Disquiet

Disquiet Junto Project 0611: Music That Listens to Itself

The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds.

September 14, 2023September 13, 2023 / 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 just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. 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. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, September 18, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 14, 2023.

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 out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).

Disquiet Junto Project 0611: Music That Listens to Itself
The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds.

Background: On September 29, 2023, there is going to be an event at a place called the Berkeley Alembic, in Berkeley, California, where I’ll play recordings of music that share a specific theme, and I’ll discuss the sounds with the people who come to listen. The event is titled Music That Listens to Itself, part of the Expanded Listening series developed by Erik Davis (Techgnosis, Burning Shore). That is the theme. Part of the goal of this project is to develop tracks for potential inclusion in the event, and to pursue ideas related to the event’s theme.

Step 1: The underlying idea is to produce music that, so to speak, listens to itself. This would be music that employs techniques to revisit itself — repurposes itself — as it proceeds. From reverb to echo to tape loops to granular synthesis to accessing a buffer, various techniques serve such a compositional and performance purpose. Consider a means to achieve this result.

Step 2: Record a piece of music that employs the technique you focused on as a result of Step 1. Please note: for the Berkeley Alembic event, I’ll be sharing music that is particularly quiet, particularly appropriate to a meditative state of mind. You don’t need to record quiet music for this project, but quiet music is what I’ll be playing at the event.

Additional details:

https://disquiet.com/2023/09/03/music-that-listens-to-itself-expanded-listening-berkeley-alembic/

Tickets:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/expanded-listening-music-that-listens-to-itself-tickets-712124101357

About the venue:

https://berkeleyalembic.org

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0611” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0611” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0611-music-that-listens-to-itself/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. About 10 minutes maximum is best, and probably no shorter than three minutes.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, September 18, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 14, 2023.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 611th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music That Listens to Itself (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds), at: https://disquiet.com/0611/

Some of the music resulting from this project may be included in a September 29, 2023, event at the Berkeley Alembic in Berkeley, California: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/expanded-listening-music-that-listens-to-itself-tickets-712124101357

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0611-music-that-listens-to-itself/

Death Hags’ Junto Episode

Her listen.camp show, Big Grey Sun 2.0, collected tracks from one of the Musikfestival Bern projects

September 13, 2023September 13, 2023 / By Marc Weidenbaum

For the September 9, 2023, episode on her listen.camp show, Big Grey Sun 2.0, L.A. musician/producer Lola G. (aka Death Hags) played over a dozen tracks from the first of the three Disquiet Junto projects that participants did this year in collaboration with Musikfestival Bern. The theme of this project, number 0590, Concrète Roots, was: Make music combining field recordings and feedback.

This is the playlist from “Big Grey Sun 2.0 / 09th September 2023,” which is hosted at mixcloud.com:

Campos – “Concrete Roots”
xhg – “Glocken”
mikey_a – “Under the Bridge”
Jazzaria – “Urban Reflections”
Jonathan Zorn – “Bubblegong”
doodledigital – “Foreshore Trudge”
OhWell – “Union Square (alt. take)”
Ray Cobley – “Resonant Range”
xhg – “Socrates”
Fake Genius – “Minority”
Marc Eisenschink – “Take a Filter Ride”
Lee Evans – “Agediale Ruin”
wasabicube – “Descente”
encym – “Filter Progression”

Work Tools (Apps)

All mod cons — as far as writing-oriented software goes

September 12, 2023September 13, 2023 / By Marc Weidenbaum

I write a lot, all the time, and I do so in a lot of different apps. I work on a MacBook laptop, an iPhone, and an iPad of late. Not so many years ago, I was evenly split between a Windows laptop, an Android phone, and an Apple iPad. Back then I used to joke that Dropbox was my operating system. I was on Nokia phones before the Android G1, and then on various other Android phones until the iPhone 13 came out. Due to a confluence of reasons, after that I ended up, for the first time, with all my major devices in the same single corporate realm (née “ecosystem,” which is a snazzy word for variably regulated shopping mall). I also have a cheap, used Samsung tablet as a second screen (or third, given the iPad). Below are the main pieces of software I use. I use a bunch of others, too, and I may add some to this list as time goes on.

