Disquiet – Page 110 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

In Bloom with Brian Eno & Peter Chilvers

One of the best apps ever

January 31, 2025January 31, 2025 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The Bloom app developed by Peter Chilvers and Brian Eno hasn’t been updated since 2024 but there’s a new half-hour-long video of it playing on YouTube. Maybe something new is coming? (Update: per David Mead below and Deb Chachra on Mastodon, it’s related to the Eno documentary, and on Facebook I benefited from the indefatigable Bruce Levenstein drew my attention to an even longer version of this audio that is available through music streaming services, more on which below.) The video is titled “Brian Eno x Bloom – Bloom: Living World (Video Edit),” and it is one of several such recordings than Eno has posted over the past year or so. The Bloom app is available for iOS and Android, and it also runs on macOS. I often have Bloom going in the background as I work, set in “Listen” mode rather than “Create,” so it can do its chill thing automatically. The app is a generative marvel, the circles appearing and disappearing in sync with the soft beads of sound that slowly come and go in relative prominence.

Here is descriptive text about Bloom: Living World from Eno’s Instagram:

Brian Eno has reimagined Bloom as a studio work, applying treatments to an hour long recording and adding subtle sonic touches. It is accompanied by Bloom: Small World, which encapsulates the whole experience into a concise 5 minutes and thirty four seconds. Accompanying the music is an original video edit, also generated from the app.

In Eno, the new film about his creative life, Brian explains that his approach to making each piece of music is to think of it as creating a new world. In Bloom: Living World this is illustrated with elegance and simplicity.

Disquiet Junto Project 0683: Space Shot

The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant.

January 30, 2025January 31, 2025 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0683: Space Shot
The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant.

There is just one step to this project. Record a piece of music in which half of the material is recorded in a highly reverberant space (or has spaciousness applied to it through effects) and half of the material is just sound in isolation, devoid of any sense of space or place.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0683” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0683-space-shot/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, February 3, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 683rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Space Shot — The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant — at https://disquiet.com/0683/

Learning from and With

683 weeks and counting

January 29, 2025January 29, 2025 / By Marc Weidenbaum

This paragraph is from the email I’m sending out tomorrow, January 30, to the Disquiet Junto email announcement list for the weekly projects:

The Junto has been around for well over a decade now, starting way back in January 2012, and a lot of people have come and gone, some returning, some pausing, and many have stayed for extended periods once they’ve joined. No matter the specific duration, frequency, or cadence of those individual presences, in combination they have formed what can be termed, for lack of a less overused word, a community. I really can’t do justice to the sensation I experience (to the way I am both inspired and touched) each week (683 consecutive weeks to date) when musicians take these rough ideas (from the stringent to the open-ended) for music composition prompts (some my own, some in collaboration with others) and make music from them. It’s quite something, and I never take it for granted, not your efforts, your insights, or your time. The year is still quite young, and who knows what will come of it, but we’ll keep making music together, and learning from and with each other.