A new documentary from photographer and director Anton Corbijn
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Photographer Anton Corbijn has shot some of the most memorable album covers in the history of popular music, many resulting from lengthy collaborations with bands like U2 and Depeche Mode. He has 850 credits on Discogs. And now he has made a documentary about an even greater contribution to the visuals that package recorded music: the studio Hipgnosis, the lengthy discography of which includes Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, and Peter Gabriel’s first three solo albums, among many others.
The film also has the perfect title, Squaring the Circle. Perhaps he, or one of his many interviewees, will answer an underlying question: why has the square, one of the great skeuomorphisms of our time, persisted as the symbol for recorded music, long after 12” LPs, 7” singles, and CDs have been supplanted by cloud-based streaming?
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week (or in this case, the past two weeks). These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (Mastodon).
▰ I signed up for the artifact.news service on my phone to check it out, and of the over 60 categories of news you are to select at least 10 from initially, music wasn’t included.
▰ Thought there was a plane flying overhead, and realized my laptop’s brown noise app had turned on
▰ Whenever someone mentions having “a part time person” as part of their project, I wonder what that entity is when it is not a person
▰ At night before I go to sleep I often record stray thoughts for morning using speech-to-text. Usually they’re comprehensible the next day. Sometimes they’re incomprehensible except as abstract song lyrics, such as what I am currently looking at: “How old I went to lock my love you got some.”
I had the great pleasure recently of speaking with Tim Held for his long-running Podular Modcast, a series that takes its name from Held’s emphasis on modular synthesizers. (Yeah, that’s me on the right.) And I was honored that my episode turned out to be the show’s 250th. We had a fun and rangy chat about synths, the Disquiet Junto, online communities, instruments as works of art, field recordings, and many other topics. Our discussion is the majority of the episode, along with interspersed music performance and some gear overviews by Held. (I appeared once previously on the show, back in 2018, for the Podular Modcast’s ninth episode.)
The Assignment: Record the second third of an asynchronous trio.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Project-Specific Note: You may contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. This week you can do a second one. Please see additional details in Step 5 below.
Answer to Frequent Question: You don’t need to have uploaded a solo in last week’s project to participate in this week’s second phase of the trio sequence.
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, May 8, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 4, 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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0592: Better Than One The Assignment: Record the second third of an asynchronous trio.
Please note: While this is the second part of a three-part project, you can participate in one, two, or all three of the parts, which will occur over the course of three consecutive weeks.
Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second in a sequence intended to encourage and reward asynchronous collaboration. This week you’ll be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0592). Note that you aren’t creating a duet — you’re creating the second third of what will eventually be a trio. Important: Leave space for what is yet to come.
Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to a pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by numerous musicians to choose from. The majority are in this playlist:
Any additional non-SoundCloud entries appear in the discussion:
(Note that it’s possible another track or two will pop up in or disappear from that playlist and discussion. Things are fluid on the internet.)
To select a track, you can listen through all those and choose one, or simply look around and select, or you can come up with a random approach to sifting through them.
Note: It’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece.
It is strongly encouraged that you look through the above discussion on the Lines forum, because many tracks include additional contextual information there.
Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and leave room for an eventual third piece of music. When composing and recording your part, don’t alter the original piece of music at all, except to pan the original fully to the left if it hasn’t been panned left already. In your finished audio track, your new part should be panned fully to the right.
To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.
Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it will be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.
Step 5: You can contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. You can do up to two total. For the second, it’s appreciated if you try to work with a solo that no one else has used yet ( look at the project’s post on Lines, linked to in these instructions, or to the project playlist, which will be posted here once tracks start coming in). The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. After a lot of detailed instruction, that is the spirit of this project.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0592” (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 “disquiet0592” (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:
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. Stick to close the length of the track yours adds to.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 8, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, May 4, 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 592nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Better Than One (The Assignment: Record the second third of an asynchronous trio), at: https://disquiet.com/0592/
