Disquiet Junto Project 0036: Still Life

The Assignment: Turning something "classical" into something "abstract expressionist," in tribute to Clyfford Still.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com 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 to the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This is a set of the tracks created in this project. At the time of this update, there were 48:


The assignment was made early in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, September 6, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, September 10, as the deadline. (There are no translations this week.)

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). The project was inspired by a visit to the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver during last month’s Denver Junto concert trip.

Disquiet Junto Project 0036: Still Life

The painter Clyfford Still (1904-1980) was one of the great practitioners of abstract expressionism. The Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado, not only houses a wealth of his works, it also has on display artifacts from Still’s daily life and practice, such as his smock, his old paint cans — and his record collection. These records, displayed behind glass, include pieces by Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach, among others, and they’re accompanied by a small note: “Clyfford Still was passionate about music, particularly classical music. Shown here are several samples from his record collection.” In this week’s project we’re going to take that word “sample” literally.

There’s an interesting question inherent here about matters of aesthetic influence: how it is that the man who painted such massive and graphically evocative works was, in fact, listening to music far more figurative than the art he himself produced? The goal of this week’s Disquiet Junto project is to take a shared sample of the sort of music that Still loved — a 78rpm recording of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante — and turn it into something that might be deserving of the term “abstract expressionism.”

So, the instructions for this week are as follows:

Step 1. Please select part of this MP3 of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante:

http://goo.gl/XqBvb

Step 2. Then transform that sample, through any methods you desire, into something that you feel meets the definition of “abstract expressionism” provided by the Clyfford Still Museum: “marked by abstract forms, expressive brushwork, and monumental scale.”

You cannot add any sounds to the sample, but you can manipulate the sample in any way you see fit.

Deadline: Monday, September 10, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 10 minutes in length.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, 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.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0036-cstillconcerto”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

This track is a transformation, in honor of painter Clyfford Still, of a sample of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante, culled from this recording:

http://archive.org/details/J.S.BachBrandenburgConcertoNo2

More on the Clyfford Still Museum at clyffordstillmuseum.org.

More on this 36th Disquiet Junto project at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0036: Still Life

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/

The example of Still’s work up top is an untitled piece dated 1957 from the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern art (sfmoma.org).

Reflecting (on) Noise

Chicago's J. Soliday says salutes Enemy.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


J. Soliday hosted the Disquiet Junto concert this past April in his Wicker Park, Chicago, home venue, aka Enemy, which he ran from 2005 until it closed this past July. (“We could still keep going,” he told the Reader back in July. “I need a break.”) Among those on the Junto Chicago bill were Soliday himself and Jeff Kolar, who runs the excellent Radius broadcast/podcast series, the opening sound cue of which served as source material for a recent Junto project (“Disquiet Junto Project 0034: Radius Joint”). And now Soliday is himself the subject of a Radius episode, number 30, in which he works through numerous variations on the same performed noise, a screech that is heard at times like an insectoid whorl, at others like a stuttering glitch. The versions are all to be considered part of a broader whole, explains a brief liner note: “Line and room recordings of the performance were sped up, slowed down, chopped, looped, replayed, and reprocessed through the system in which they were originally generated. The resulting works should not be considered definitive versions, neither individually nor as a whole, but merely as windows into an ongoing continuum.”

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/radius-14. More at theradius.us. More on Soliday at jsoliday.com.

Sounds from an Imagined Belgium (MP3)

An experiment in field recordings and performance by Peter 7 Paelinck & Yves Bondue

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


The rhythm is disjointed, overlaid, an experiment in disorienting counterpoint: a rough mix of pizzicato strings and occasional sawing on the one hand, and what seems to be a particularly adamant church bell on the other, the whole thing, this combination of beat-like punctuations that decline to align, given context by an underlying drone. And then it shifts, the drone coming to the forefront like a fog horn that has mastered circular breathing. The sounds are sourced, reportedly, from a place in Belgium that holds special meaning to the musicians whose work this is: Peter 7 Paelinck and Yves Bondue. They explain, “It is an historcal place with ancient history of death and war – Yves’ playground when he was young, a place druids, a gathering point of nature sourced by its sounds of trees and birds.” Then again, the duo appends to this notice a caveat: “nothing is true / everything is permitted.” Perhaps their geolocative sonic experiment is entirely fictional (MP3); either way, its amalgams are entrancing.

[audio:http://www.touchshop.org/touchradio/Radio82.mp3|titles=”W12″|artists=Peter 7 Paelinck & Yves Bondue]

Track originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk as part of the great Touch Radio series from Touch Editions. The above photo, by Luc Vanhoucke, accompanied the MP3 at the Touch Radio post.

Aphex + Sci-Fi: The Top 10 Posts & Searches of July 2012

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

As mentioned last month, the software that for a long time automatically tallied the most popular posts on this site has gone belly up. So, as was the case last month, the following is, instead, a list of 10 key posts from August 2012, during which there were 35 posts:

(1) a listen to the score-meet-sound-design of a short sci-fi film titled Loom (with addendum information provided via email by one of the movie’s composers), (2) a Disquiet Junto project in which the participants interpreted polling data from the ongoing U.S. presidential election as if it were a graphically notated score (see image above), (3) a revised version of a Disquiet Junto remix of a Shostakovich chamber symphony by Kent Sparling (composer of, among other things, the score to Wayne Wang’s The Princess of Nebraska), (4) my interview with sound artist Christof Migone about his excavation of Ray Bradbury‘s The Martian Chronicles, (5) my 1993 interview with Depeche Mode (online for the first time ever) from the period that culminated with the Songs of Faith and Devotion album, (6) one of the seven performances from the recent (August 19) Disquiet Junto concert held in Denver (more audio will be posted live soon), (7) the announcement that I’m writing a book for the great 33 1/3 series on Aphex Twin‘s landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol II, (8) a Disquiet Junto project in which almost 30 musicians in just over four days interpreted an incendiary Yoko Ono Fluxus work from 1955, (9) an abstract exploration of the film-sound nugget known as the “Wilhelm Scream,” and (10) my all too close encounter with a massive swarm of bees.

The most popular searches of the month included: dome, distinction, aaron, junto, soundwalk, 3D music, autechre, cocteau, free, ngngngngngngng.

Diffusion Over Sublimation

Benjamin Dauer test drives his newly rebuilt studio

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

They may break champagne bottles over the bows of ships to inaugurate their voyage, but Benjamin Dauer took a plosive-free approach when he tested out his newly rebuilt studio. He reconstructed the studio “from the ground up,” and then set about an initial work, built much like his studio largely from pre-existing pieces but experienced in a new light. In other words — his words — the track, titled “Driving Stage,” is “a little remix.”

The result is four minutes of gentle meander, the melody less a matter of sublimation than of diffusion. The low-level presence is not so much a concern of inherent tension as it is of lovely, widely distributed spaciousness, abetted by an enticingly slow pace. Writes Dauer of the effort, speaking in particular of some of the newly installed equipment, “I realize it’s very naive to say, but it was really great being able to approach the mix by hand – turning actual EQ knobs instead of virtual ones on a screen.”

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/benjamindauer. More on Dauer, who is based in Washington, D.C., at benjamindauer.net.