The above player is as of mid-June a new feature in SoundCloud’s service. It allows for the collation into one place of tracks from various accounts, and what’s great about that is we can, for each project, have one single player. The above one is a work-in-progress. I will populate it over the next day, and then work through earlier projects.
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 theme of the 23rd weekly Disquiet Junto project is the “palindrone” — that is, a drone in the form of a palindrome. The source audio was provided by Thomas Park, a prolific musician who records as Mystified. I’d wanted to do a drone-based project for some time, because the drone is such a ubiquitous presence in contemporary music, and has been a strong force in the pieces submitted by musicians as part of previous Disquiet Junto projects. It took awhile for me to come up with a project that I felt would inherently explore the subject matter. Park had offered his source material some time back. They’re a series of drones made with acoustic instruments, like a slide whistle and a kazoo. They’re selected from his collection Various Wind Instrument Drone Samples, available at mystified.bandcamp.com.
The idea of everyone sharing samples seemed helpful to explore the perceived generic quality of drone music; since everyone is using the same raw goods, the distinctions and similarities between tracks will be immediately apparent. The idea of the palindrome likewise brings the matter of structure — something that drone music suggests itself as apart from — to the fore; listeners used to getting lost in drones will likely find themselves listening for, or simply being made aware of, the mirror-like shape of the resulting pieces of music.
The assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, June 7, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, June 11, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0023-palindrone. Within a few hours of the project’s launch there were already two entries, one by CP McDill and another by Park/Mystified himself.
These are the instructions that went out to the email list. They appear below translated into French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish, courtesy of Eric Legendre, Allan Brugg, Naoyuki Sasanami, David Font-Navarrete, and M. Emre Meydan, respectively.
Disquiet Junto Project 0023: Palindrone
This week’s project is about drones, a pervasive undercurrent in contemporary music. Whatever your definition of “drone,” you will compose a piece of drone music using five of the provided source tracks. These source tracks are a series of drones made by Mystified (aka Thomas Park) from such analog instruments as kazoo, bottle, slide whistle, and didgeridoo. There are 20 source tracks in all, and you will select 5 for your piece. You cannot add any new sounds, but you can transform the provided ones as you wish.
Your drone will take the form of a palindrome. This is to say: once the track reaches its midpoint its structure will then continue to unfold as a mirror, or reverse, of its first half. As always, these instructions are intended as a starting point, and are open to interpretation.
Deadline: Monday, June 11, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Please make your track no longer than eight minutes.
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 “disquiet0023-palindrone”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:
Samples courtesy of Mystified, aka frequent Disquiet Junto participant Thomas Park:
http://archive.org/details/Junto_23_Samples
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info
The one track featured here is “Joy” off Saito Koji‘s recent album, Again, on the Resting Bell label. The album is eight tracks in all, each three minutes long, and all best experienced in sequence. The music is a series of exercises in restraint, thick washes of white noise and deep swells, all compacted and limited, so even, as with “Joy,” when they suggest something voluminous, they have a clear beginning, middle, and end — and the middle doesn’t last all that long. It’s not that they work better together, in sequences, because to say so would be to slight the composure and structure and tonality from which each track benefits. It’s just quite enticing how their steady passing, one after another, lends a sense of narrative to the proceedings, like a slide carousel of a holiday vacation in which all we see is a series of slightly-out-of-focus landscapes (