Disquiet Junto Project 0644: Event Horizon

The Assignment: Record music for a party of your choosing.

/ 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 appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

These following instructions went to the group email list (via juntoletter.disquiet.com). 

Disquiet Junto Project 0644: Event Horizon
The Assignment: Record music for a party of your choosing.

Step 1: Imagine a party you want to attend.

Step 2: Write some music that would be appropriate as background music for that event.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0644” (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-0644-event-horizon/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. The party may never end, but your song will just be one among many.

Deadline: Monday, May 6, 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 644th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Event Horizon — The Assignment: Record music for a party of your choosing — at https://disquiet.com/0644/

A Letter from Paul Auster

1947 - 2024

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When I was an editor at the magazines, primarily Pulse!, published by Tower Records, I occasionally sought out writers other than professional critics to write for us, in particular musicians and novelists. The list of novelists who did wasn’t a long one, but it was a respectable one, including as it did Jonathan Lethem, Richard Kadrey, Geoff Nicholson, and the late David Bowman, among others. One who declined was Paul Auster, and in some ways I’m glad he did. Had he said yes to my invitation, I’d only have had an article. But because Auster said no, back in October 1993, I have this letter, postmarked from Brooklyn:

And if the script of his fountain pen is difficult to read, here is the text:

Oct. 6, ’93

Dear Mr. Weidenbaum:

Many thanks for your kind letter. I can’t tell you how touched I was by your invitation. Music is probably the most important thing in my life — more important even than books …

But how to write about it? I’ve tried to do it, but have never managed to say anything that made any sense. Perhaps the real power of music for me is that it resists the grasp of words — and therefore continues to renew itself, endlessly.

If anything ever comes to me for an article or story, I will let you know. But I’m afraid it’s not too likely; so, please don’t count on me. But I am enormously grateful to you for your thinking of me.

With warm regards —

Paul Auster

Tasselmyer’s Gestures

Live sample processing

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Another gorgeous live performance by Andrew Tasselmyer, who here runs four often though not entirely unidentifiable piano samples through various processes, yielding a piece at once cinematic and immediate, at once widescreen and obscure. Watch his hands as he manipulates the source material. Track motions to alterations, finger gestures to sonic morphing. And if you’re familiar with the central instrument, the Octatrack, then you’re no doubt thankful we don’t hear the familiar clack of those plastic buttons, which would be entirely out of place here. I especially appreciate how his index finger ends the performance with a single tap on the laptop’s touchpad. We’re long past the time of rampant doubt about what it is exactly a “laptop musician” is up to (and the associated “are they really performing?”). Here what we see is the same intimacy inherent in expertise that one might expect of a “traditional” (read: “acoustic”) instrument. Manual skills are manual skills, no matter the tools.

Taylor Deupree’s Loop of Loops

From his newsletter, The Imperfect

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I love record albums, certainly, but in 2024, as for many years now, there’s nothing for me quite like fragments posted by musicians online as they work toward a finished work. The word “work” appears twice in that previous sentence, eventually as a synonym for a fixed document, but first as the effort it took to get there. You can hear that sort of effort in an untitled track that Taylor Deupree just posted in his newsletter, which is titled The Imperfect. The recording is just under three minutes of looping drones. Per the brief description, there are two loops: “loop a / Arp2600, pitch pipe, wooden abacus → strymon volante → meris mercury x / loop b / kaleidoloop.” If the words aren’t familiar, a quick search online will reveal the instruments being described. What matters is the result, a kind of lush, syrupy stasis, the sonic equivalent of a nearly blank mind that is stuck on something ponderous, but not uncomfortable with the mental obstacle. It’s a beautiful little treat. The audio is only in Deupree’s newsletter, so you’ll need to click through to listen.

Where and How I Listen

To music, that is

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I have two very small office areas: one at home and one that I rent nearby. Neither has a proper stereo system.

The home office has a small modular synth setup next to my desk. For space-management reasons the speakers (monitors, actually, in music-equipment speak) sit perpendicular to my desk, above the synth. There I usually listen to music on my laptop speakers or headphones. My laptop, a MacBook Pro 14″ (the M1, which is somehow several generations behind but feels quite peppy and looks brand new), has fantastic built-in speakers, but when I really want to listen to something, I walk into the living room, which has proper speakers connected to what once was a proper stereo system and now inspires people point and stare and ask what the heck those big things are beneath the television and why don’t I just have a Bluetooth something or other. I have a Plex system running on a Mac Mini attached to the home stereo, so I can easily collate my digital music files (notably: inbound material I’m considering for review), listen to them in the living room, and access them elsewhere with my phone, iPad, or laptop.

The rental office is self-enclosed but in a shared building with an active hallway, so I only listen to music there on headphones and earbuds, so as not to bug anyone. My main extravagance is I bought a second guitar when I got the rental office, so I can be a terrible guitarist in two places rather than just one, and to avoid looking like an oddly clean-cut itinerant musician were I to walk back and forth with the guitar between home and office regularly.

That is where and how I listen.