Disquiet Junto Project 0675: Arc of the Drone

The Assignment: Record a drone that goes from simple to complex to simple.

/ 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 0675: Arc of the Drone
The Assignment: Record a drone that goes from simple to complex to simple.

Step 1: You may, yourself, be experienced recording drone music, or you may never have recorded any. You may not even be sure what drone music is, in which case read up a bit. Not matter your experience and familiarity, please give some thought as to what constitutes drone music.

Step 2: Now think about what makes a drone simple and what makes a drone complex.

Step 3: Now record a piece of drone music that begins simple, gets complex, and then gets simple again. And note: The simple drone at the end needn’t necessarily be the same sort of drone with which the piece opens.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0675” (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-0675-arc-of-the-drone/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. How long is your arc?

Deadline: Monday, December 9, 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 675th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Arc of the Drone — The Assignment: Record a drone that goes from simple to complex to simple — at https://disquiet.com/0675/

Ambient Tea Party

A live performance

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I believe that this Ambient Tea Party, on the YouTube channel Den Pat, took place in Saint Petersburg, Russia, as that is where the associated Bandcamp page is based. Den Pat is, I think, the Denis Vladimirovich Patrabaev (or Патрабаева Дениса Владимировича — thanks, online translation tool!) listed in the label’s description as its founder. This solo set, which I listened to on repeat while working, is a treat, an admirably consistent, nearly hour-long mix of modulated tones and gently abrasive intrusions. Highly recommended. I’ll be working through the label’s catalog shortly.

My Favorite Albums of 2024

Hey, I got it done this year

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I voted in this year’s Pitchfork “best albums of 2024” list (and The Wire’s), and was asked to hold off on publishing my personal list until the full Pitchfork list went up on their website, which it now has, and the issue of The Wire with their look back came out today, too. (The Wire does a cool thing when listing the contributors to the voting: they list each contributor’s #1 album of the year.) So, here are my favorites. I have friends and colleagues who actively refine and adjust their lists of the best albums over the course of the given year, and even continue to do so, revising years and decades as time passes. I am, quite simply, not one of those people. Were I not asked to make a list, I would likely not. But I was, and I have, and I recognize these lists are very useful to people, so I share here happily. These are 25 records I enjoyed (or: appreciated, admired, got lost in) the heck out of this year:

  1. Bill Frisell/Andrew Cyrille/Kit Downes: Breaking the Shell (Red Hook Records)
  2. Jeff Parker / ETA Vtet: The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem / Nonesuch)
  3. KMRU: Natur (Touch)
  4. The Necks: Bleed (Northern Spy Records)
  5. Taylor Dupree: Sti.ll (Greyfade)
  6. Sarah Davachi: The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir (Late Music)
  7. Dialect: Atlas Of Green (Rvng Intl.)
  8. Lia Kohl: Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph)
  9. Prefuse 73: New Strategies for Modern Crime (Lex Records)
  10. Eiko Ishibashi: Evil Does Not Exist (Drag City)
  11. Dirty Three: Love Changes Everything (Drag City)
  12. Eli Keszler: Live 2 (LuckyMe)
  13. Christopher Bissonnette: In a Second Floor Window (12k)
  14. Seefeel: Everything Squared (Warp)
  15. Kali Malone: All Life Long (Ideologic Organ)
  16. Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Challengers (Original Score) (Milan)
  17. FourColor: Lightscape (12k)
  18. Max Richter: In a Landscape (Decca)
  19. Tristan Perich & Ensemble 0: Open Symmetry (Erased Tapes)
  20. Michael A. Muller: Mirror Music (Deutsche Grammophon)
  21. Kenneth Kirschner: Three Cellos (Greyfade)
  22. Patricia Wolf: The Secret Lives of Birds (Nite Hive’)
  23. Nonkeen: All Good? (Leiter)
  24. Adam Wiltzie: Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal (Kranky)
  25. Zimoun: Dust Resonance (Room40)

Back at It with Hannes Pasqualini

More four-panel comics are coming

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

During the first year of the pandemic, Hannes Pasqualini illustrated and I wrote a half dozen four-panel comics: “Foghorns” (March 18, 2020), “Megaphone” (April 6, 2020), “Mentors” (April 13, 2020), “Eavesdrop” (June 15, 2020), “Room Tone” (March 25, 2020), and “Mnemonic” (October 5, 2020). Doing so was a highlight of that dreadful and stressful year. I’m happy to report that we are back at it, and I hope to have a new comic to share soon, and others soon after that. (The above image is a tiny detail of a work-in-progress.)

Meanwhile, Hannes, who is based in Northern Italy, is also at work on some solo material, and here, with permission, is a peek at what he is up to. You can follow his always interesting activities at instagram.com/hannes_pasqualini_illustrator. If you make music with synthesizers, then you may have used modules Hannes worked on, such as those from Mutable Instruments.

Communities in Code

Back to izzzzi.net in 2024

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I initiated a digital semi-break starting on the Friday before (American) Thanksgiving, but then this nifty tool, izzzzi.net, popped up, and I made a brief exception — not a breach, not a betrayal, just a matter of curiosity leading the way. The flourishing of code that encourages community amid a community in which software is a core component — well, that is a very specific place where my head (which is to say: my writing) happens to be at right now (alternative firmware, reciprocal repositories, gardens of forks), so the public announcement of izzzzi was especially well-timed for the current resting state of my receptors. I’m digging izzzzi plenty, both conceptually and practically. I’m not totally offline at the moment, but I have muted much of my digital social life for the remainder of 2024, with izzzzi now included in that self-imposed pause. I’ll be back at it sometime during the first week or so of 2025.