Disquiet Junto Project 0666: Beauty and the Beast

The Assignment: We've hit a devilish numerical milestone. Do your thing.

/ 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 0666: Beauty and the Beast
The Assignment: We’ve hit a devilish numerical milestone. Do your thing.

This week marks the 666th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project. Many numbers along the way, since the Junto first began in January 2012, have inspired interpretation. This particular one has hovered on the horizon for a long time. And now we’ve arrived. Take a moment to go dark and make some noise.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0666” (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-0666-beauty-and-the-beast/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, October 7, 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 666th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Beauty and the Beast — The Assignment: We’ve hit a devilish numerical milestone. Do your thing. — at https://disquiet.com/0666/

The Dawn of ‘The Dawn of the Dead’

Coming soon

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Stoked to be part of this hilobrow.com series, edited by Heather Quinlan. I got to write about one of my favorite movies of all time (and I wrote about the original, not the remake/reboot). It’ll unfold at hilobrow.com. Great lineup of people to be alongside. Many thanks to Heather and to Josh Glenn.

Insectoid Raga

New organ work from Marco Lucchi

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A gorgeous free-flowing piece by the prolific, broadly talented Marco Lucchi of Modena, Italy, combining pipe organ and synthesizers into a kind of insectoid raga. The track, five minutes or so long, is a whirring drone inside which cascades of organ notes, up and down the scale, pushing through for relative prominence. It tastes of Terry Riley in particular, and in a good way. There’s a remarkable amount of new music for organ being created currently, and this is a splendid addition — both the piece itself, and the combination of instruments.

“Flesh Noise”

The chatter was like rainfall

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I had a few hours to spare so I grabbed a table at a hotel downtown where I passed, far too easily, as a participant of the ongoing professional conference. The wifi required a room number and a corresponding name, but my phone worked fine as a modem. Quite suddenly, an hour and a half into my stint, myriad doors opened and the hallway was packed with actual conference participants, marked by shiny lanyards and purpose-built smiles. The chatter was like rainfall, like a rushing stream, like a flock of chatty birds — dense, rapid, and unintelligible. I recorded 45 seconds. This isn’t white noise (too slow) or brown noise (too shrill). It’s flesh noise.

Humorously, both my laptop and my phone recognized the presence of human speech in the recording, and the Voice Memos app registered this with the little speech bubble icon, which signals that a transcription is available. I wondered what marvel might await, as I went to click on the button. Perhaps the processing power of my five-year-old laptop would be able to discern multiple individual streams of conversation from the tightly packed, overlapping speech. I was disappointed if not surprised. The transcription yielded merely “…..” — an extended ellipsis.

On Repeat: Clarinet, Stasis, Crimson

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ Just Duet: The musician Linus Fung, born in Hong Kong, has been doing some fantastic work folding his clarinet playing into a modular synthesizer format, essentially dueting with himself and transforming his melodic approach live. Here he is heard — and seen, bird’s eye view — building on the Canonic Duets of composer Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767).

▰ ’Tis the Season: Glacial stasis these days doesn’t necessarily come too easily. I’m not certain I would put it that way. But with so many available tools to achieve it, listeners can benefit from recordings that explore now common granular lushness as an element or a context rather than an end unto itself. Case in point, the way metallic slurry and vibrant shifts in tonality push beyond standard harmonic haze on autumnal_city_01 by autumnal_city.

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▰ Back in Court: Half of the classic early-1980s lineup of King Crimson is currently touring music from that trio of great albums: Discipline, Beat, and Three of a Perfect Pair. I’ve been spending a lot of time tracking fan uploads of video from the various concerts, and a highlight is this rendition of “The Sheltering Sky,” with original guitarist Adrian Belew and bassist (and Chapman Stick player) Tony Levin, plus Steve Vai riffing on Robert Fripp’s work, and Danny Carey (of Tool) playing — literally, I believe — Bill Bruford’s drums. The quartet goes simply by the name Beat.