The ceiling at this big box store always makes me feel like I’m on a spaceship in a Star Wars movie. The beeping and overall drone of the room tone support this impression.
Imperial Big Box
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
Disquiet Junto Project 0673: Switch Back
The Assignment: Make the quiet part loud, and vice-versa
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 0673: Switch Back
The Assignment: Make the quiet part loud, and vice-versa.
Just one step this week: Record a piece of music in which you make loud that which is usually quiet and quiet that which is usually loud.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0673” (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-0673-switch-back/
Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you.
Deadline: Monday, November 25, 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 673rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Switch Back — The Assignment: Make the quiet part loud, and vice-versa — at https://disquiet.com/0673/
Getting to the Tracks
How one ends up listening to something
I think sometimes about not just what I listen to but how I get to the music I listen to, how a recording ends up being a focus of my attention. For example:
▰ Taylor Deupree is often on my mind, in his capacity as a musician, and a record label owner, and the moderator of a great Discord, which is an offshoot of his record label. And he has an excellent newsletter on his process, which is how I ended up spending this afternoon listening to some forays into what he calls “digital degradation territory.” Beautiful stuff. Definitely give it a listen.
▰ It was then through another Subtack, dated earlier this month, from the musician Lia Kohl, that I came across the name Dorothy Carlos, whose Split EP, which came out in August, I’ve been listening to quite a bit:
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▰ And then there’s Julian Lage doing the bluesy “Nocturne” live in Manchester, thanks to the steady feed of his YouTube channel:
▰ And the instrumental of Casual’s “That’s Bullshit,” which I sought out after a friend informed me that the rapper Saafir (who appears on the track) had died. Choice taut sampling.
▰ And a couple tracks off the upcoming Oneiris from Chloe Lula. I learned about it from her Instagram. She’s melding her cello with her interest in electronic music. Dramatic stuff.
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EV Car Wash
It's a wet one
Just as the car pulled into the low-rent automatic wash attached to the gas station and wrapping around and behind the snack shop, I pulled my cellphone out of my jacket pocket and hit the big red record button. Not documented here are the interior’s colorful flashing lights, which seemed to exist solely to heighten the mechanized entertainment factor, but the sounds tell enough of the story, beginning with the high-pressure drone of the commercial cavern, proceeding through foam and the thick Lovecraftian tongues that lapped at the windshield, past the oversized brushes, and through the final rinse and drying cycles, followed by the fade-out as the car emerged back into society, just at the start of end-of-day rush hour. This was my first time through a car wash in an electric vehicle — meaning there were no particular sounds emitted by the car itself throughout — and my first time in a car wash in a very long time. A decade, maybe two? The denouement at the end was almost complete when I hit the stop — actually, “Done” — button. (Recorded November 19, 2024, on an iPhone 13 Pro.)
It’s also on freesound.org.
Vibrating with Decisive Purpose
Lowercase glitch from Oleg Malov
Fizzy, twitchy little sonic trinkets, the longest just a couple seconds over four minutes, the shortest a little over two and a half. Lulling bits of room tone split into fragments and scanned through as if with a radio dial. Beats made of considerably less than the sound of dust brushing against a vinyl player’s needle, other times — in classic glitch fashion, here rendered all in lowercase — like a questionable, all-plastic CD player well past its return date. Beats like windshield wipers made of eyelashes. Beats like stray thoughts caught in a spider web on a rickety wooden metronome. A hushed voice struggling to be heard, and yet cagey about what it might want to say. These are the components that comprise New Old Loops, a set as compact as it is delicate, at once intimate and private, and yet vibrating with decisive purpose. The musician is Oleg Malov of Tuapse, Russia. Malov, who goes by Okmiracle, knows exactly what he is doing, and it’s low-key glorious.
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