- Street sounds. Shot while with @boondesign, a block from the street for which the filter is named. #415 http://t.co/5TIa6055 #
- RT @markrushtoncom: re my Tweet linked in http://t.co/5CevNhcI Yep, it’s true! I’m still processing the advances. Cc @otolythe @HILOBROW #
- Wow. Almost 4,000 people in 24 hours listened to the http://t.co/JGWMqeHB interview in which we discuss the creative benefits of restraint. #
- The RIAA’s vision of the future of the home stereo. http://t.co/xVKDPXrh #
- This is Anthony Braxton’s new jam: http://t.co/QyY72CXy. #
- Severed cockroach leg as music visualizer. #ted #
Disquiet Helps Inaugurate New Soundcloud Podcast
In which we discuss community organization as a form of curatorial practice
Yesterday, the great sound-hosting service Soundcloud.com posted a 15-minute podcast in which Jami Welch interviewed me about various Disquiet-related projects, in particular the Instagr/am/bient collection, and the ongoing Disquiet Junto projects.
As of now, the podcast has had over 4,000 listens, which is a rewarding experience. It is helping to get word out about all the amazing work that the contributors to these projects have produced — and, perhaps, expanding the participatory base for the Junto:
Welch is himself a musician. He records as Seams, and he participated in the sixth Junto project, in which people were asked to remix the sound of three archival Edison cylinders (in his case yielding the track “Ebb”). He brought this personal experience to the conversation. (He also tweeted about the production process of the podcast audio, including at one point linking to a screenshot of his efforts.)
It turns out, our conversation was the first in a new podcast from the service, called SoundCloud Speaks. Welch asked great questions. Perhaps the most intriguing thing he said, though, came in the form not of a question but an observation, when he mentioned how there was a “narrative” to the Disquiet Junto. He’s quite right about that. For all the extent to which the individual projects are intended to stand alone, there are various threads connecting them. One of the enjoyable challenges of organizing the series is sorting out what sequence of projects will be most rewarding for the participants and a broader range of listeners.
The podcast is housed on two pages: on the company’s blog.soundcloud.com page, and on its soundcloud.com/community-team page.
Junto at Hilobrow.com
In which she decodes the predictions inherent in Benjamin Franklin's original Junto
Peggy Nelson at hilobrow.com has produced a thoughtful and highly appreciated overview of the weekly Disquiet Junto series of music assignments, which are hosted at soundcloud.com.
She intersperses pairs of recordings from various Junto assignments in order to highlight contrasts in response to the same instructions and source material. And in between these pairings, she inserts descriptions of the Junto’s broader concerns. She touches on Benjamin Franklin, whose own Junto loaned its name to our endeavor, and has kind words regarding the open nature of participation in our modern version.
And she drops this excellent insight:
“A social club dedicated to mutual improvement”might be a #TweetsOfOld description of remix culture, if we extend social into media and networking, and aim improvement at the artworks instead of their makers. Exchanging leather aprons for a screen and mouse, Disquiet Junto is a fresh update on an old, but still very much alive and relevant, idea, applying social and improvement to music remixing.
Variations on the phrase “social club dedicated to mutual improvement”are routinely associated with Franklin’s Junto, based on phrasing originating in his autobiography. I’ve been employing it myself when talking about the origins of the term. What Nelson does is great. She unpacks the phrase. She locates within the word “social” a premonition of social media, and matters even broader than social media: the modern, digitally enabled network culture that characterizes creative life on the Internet. From “improvement,” Nelson notes the sense of iterative development inherent in the sequential and recombinant essence of remixing. That is, in brief, some excellent cogitation.
At the end of her piece, Nelson thanks twitter.com/lrjp for “additional music reporting,” so I will as well. Read the full piece at hilobrow.com. Follow Nelson on Twitter at twitter.com/otolythe. And read at theatlantic.com how she got her “otolythe” moniker. It involves hearing and physiology and little fish and the evolution of self-identification on the Internet.
So Percussion Remixes So Percussion (MP3)
Free download of the ensemble turning its drone into an electronic stomp
There is much to enjoy and appreciate in So Percussion‘s freely released remix project, Amid the Noise Remixes, a collection of reworkings of their album Amid the Noise enacted by three of the four members of the group: Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, and Jason Treuting (only member Adam Sliwinski isn’t credited on the collection’s dozen remixes). The first remix on the record makes for helpful comparison with the original, because the original is also available for free download, from cantaloupemusic.com, the website of the releasing record label. The original record came out toward the end of 2006. The remix collection came out in December 2011.
The original, “June,” is a percussion (but not percussive) exploration of tone, thick ringing globules of tone that announced Amid the Noise as something other than So Percussion’s listeners had come to expect. To upend expectations, they opened the album on a track essentially lacking in plosives: in verbal terms, it’s all extended vowels, virtually absent of consonants (MP3). Even at a narrative level, it is willfully remote, a stretch of concentrated stasis in place of thematic development. It is splendid.
[audio:http://www.cantaloupemusic.com/mp3/ca21039.mp3|titles=”June”|artists=So Percussion]
The remix, by So Percussion member Quillen, upends the upending. It takes the original and gives it the jitters, and then once the jitters have set in but good, it adds a heavy thud of a beat that builds over time. If the original version refuted development, this one welcomes it, altering as it proceeds, transforming at a swaggering and geometric pace. Like the original “June” on the original album, the “June” remix announces the remix album’s intentions. In this case, that would be a fun night out.
Get the full set for free at sopercussion.bandcamp.com. More on So Percussion at sopercussion.com.
Lisbon & Comments: The Top 10 Posts & Searches of February 2012
Lisbon remixed, two songs for 2/22, open comments, and other reader favorites
The most popular post of February 2012, out of 28 total posts for the month, was (1) the announcement of a new Disquiet-commissioned project, LX(RMX) / Lisbon Remixed, in which eight musicians under sixteen names remixed the sounds of urban Lisbon. The project was a collaboration with artist Jorge Colombo.
Also among the 10 most popular posts were (2) an overview of the fifth in the ongoing Disquiet Junto series, this one involving adding sounds to a pre-existing documentary recording of everyday noise, (3) an announcement that this site no longer requires a comment to be approved by a moderator before being published, and (4) liner notes that I wrote for a two-song project by musicians Corey Allen and Marcus Fischer.
Three of the site’s daily Downstream MP3 recommendations made the top 10: (5) one on the persistence of the wind chime in instrumental hip-hop, (6) another on the drone-industrial complex, and (7) a third on music for koto, pitch pipe, and samplers.
Rounding out the top 10 most popular posts of the month: (8) the list of the 10 most popular posts of the preceding month, and (9, 10) two of the automated Saturday repostings of twitter.com/disquiet.
The most popular searches of the month were: harold budd live, junto, souns, autechre, bars, Buddha Machine, rjdj, dubstep, Maximin, virant, would-be messiahs, amon tobin, astralwerks, curated, flyer, gareth dickson, grouper, iron chef of music, mashup, mixtapes