The Waveform Warns (MP3)

A reflective rifflet by Tyler John Arnold

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The wave form warns you, certainly. There’s a serious jump shortly into “Freur” by Tyler John Arnold. It’s like a small wave hitting a seawall, except that the seawall continues for a long time before tapering off. That wall signifies a serious volume jump in the track, from hazy field recordings to a ringing drone-like rifflet that cycles over and over, with various elements, from muted vocal fragments to off-the-beat rhythmic moments to odd noises, layered atop. The volume leap is quickly forgotten thanks to the downtempo setting, and the overall effect is that of sonic curiosities peeking through.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/tylerjohnarnold.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • From advance warning anxious that Dyer’s Zona will send me back to my decades-long no-1st-person approach to writing, just as I was warming. #
  • Picked up Geoff Dyer’s Zona at the library. It has a sticker on it that says “POPULAR READING.” #
  • Thanks! MT @Nonwrestler: @disquiet 30s photos converted to sound, presented as videos tracking through the results http://t.co/wPJzfPhQ #
  • Made banner image for my site: white backdrop + black text atop image. Massive Kinko’s flashback to circa-1987 college flyer/zine-making. #

    • Continue reading “Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet”

Newsletter Update + Discussion Forum

Pondering an addition to this website – input from readers appreciated.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I just sent out an email to this website’s newsletter list. It was an interim newsletter, mostly serving as a request for input from readers:

I’m thinking about adding a discussion forum to Disquiet.com, and was wondering if, as a reader of the site, you might find such a thing of interest.

That wasn’t phrased as a question, but please imagine that it had been and, if you have a chance, please reply with your thoughts. I’d greatly appreciate the input.

What’s led me to think that a discussion forum housed on Disquiet.com might have a solid base of informed and inquisitive participants is the range and quality of discussion in various related places, such as on the Discussion tab at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud, and on Facebook and via Twitter, as well as in the comments on Disquiet.com. I feel like there’s an opportunity to host discussions about sound, art, music, technology, creativity, and related subjects. I think I’d revive the “MP3 Discussion Group,” and add a semi-regular book discussion, perhaps film as well. If this appeals to you, please let me know. (And if you think it’s a less than stellar idea, please tell me why, if you have a chance.) And no matter your expressed perspective you’re under no obligation to participate, should I go ahead and launch it. There are numerous forums associated with music-making gadgetry, and with record labels, but a place focused on listening and composition might have some promise.

If you have thoughts on the subject, shoot me an email (at [email protected]), or reply in the comments section to this post. Thanks.

That logo at the top of this post is for the service that hosts the Disquiet.com email newsletter, which you can subscribe to at tinyletter.com/disquiet, or from the form that appears in the left-hand column of just about every page on this website. Previously the list was hosted on the archaic Mailman service, which was inelegant, and before that it was just me putting a lot of email address into the Bcc line of an email, which was several leagues below inelegant.

Disquiet Junto Project 0025: Schedule Song

The Assignment: Turn one or two sets of sonic alerts (project 24) into a song.

/ 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 week’s project is the Disquiet Junto’s 25th, which is quite a remarkable milestone. Just this past week we passed the 1,000-track milestone, and just the week prior the 200-participant milestone. The 25th project builds on the 24th one, which was about creating an asynchronous suite of related musical alerts, sonic signals or ringtones for events such as the arrival or email or an IM. While the individual parts of those tracks did relate to each other, they also suggested themselves to many participants as the source material for subsequent reworking — which is precisely what the 25th project is up to.

The assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, June 21, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, June 25, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0025-skedsong.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). They appear below translated into four additional languages: German, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish courtesy of Allan Brugg, Naoyuki Sasanami, Norma Listman, and M. Emre Meydan, respectively.

Disquiet Junto Project 0025: Schedule Song

This week’s project treats the previous week’s (project 24) as its source material. The goal of project 25 is to construct a single track made from audio elements that were initially intended to serve as sonic alerts. The tracks contributed to project 24 included four distinct elements, one each to signify the arrival of an email, the arrival of an IM, the arrival of a phone call, and a calendar event. Please select one or two tracks from project 24 and make a new song by combining their individual parts. Please structure your new song in the form of a day: opening, for example, with an alarm clock, and ending at bedtime. You can add new sounds and you can transform the elements from the pre-existing tracks.

The source tracks from project 24 can be located here:

Disquiet Junto Project 0024: Alert Suite

Deadline: Monday, June 25, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Please keep your track to between 2 and 5 minutes.

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 “disquiet0025-skedsong”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 links to the one or two tracks you employed as source material, and include to the following information:

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Continue reading “Disquiet Junto Project 0025: Schedule Song”

Under the Bridge, Revisited (MP3)

A Portland bridge gets a German restructuring.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A month ago rawore (aka Bob Phillips) caught the sounds under the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland, Oregon. The result was a gaping-mouth yawn of rumble and doppler woosh. At barely half a minute, it registered as a snippet, a glimpse of daily sonic life, a snapshot of the sonic everyday. But it had something to it, a sense of narrative, perhaps, and certainly a meaningful texture — that odd tension that exists within a documentary recording that feels lush and warm when in fact it is capturing hard rubber on tarmac echoing against concrete and metal. Perhaps brevity served it as well, coaxing the imagination to ponder where it might have gone had the road not hit a dead end.

Over in Germany, all cousmatic (aka Allain Cousmatique) took note of this low-grade intrigue, and then took the sounds and expanded them sixfold in length. The result tweaks the texture just enough so that the rubber on the road becomes a minimal techno rhythm, a light beat that shimmers like a mass of passing headlights, never quite aligning with a proper metronomic pulse, but still telegraphing momentum, speed, direction, force.

Original track originally posted at soundcloud.com/r-37, remix at soundcloud.com/all-cousmatic.