Disquiet Junto Project 0639: Path Ways (4 of 3)

The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways.

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 0639: Path Ways (4 of 3)
The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways.

These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully. Originally this trios sequence of projects would have ended with the completion of the trios after three consecutive weeks. However, those went particularly well, so let’s see if we can push it a little further.

Please note: You needn’t have participated in any of the prior Junto projects to participate in this one. 

Step 1: In the previous project, we completed musical trios. Project 0638 was the third of three consecutive projects. In the first one, 0636, musicians recorded solos. In the second, 0637, musicians took those 0636 tracks, nudged them to the left side of the stereo spectrum, and then added their own music to the right, forming duets with a hole in the middle. In project 0638, other musicians introduced a third track down the center of the 0637 recordings, completing the trios. You can revisit the music via the blog posts disquiet.com/0636, disquiet.com/0637, and disquiet.com/0638, and you can follow the forking paths through the related Google Drive spreadsheet.

Step 2: The goal of this project is to rework the material that accumulated over the course of the previous three projects. There are two main ways to go about this. One is to simply choose one or more tracks and remix, combine, mash-up, or otherwise transform them. The other is to move on to Step 3.

Step 3: Choose one 0636 track, a solo, that yielded more than one 0638 trio. (These are highlighted in light blue, or maybe it’s teal, in the leftmost column of the spreadsheet.) Trace the various routes that 0636 track took. Perhaps it also led to some 0637 tracks that never went any further. Perhaps there are various 0638 versions based on varied 0637 versions. In any case, record a piece of music that lets the listener experience the branching paths that the original 0636 track took over the course of the three phases of the trios project sequence. Clearly you will be using a linear form to represent variations, so how to achieve that will require some compositional ingenuity. But you’re up to the task.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include either “disquiet0639remix” (if you follow the loose rules of Step 2) or “disquiet0639paths” (if you follow the more specific rules of Step 3) 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-0639-path-ways-4-of-3/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is entirely up to you.

Deadline: Monday, April 1, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

License: It’s required for this sequence of projects 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 639th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Path Ways (4 of 3) — The Assignment: Rework musical trios using the constituent parts — one of two ways — at https://disquiet.com/0639/

In Advance of Disquiet Junto Project 0639

A note to community members

This went out to juntoletter.disquiet.com subscribers just before noon Pacific on March 27:

One nice thing about having moved to Buttondown for these Disquiet Junto project emails (from TinyLetter, which was shut down just over a month ago by its parent company, Mailchimp) is that I can send more emails than I used to be able to.

Previously, sending one email each week kept the list just under the maximum that the account was capable of. I promise to not start sending out emails willy-nilly. It’s just nice to have the freedom to communicate a bit off-cycle, solely to the extent that it serves the projects and the Junto community.

All of which is a lead up to a simple request: please make sure, if you did tracks for project 0638, that they are downloadable (whether you posted to SoundCloud or to YouTube). This was stated in the 0638 instructions. I mention this here because project 0639 will build on project 0638. This recent sequence was initially planned to be a three-part project, but with the option to extend it further if it went well. Suffice to say, the past three projects went very well, indeed.

The official project instructions for 0639 will go out in about 11.5 hours, shortly after midnight California time tomorrow.

Day … Groundhog Day … Groundhog

Coming up soon

I’m excited to have a short piece on Groundhog Day, one of my favorite movies (and, perhaps just as key, one of my favorite stories), in this series alongside some friends and writers I admire. It’ll be rolling out on hilobrow.com over the next few months.

Check out the announcement post.

Kelly Moran’s Ice Breaker

An advance listen to the pianist's upcoming album, Moves in the Field

This first appeared in the March 21, 2024, issue of the This Week in Sound email newsletter, also the newsletter’s 22nd Listening Post.

Just over a year into the pandemic, Kelly Moran marked most electronic music fans’ favorite annual holiday, April 14, in honor of the Aphex Twin song “Avril 14th,” with the requisite solo piano cover. She recorded her video with a camera that she set to look directly down on her keyboard, and at first all we see is the piano — even after the music starts playing. Magically, the keys move without anyone touching them, and then her hands — slender, sensual, nails gleaming colorfully — appear alongside the ghost accompaniment and flesh out her own version of the song. 

It turns out that she was performing on a Disklavier, on loan from Yamaha, the same instrument on which Aphex Twin reportedly recorded the original version. “Avril 14th” appeared on his 2001 album, Drukqs; Moran’s cover marked the 20th anniversary. 

More time has passed. In the years since that simple (if deceptively so) Aphex Twin experiment of hers, Moran has come to wield the Disklavier not just expertly but ferociously. She has pushed its feature set further. The instrument allows her to record parts and play along with them, and record that and play along with that. Her deep pandemic studies have yielded impossible, post-human music that is truly hyperactive, with chords that no human could accomplish on their lonesome in cadences no human could play for a prolonged period. The works are crystalline paradoxes at warp speed. It’s absolutely perfect that “Butterfly Phase,” the lead video for her forthcoming record, Moves in the Field (due out March 29), involves figure skating, because aesthetically that’s what Moran’s current music is: calisthenic, showy, muscular, and deeply competitive. (Regarding that last point, the title comes from the term in skating for the tests of a competitor’s abilities.) 

Both “Butterfly Phase” and another track, “Sodalis (II),” are available as previews in advance of the full album’s release:

https://kellymoran.bandcamp.com/album/moves-in-the-field