Disquiet Junto Project 0024: Alert Suite

The Assignment: Create four alert sounds that complement each other.

/ 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.


The week’s project is both the Junto’s most mundane yet and, in a certain light, its most experimental — mundane in that it focuses on the commonplace sound of what would broadly be described as the “ringtone,” but experimental in that it pushes the definition of music further than even the drones, ice cube rattling, and broken speech that preceded it. This is because it asks the participants to consider how a set of tones interrelate, how they might complement each other — how, in other words, they serve as a kind of asynchronous suite.

The assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, June 14, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, June 18, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0024-alertsuite.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0024: Alert Suite

This week’s project is about “functional music.” You will make four individual sounds that serve as alerts for digital communications. They will be in these categories:

1. email arrival
2. incoming phone call
3. new IM received
4. calendar event alert

The goal is that the four alerts will work together as a suite — that is, that they will complement each other, yet be distinct and recognizable from each other.

For the purposes of the Disquiet Junto, you’ll present these four alert sounds as one single track, repeating each sound a few times.

Please note: If you’d like to post the sounds individually for use by others, that’s wonderful, but please don’t associate the individual alerts to the Disquiet Junto SoundCloud group; only associate the single track that compiles all the alerts.

Deadline: Monday, June 18, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: This will be determined by the instructions above. Generally speaking, it will be under a minute.

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 “disquiet0024-alertsuite”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 the following information:

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Continue reading “Disquiet Junto Project 0024: Alert Suite”

Accordion + Harmonica + “Big Fancy Studio” (MP3)

What happens after hours at New York University? An ebullient digital hoedown.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s common refrain among former students of music conservatories that one of the great opportunities of the education was the availability of an orchestra to play their music. There are technological equivalents to that relative proximity of vast musical resources. As Ethan Hein, a music student and not infrequent subject of coverage here at Disquiet.com, noted in a recent upload to his soundcloud.com/ethanhein account, the school he’s attending, New York University (where among his instructors is Morton Subotnick), has a “big fancy studio” to which he and other students have access. One recent evening, their experiments yielded the ebullient digital hoedown “Accordion and Harmonica,” featuring Chris Jacoby on the former and Hein on the latter. Writes Hein of what led to this:

I had Chris improvise a drone on the accordion based around D mixolydian without the third. Then I overdubbed a harmonica improv on top. Today I finally succeeded in getting the file off the studio computer and onto mine, where I dropped it into Ableton and went to town. So in addition to me and Chris as filtered through various effects, you’re hearing 808, processed hand percussion and a giant bell slowed down and reversed.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ethanhein. More on Hein at ethanhein.com and twitter.com/ethanhein. More on Jacoby at soundcloud.com/christopherjacoby, christopherjacoby.com, and twitter.com/chrstphrjcby.

Free Amon Tobin Tracks (MP3s)

Part of a Bleep EP in advance of Sónar 2012 – and more

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a free Amon Tobin track available for the next day (by “next day” is meant “until Thursday 14th June at 1500 GMT”). It’s part of a promotion for the 2012 Sónar Festival, which starts around the time that the free offer ends. The track, Tobin’s “Computer Game,” is one of four on the Bleep X Sónar 2012 Sampler EP set. You need to set up a Bleep.com account to access the download, but no financial transaction is required. The Tobin track is an amalgam of sorts — part high-grade digital percussive momentum, à la Tobin’s work on Splinter Cell games, and part retro 8-bit, with more than a whiff of the sort of gleeful vapor pixels that Daft Punk used to build its Tron score. The other three tracks are more of the dance-clubby variety. Additional details on the collection at bleep.com. More on Tobin at amontobin.com — where, currently, if you subscribe to the email announcement list, you will receive a free download of this track, a remix by Lorn Reel of “Night Swim”:

More on Sónar, which runs June 14 – 16, at sonar.es.

Instrumental Hip-Hop, Afterwards (MP3)

A beat from Bavaria

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The name rawb1 is that of a SoundCloud account that’s a regular on the Stones Throw Beat Battles. The battles are a strong precursor of the Disquiet Junto. Each week a sample is offered up to the members, who then — with a handful of restraints, along the lines of variations on the game of poker — craft an instrumental hip-hop beat out of it. Much of the rawb1 account is a series of these entries, but the most recent track suggests itself as a respite, thanks to its title, “Cigarette Afterwards.” It’s a solid beat, which is to say it is unsolid: there’s a light shift or swagger to its pace, even though its foundation is a repeated sample of a piano, bass, and percussion. The tension, or more to the point the accomplished lack of tension, between affect and process is a key facet of a good beat, There’s also a bit of coital enthusiasm that serves as “Cigarette Afterwards”‘s approximation of a vocal. One of the pleasures of the Beat Battles is listening to instrumental hip-hop continue to become a self-contained force, not music intended for sublimation to a vocalist, but a formed composition unto itself.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/rawb1. The account appears to hail from Bavaria, Germany. More on the Beat Battles at soundcloud.com.

All Aflutter (MP3)

The synthesizers of Covolux are in a muted flurry of activity.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The six tracks that comprise the album The Now by Covolux, released by the 8 Ravens netlabel, are more system than composition — that is to say, they are system-as-composition. The closing track, “Nanglong,” exemplifies the approach, in which a flurry of activity supplants any traditional sense of compositional development (MP3). This is, to be clear, very much in the music’s favor. Each track has a muted hyperactivity to it, like a flock of birds seen only as shadows cast on thick vellum, or a bee hive overheard from below the attic where it has been constructed. The album is listed as “lobit,” or “lowbit,” and this should be seen as a keen distinction from 8-bit. This music may be rudimentary in its sonic palette, but there is nothing purposefully stunted or backward-mindedly retro about it. It’s exploratory and, at times, enthralling.

[audio:http://archive.org/download/8R067/6Covolux-Nanglong.mp3|titles=”Covolus”|artists=Nanglong]

Album posted by the 8 Ravens netlabel for free download at 8ravens.blogspot.com and archive.org. The Now appears to have been the netlabel’s 67th release.