sequence benefits from some additional monitoring on my part, and it’s a pleasure. That monitoring means a bit more activity by me on the Lines discussion board, as well as the maintenance of a spreadsheet. Now, this spreadsheet is intended to make the process of the trios sequence go more smoothly than it might otherwise, but I recognize that the very existence of the document, let alone its seeming complexity, can make things appear more complicated than they are. This balance is something I’m aware of and that I do my best to manage. If you find the spreadsheet daunting, I apologize. In two weeks, when the trios sequence will be over, everything will go back to normal (i.e., no spreadsheet required).
This here is what the spreadsheet looks like at the moment, when there are 22 solo tracks (out of 54) from the first project in the trios sequence yet to (potentially — as it doesn’t always work out for all tracks) become duets in the currently ongoing second week/project of the sequence. You don’t even need to be able to read the text in this sheet to see the forward motion and the patterns of activity. Note that there are numerous solo tracks branching out into multiple duets, which is awesome.
Some additional notes on the spreadsheet:
Update: As of 10:49pm on Monday. May 4, we have 71 duets. Of the 54 original solos from the previous project, all but 10 have become duets. Of those 44 solos that became duets, 19 had two or more duets made.
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I tag on what books I may have finished reading. Knowing I’ll revisit my social media posts, I’ve found, serves as a positive and mellowing influence on my online activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ I remember when there were only two readily available recordings of Brumel’s “Earthquake” Mass (from around the first decade of 1500). I’ve got some catching up to do.
▰ I’m very happy that Beat (Adrian Belew, Danny Carey, Tony Levin, Steve Vai) continue to tour, playing the fantastic 1980s King Crimson repertoire, with Carey filling Bill Bruford’s shoes and Vai filling Robert Fripp’s. What I’m hoping for is that they start writing new music together.
▰ These endless automated spam calls for fake loans and other phishy hijinks just can’t be sustainable. The prevalence must be impacting how people even use their phones, how (not) responsive people are to inbound calls in general. It’s kind of bizarre robocalls can legally persist like this.
▰ Q: The 750th Disquiet Junto project happens in a couple weeks. You gonna run out of project ideas?
A: I drove to the Marin Headlands this weekend and got two ideas out the trip before I even arrived at my destination, and a project proposal was waiting for me in my email from a regular participant.
▰ A friend DMd me the transcription of a voice message from an elder relative, whose accented English was impenetrable (i.e., ignored) by the automated voice-to-text tool. I thought immediately of Malka Older talking about writing for people whose names are underlined in Microsoft Word.
▰ Just to repeat: We live in the golden age of vaporware.
▰ I would have recorded and shared the dulcet sizzle of my dolsot bibimbap lunch, but the K-pop* playing on the restaurant stereo would have earned me a takedown notice.
I did get a good pun out of it. I also learned a new-to-me word: “nurungji,” or “scorched rice,” the flavor of the sucking candy that came with my bill.
*IIIBOI, Ash Island, Big Naughty
▰ OK, that’s a neat trick. In Threads I pasted in a long post, and the text was auto-split into suggested multiple posts of the correct length.
▰ I just got a whopper of a phishing expedition: a pleasant email, from someone I know, containing a document that looked totally for real, with the logo and even a watermark for the individual’s organization. In the document was an “Access Document” link for additional information, and the link URL looked initially like that of the organization, except of course it went on and on with hyphenated words, and was a total fake. If you click on it, you have to do a “security check” (ironic, yes — that’s the essence of Erving Goffman’s “cooling the mark out”), and then you are taken to what looks exactly like a Google log-in page, except if you look at the URL it is a truly bizarre concoction that has nothing to do with the organization or with Google, but the URL could easily be overlooked, especially at this stage of the process. Short version: be careful out there.
▰ People need to reread Fahrenheit 451. In popular memory it’s all about censorship and book-burning, but what fills the void of the destroyed books — the personalized immersive audio-visual storytelling — is even worse.
▰ My browser tabs have run amok this week, and are starting to resemble a Paul Smith textile design.
▰ The only thing not in flux is … oh, yeah, everything is in flux.
Solo Output: More than 50 Disquiet Junto community musicians last week created solo pieces, as part of project 0747, with the intention for those to become duets this week and trios next week. Join in!
Mid-project Milestone: As of 7:30pm Pacific on Saturday, May 2, just over half of the 54 projects from week one (aka solos project 0747) have become duets (in project 0748), leaving exactly 26 yet to become duets. And we already have 42 duets total in project 0748 (owing to multiple solos having become more than one duet).
Second Helping: when making a duet for 0748, you can use any solo track from project 0747, even if someone else has used it already (see the spreadsheet, which is updated regularly). It’s when making a second duet that the hope is you’ll use a solo from 0747 that hasn’t yet been built on (even if between when you start and finish, someone else also makes a duet of it).
Two Timing: And yes, in the vast majority of Junto projects, it’s asked that you only upload one track in response. This trios sequence is a deviation, because the goal is for as many solos as possible to become duets — and next week for as many duets as possible to become trios.
Unlockable door:
Very much my vibe, location courtesy of Charles Lindsay:
Also my vibe:
