- Video of my introductory statement at the 4/19 Chicago Disquiet Junto Enemy group concert: http://t.co/lmuhx2AE #
- Funny: The sound of a raging Dyson hand dryer from the bathroom of a small quiet cafe. #
- Many thanks to @peterkirn for this thoughtful overview of Disquiet Junto, LX(RMX), & Instragr/am/mbient: http://t.co/5qSdxXDy #
- More on this when time frees up, but I have a piece on San Francisco’s sonic-arts infrastructure at @artpractical: http://t.co/zwKL1lW2 #
- The 16th Disquiet Junto project is at http://t.co/XdRJsrQ9. Due Monday, April 23, at 11:59pm wherever you are. #
- RIP, graphic designer David Hillman Curtis (b. 1961), who directed Ride, Rise, Roar film about the Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno Tour. #
- Belated RIP, Dick Clark (b. 1929), eternal teenager, and the Band’s Levon Helm (b. 1940), who always seemed old beyond his years. #
- Disquiet Junto 16: Make a new track from samples of dice and sandpaper; use one as background, the other as foreground: http://t.co/XdRJsrQ9 #
Disquiet Junto Project 0016: Back/Foreground
The Assignment: Explore matters of background and foreground.
*Each Thursday evening at [the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com](http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) 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](http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/).*
This assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 20, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 23, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list:
>Disquiet Junto Project 0016: Back/Foreground
>
>Deadline: Monday, April 23, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
>
>Plan: This week’s effort is the 16th weekly Junto, and it is a shared-sample project. The theme is “background and foreground.” There are two provided samples, one of sandpaper and the other of dice. Please make one track employing both samples. You can transform them in any way you wish. You can add other elements if you choose to. However, one of the two samples should provide the predominant background sound, and the other should provide the predominant foreground sound. Which does which is up to you. You’ll find the samples here:
>
>http://www.freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/28541/
>http://www.freesound.org/people/Robinhood76/sounds/60857/
>
>Length: Please keep your piece to between two and four minutes in length.
>
>Information: Please along with your track include a description of your process in composing and recording it.
>
>Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0016-backforeground”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 you post your track, please include this information:
>
>Sandpaper sample by HerbertBoland at http://www.freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/28541/
>
>Dice sample by Robinhood76 at http://www.freesound.org/people/Robinhood76/sounds/60857/
>
>More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
>
>http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
The Patch Cord Godfather
Talking with Morton Subotnick about the intersection of technology and creativity
At 79, Morton Subotnick is by no means resting on his laurels, as substantial as those laurels may be. Several years ago, Subotnick, one of the co-developers of the first analog synthesizer, which Don Buchla constructed in 1963, started using Ableton Live in his own performances and recordings — which is a bit like if Les Paul had started using an iPad in his weekly sessions at the Iridium. But the fact that Subotnick did fiddle with and then embrace the Live software is an emblem of his trademark curiosity and creative energy. I had the opportunity to talk with Subotnick in advance of a pair of upcoming Colorado events — one at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs and the other at the Communikey Festival in Boulder. He’s touring and performing with Lillevan, the German visual artist. My interview appears today in the Colorado Springs Independent. Below is one back’n’forth from the Q&A. I will post more of the full transcript here at Disquiet.com at a later date.
Marc Weidenbaum: Does new technology help you achieve old musical ideas, or does it introduce new musical ideas?
Morton Subotnick: When my mother died, I got some boxes of old stuff and I found an essay I had written, I think, in high school.
It was a short story that described a time in the future when I came into a concert when they were doing a late Beethoven string quartet. The four musicians were on the stage with no instruments. They were sitting in chairs and they had bands around their arms and chests, attached to their chairs, and they had their music in front of them — and with their bodies and their minds they were playing their parts.
There was no sound in the auditorium. It was not quite like brain waves, it was more a physical thing; they were able to project the music through the electric currents in the room.
So, I’m still struggling to realize the ideas I had in 1960 and 1961. And I’m getting really close.
More on the Colorado Springs event at the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at uccs.edu and on Communikey at communikey.us. Read the interview (“Patch Cord Godfather”) at csindy.com.
The above video, from youtube.com, shows Subotnick and Lillevan performing live at Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria in 2010. (And many thanks to Ethan Hein, of ethanhein.com, for an assist in getting the interview to happen.)
Tuned-In in Dunedin
The elliptical radio art of Sally Ann McIntyre's Radio Cegeste
The work is titled “dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once” and it is credited to Radio Cegeste, which is in fact one Sally Ann McIntyre. McIntyre lives of Dunedin, New Zealand, and Cegeste is her working with a small battery of portable FM radios. The radios, in turn, work in collusion with each other in a small space, in this case in Dunedin gallery, to create a fractured sonic hologram of social activity.
McIntyre is working from a rich theoretical construct, which Radius presents along with the audio on its respective pages at tumblr.com and soundcloud.com. This is an except:
As a site-specific, spectator-less, solo performance, dear friends who have died are all talking to me tonight / all at once re-constructs and re-imagines personal and public memory through the medium of transmission, as an appropriate framework for uncertain, shifting structural and social realities. Small clusters of radio receivers, constantly shifted around the space, pick up the signal from a stationary mini FM transmitter. These receivers also engage with each other, chattering and heterodyning, becoming analogous to groups of people talking, and the social space of a gallery opening. Such chatter interjects the night airwaves of Dunedin, full of noise, clashing frequencies, and etheric vocal infiltrations, into what is usually perceived as the bounded space, silence and temporal amnesia of the ”˜white cube’.
More on Radio Cegeste and Sally Ann McIntyre at radiocegeste.blogspot.com.
Disquiet Junto: Live in Chicago (April 19)
Music for expanded glass harmonica, and other work
Update: There’s now a post-concert post with audio and video: “Disquiet Junto / Live in Chicago (MP3).”
The Disquiet Junto Group on SoundCloud each week employs procedural restraint as a springboard for compositional creativity. Over 150 musicians around the world have participated. At this concert, Chicago-area Junto participants will each perform a piece of “expanded glass harmonica,” and additional original work.
When: Thursday, April 19
Where: Enemy Sound
1550 North Milwaukee Ave., 3rd Floor
Chicago, IL 60622
Tickets: Donation requested
Door: 8:00pm
Concert: 9:00pm
(For those not able to attend, the event will stream live at numbers.fm.)
Who’s Playing:
Ӣ Aroon Karuna / Vapor Lanes
soundcloud.com/vaporlanes
Ӣ Erik Schoster
hecanjog.com
Ӣ Jason Shanley / Cinchel
cinchel.com
Ӣ Jason Soliday
jsoliday.com
Ӣ Jeff Kolar
jeffkolar.us
Ӣ Jon Monteverde / XYZR_KX
jonmonteverde.com
Ӣ Joshua Davison / Stringbot
stringbot.com
Plus possible guests
More info at:
The easier to remember URL for this page is:
disquiet.com/juntoenemychicago120419
Above images drawn from the third Disquiet Junto project.