- Thanks to @SactownMagazine‘s new website my old interview with Pakistan-born rapper Bohemia is now online: http://t.co/rogKjZQh #
- Interviewed Morton Subotnik and Tommy Victor (of Prong) in the same afternoon. I love the 21st century. #
- The Disquiet Junto instruction email last night went into some people’s spam folders. Project is here: http://t.co/XdRJsrQ9 #
- What he said. RT @Chegreco 14e Junto du merveilleux Disquiet sera un bel « excercice de style » musical | Oulipo ¬ Oubapo ¬ Oumupo | #
- #junto I love it. Bonus points for 99-second entries. RT @mmaddencomics none of this 2-7 minutes mollycoddling: It’s 99 seconds or nothing! #
- The 14th Disquiet Junto is a sonic-narrative rendition of @mmaddencomics‘ 99 Ways to Tell a Story: http://t.co/XdRJsrQ9 #
- 14th Disquiet Junto project instructions went out to email list. No translations right now (I was traveling), but we may have some shortly. #
- Now: tunnel remix of aforementioned quasi-monophonic lofi surround sound version of public radio. With playful honking. #
- Stuck in traffic. Public-radio broadcasts coming from multiple slow-moving vehicles. An automotive 40 Part Motet. #
Disquiet Junto 0014: Sonic Narrative
The Assignment: Do a sonic version of Matt Madden's Exercises in Style.
*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 5, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 9, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list:
>Disquiet Junto 0014: Sonic Narrative
>
>Subject: This project, the 14th in the weekly Disquiet Junto series, is about sonic narrative.
>
>Instructions: You will re-tell a very short and simple story — an anecdote really, an everyday slice of life — utilizing sound. It will take the form of a single audio file uploaded to your Soundcloud account. You will construct this track in any manner you choose: with field recordings, music, effects, dialog, or a mix thereof. The story you will be re-telling is this single-page comic strip by Matt Madden:
>
>http://goo.gl/TBI3x
>
>In the process of re-telling the story through sound, you may interpret it in any way you choose. You can do it as straight narrative, or do an abstract rendition, or retell it from another point of view, or contribute a score as if it were a movie, or a record series of foley cues. The choice is yours.
>
>Background: Matt Madden’s single-page comic is the template for a book he created titled 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. In the book, Madden told that same story 99 different ways, each in a different comic-book style. For example, he told it as a superhero comic, he told it as a manga, he told it as experienced from upstairs, and he told it as if it were overheard at a bar. Madden did this in homage to the French writer Raymond Queneau’s own Exercises in Style, which is a key text of the literary movement known as Oulipo. Oulipo approaches the act of writing with intentional constraints, and the movement’s approach to creativity was a strong influence on the development of the Disquiet Junto. Oubapo is the name of the comics version of Oulipo. What we’re up to is the musical version: Oumupo
>
>Length: Please keep your piece to between two and seven minutes in length.
>
>Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0014-oumupo”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:
>
>More on Matt Madden and his book 99 Ways to Tell a Story at:
>
>http://mattmadden.com/
>http://exercisesinstyle.com/
>
>More on the Disquiet Junto at:
>
>http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
The Name of the Game Is the Public Domain (MP3)
Collage as surrealist melodrama
The 22nd in the Radius podcast series is a collage committed by Public Domain, aka the London, England, duo of Jane Burton and Doris Lake. It’s a string of static-laden sampled fragments, spoken bits and snatches of music, strung together in a model that fits somewhere between surrealist melodrama and willfully distracted knob-turning. The duo says they use humor and found materials to express something akin to the “collective unconscious.” The key element here may be the static, because it means that the reused goods are transformed at least once before context lends a subsequent mental or otherwise associative realignment.
Track originally posted for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/radius-9 and theradius.tumblr.com. More on Public Domain at its facebook.com page.
Learning to Love the Static (MP3)
The track at its opening tells the ear to pay attention
From light hum with a sonar blip, across a brief plateau of fuzzy-circuit texture, into a brief swell of bug-zapper droning, and on through a series of pitched undulations, sound-element fade-ins, and tonal fragments. That is one unhelpfully parsimonious description of a recently uploaded track by C. Cu titled “As a child it dreamt in fear of coventrate, as an adult she learnt to love to bomb.” It’s brief, the track, arguably more brief than its title. It’s a study in small sounds that accrue meaning through narrative and contrast. Contrast provides incremental narrative, how one thing resonates in the ear and the imagination versus the things that precede, follow, or overlap it. Narrative allows for associations not just in a linear process, but how later sounds reflect earlier ones, and how earlier ones prepare the ear for later ones. The first heavy swell of C. Cu’s track would be relatively quiet, were it not foretold by something barely discernible from a room tone. The track at its opening tells the ear to pay attention, and then it proceeds to reward that attention with carefully posited instances.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/ccu. More on C. Cu, based in Belfast, Ireland, at springtimeinnepal.tumblr.com and twitter.com/limnul.
Emphasizing the Gleaming (MP3)
Thomas Park reworks the national anthem.
Thomas Park, who records as Mystified, is a frequent participant in the weekly Disquiet Junto projects (at soundcloud.com), and a prolific member of the international array of musicians who contribute to netlabels. When posting some recent rewordings of an old 78rpm recording of “The Star Spangled Banner,” he mentioned, generously, that a recent Junto project was part of his inspiration. In making something new from the old recording of the national anthem, he emphasizes the gleaming — the four versions he has posted move from rousing, octave-leaping exuberance to something spectral and spacious. The third version in particular is simultaneously vaporous and introspective in ways one might not associate with the source material (MP3).
[audio:http://archive.org/download/Mystified-StarSpangledBannerOuttakestreetrunk213/SSB3120.mp3|titles=”SSB3120″|artists=Mystified]
The U.S. national anthem is an interesting subject of interpretation because of how it stands as a sort of sonic parallel to the flag. It seems like a year doesn’t pass when someone isn’t criticized for singing it too slowly, or fumbling a performance, or dressing inappropriately. Park opens himself to criticism by so thoroughly reworking the material, far beyond recognizability. Yet in the end, what he has produced is so stately, it seems to deflect criticism deftly by suggesting itself as being deeply inspired. Then again, Park isn’t so sure what people will say, which is why he adds at the end of the brief liner note accompanying the tracks: “Any interpretations of these pieces are left to the listeners– Mystified viewed this project as an aesthetic one, not a political one.”
Full set available for free download at archive.org. More on Mystified at mystifiedmusic.com.
Update 2012.04.06: After posting this, I was informed by Park/Mystified that John Tocher was the person who introduced him to the source audio, not the person who recorded it. The source recording is, in fact, anonymous. This article has been corrected to reflect this information.