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 week’s project tackles the concept of silence, which by most measures is in fact a relative term, a term in regard to perception rather than some actual objective absence of sound. The major 20th-century milestone in our understanding of silence is arguably the (perhaps apocryphal) story told by the late John Cage of entering an anechoic chamber, expecting to hear nothing, and instead hearing sounds emitted from his own body. In this project we will take recordings of perceived silence, push them until the noise within the silence reveals itself, and then make music from that noise. Cage, pictured above, would have turned 100 this year, and this project is in his memory.
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The assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, July 26, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, July 30, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0030-nonsilent.
Below are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). They appear below translated into five additional languages: French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish, courtesy of Éric Legendre, Allan Brugg, Naoyuki Sasanami, Norma Listman, and M. Emre Meydan, respectively.
Disquiet Junto Project 0030: Sounds from Silence
This week’s project deals with the concept of silence — specifically recorded silence. We will take a segment of audio that is intended to signify silence, and then from it make an original piece of music.
Step 1: Select a segment of recorded sound that would generally be perceived as silent. Examples include: the gap between tracks on a tape cassette or vinyl record, the noise your laptop’s headphone jack emits when nothing is playing, the quietest moment in an MP3, a radio signal when nothing is supposed to be heard.
Step 2: Amplify or otherwise magnify that supposed absence of sound until it makes a perceivable noise.
Step 3: Compose, perform, and record a new original piece of music that takes this sound as its sole source material. You can manipulate the original audio as you see fit, but you can’t add other pre-existing audio elements to it.
Deadline: Monday, July 30, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Please keep your track to between 2 and 4 minutes in length.
Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, please 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 “disquiet0030-nonsilent”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 please include this information:
More on the 30th Disquiet Junto project at:
Disquiet Junto Project 0030: Sounds from Silence
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/
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The Dusted Wax netlabel remains a steady supplier of what might be termed mid-school hip-hop. This would be neither the full-on tape splicing and vinyl scratching of its earlier years, nor the codified digital beats of its attenuated present. The stuff that Dusted traffics in is deep in the era of second-generation turntablism, real and virtual, which is to say, the calisthenics we associated with DJ Krush, and the studio-heavy work of Funki Porcini, both of which drew heavily from jazz, funk, and exotica in the construction of downtempo grooves rich with atmosphere and largely uninterested in being subsumed by vocalists. That sort of instrumental activity courses through Thegntlmn’s Earbuds (Volume 1), 10 tracks of jazz-infused beats, souped up with vocal snippets and surveillance effects. The album is well represented by the track “I Was Wondering” (MP3), with its layering of muffled voices, soupy piano, and overheard conversation.
From Martijn Comes comes Those Who Know Do Not Speak, Those Who Speak Do Not Know, released last month on the long-running Panospria netlabel. Among an impressive variety of slow works that range from low-key rhythmic invention (the percussively erratic “Thinking Machine”) to field recordings (the lovely “A Misty Morning”) is a cover of a piece by French composer Francis Poulenc, “A Snowy Evening” (