Notes / Writing

▰ I primarily use Obsidian (obsidian.md) for the majority of my organized notes, which are broken down by date and project. Obsidian is a recent move for me, from IA Writer, and before that a variety of other Markdown tools, including Atom and Sublime. I sync Obsidian with my iPhone and iPad thanks to iCloud, which works fine. I use the tabbed and multi-window options in Obsidian a lot.

▰ I take quick notes in Apple Notes, which syncs fairly well, though there are odd hiccups.

▰ I do most of my longer-form writing (anything over 1,000 words) in Scrivener (literatureandlatte.com) for a simple reason: a specific feature that, to my knowledge, only Scrivener and another writing tool, called Ulysses, provide. This is the ability to split a single document into multiple sections, and to be able to view and edit any consecutive subset of them. It’s fantastic.

▰ Anything simple that requires collaborative editing I do in Google Drive.

To Do

▰ I have several sheets in Google Sheets that are formatted as virtual whiteboards, one of which is always displayed on my side screen (a cheap, used Samsung tablet). This has two benefits: (1) I can turn off my whiteboard at the end of the day; (2) I can see my whiteboard even when I’m not home.

▰ Apple Reminders — I’ve tried ’em all (Any.do, Trello, etc.), and none of them have really worked for me, but to the extent I use any to-do app, it’s currently Reminders. Before this, Todoist was the one that worked best for me.

Other

▰ Pinboard.in for bookmarks, with an app that syncs on my phone. It’s incredibly bare bones, which is to say: it does what it’s supposed to. I tag everything by project, and I have a few lists of things (like newspapers and other resources) that I check every morning over coffee.

▰ Duet (duetdisplay.com) lets me use my Samsung tablet as a second screen from my laptop.

▰ Horo (matthewpalmer.net) is a laptop timer. It’s somewhat finicky, but it’s simple and sits in the menu bar.

▰ Blurred (via github.com) is set up in the laptop menu bar. Whichever window is currently “active” appears slightly brighter than all the others, of which there are generally many.

▰ Chill (see the dev’s website) is a white-noise app that sits in the laptop menu bar. I like the Airplane mode.

▰ MacWhisper (goodsnooze.gumroad.com) is a fantastic laptop speech-to-text tool. I use it a lot.

▰ Keysmith (keysmith.app) is an easy way on your laptop to save text phrases to be called up with keyboard commands. I pretty much use it for just one thing consistently, which is the day’s date, which I format as “YEAR.MM.DD / Weekday” (e.g., 2023.09.12 / Tuesday).

▰ TextSniper (textsniper.app) is an incredible tool to copy any text from your laptop screen. If I’m watching a movie and the end credits roll and I want to simply copy the names of everyone involved in sound, I select that portion of the screen, and TextSniper turns that into actual words I can then paste into a document.

▰ AirBuddy (airbuddy.app), which hangs out in the laptop menu bar, for whatever reason connects my AirPods to my laptop better than the default Apple settings.

▰ MonitorControl (via github.com) lets you control the brightness of external monitors the way you do your laptop monitor.

▰ Goodnotes (goodnotes.com) is the primary tool I use for (1) reading and making notes on PDFs, and (2) taking handwritten notes on specialized “virtual” paper (e.g., sheet music). I’m hopeful that the eventual reMarkable 3 tablet will be backlit. If that happens, I’ll give it a try.

▰ Kindle: I have a Kindle (the current one, the first with USB-C) and it’s the main thing I read books on (other than comic books), though I sometimes read on my laptop and iPad, too.

Acoustic Drone Music from Sweden

The group Trio Ramberget is poised to release new commissions

September 11, 2023September 10, 2023 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The title track on Drone Positions by the Gothenburg, Sweden, group Trio Ramberget is a promising taste of the full set, which is due out on September 29. The ensemble consists of three horn players: Gustav Davidsson, trombone; Johanna Ekholm, double bass; and Pelle Westlin, bass clarinet. They are joined on the album by a half dozen guests playing, among other things, piano, guitar, vibraphone, and a tape deck, as well as singing. “Drone Positions” is a luxurious descent into deep deep timbre. The sounds are dense and glottal, rich and vibrant. There is an earthy sibilance throughout, and a steady — if glacial — sense of melodic development. It’s wondrous.

https://trioramberget.bandcamp.com/album/drone-positions