Unfolding Trios

Background on an especially popular Disquiet Junto project sequence

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each week, the music community I have managed since 2012, the Disquiet Junto, receives and acts on a music composition prompt that is sent out via email. I mention the latest of these projects in each Tuesday’s This Week in Sound issue, as the prompts end each Monday (at 11:59pm, wherever a given participant may be). This week we’ve embarked on what is often among the most popular and active projects of the year, which is why I’m mentioning it while it’s still underway. Barely a day and a half after the project went live, already over 20 musicians had contributed to the SoundCloud playlist, with additional folks posting from YouTube and other hosting services on llllllll.co, where Junto discussion usually takes place. That was Friday evening, when I sent out an issue of This Week in Sound, containing an earlier version of this post. As I update it right now, just after noon on Sunday, there are 35 tracks in the playlist, plus a YouTube video on llllllll.co.

Dr. Ethan Hein, a frequent and longtime Junto participant, who has also written a lot about the Junto over the years, has said this particular project is “a horizon-broadening creative experience.” What he’s referring to is not just this specific week’s project, but also the two that will follow in the coming weeks. 

You see, how this sequence of projects works is that the first week, participants upload a solo piece, one that is intended to, over time, with the contributions of other musicians, become a trio. Thus, for the first week, it’s helpful for participants to leave room for who and what will follow. 

The second week, musicians each select solo pieces from week one, pan them to the left, and add a second channel on the right, creating not just duets, but incomplete ones. Then the final week, new participants add a third track in the center, thus completing the trios. 

It’s a pretty incredible project to listen to as it unfolds, especially when, come week two, you can sometimes hear multiple duets built from one initial solo track — and the same, when the trios are complete, come week three. Sometimes there’s even a fourth week, when Junto members remix the trios, utilizing the raw source material from previous weeks. We’ll see what happens. I sometimes consider doing a “quartet” version of this project, but that always feels ever so slightly too busy. Maybe down the road.

If you have interest and time, please join in (details at disquiet.com/0591). And check back in a week when the duets begin to take shape.

Austin Kleon’s Concrete Poetry

A debt to Tom Phillips, and extracting music from an obituary

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

An Austin, Texas–based artist and all around generous thinker about creativity, Austin Kleon is a great admirer — as am I — of the late Tom Phillips, who died last November at age 85. Kleon is also a marvelous practitioner of one of Phillips’ primary techniques, which was to extract concrete poetry from pre-existing texts. 

Phillips achieved this most famously in his ongoing project The Humument, which had several editions, all of them exacting reworkings of an earlier book, called The Human Document, by William Hurrell Mallock, who died in 1923, 14 years before Phillips was born. 

Where Phillips often employed dramatic colors and textures, Kleon often brings an energetic, brutalist vibrancy to his pieces. Shown here is a recent favorite of mine, reproduced with the artist’s permission:

Kleon, who often bases such poems on newspaper clippings, explained to me that this one came from a New York Times obituary (gift link) from last August for Sy Johnson, an arranger who collaborated with Charles Mingus, the jazz bassist and composer. I love the “music” that Kleon found within an obituary that had music as its topic, and I love the idea that such a phrase could emanate from the original, unbeknownst to the overall text’s “first” writer. 

The scenario reminds me of an often quoted comment about aesthetics by novelist Don DeLillo: “when I work I have a sculptor’s sense of the shape of the words I’m making.” Kleon is, as well, a sculptor in this manner, making shapes from raw materials provided, unwittingly, by another writer, who in DeLillo’s thinking is also a sculptor.

When granting approval to share this piece, Kleon also explained to me an aspect of his approach: “I don’t ‘read’ the article first when I make these — try to think of them as a raw field of words, like a word search puzzle.”

Scratch Pad: Fog, NCC-1701, the ’90s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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).

▰ Tried to type “Tonka truck.” My phone corrected it to “atonal truck.” Now I want an atonal truck. I assume it’s an EV with bespoke music licensed from the estates of serialist composers and revised by an AI.

▰ I’m so into the music in the TV series Rabbit Hole that last night I apparently dreamed a scene that wasn’t in the show. The composer is Siddhartha Khosla (Only Murders in the Building, The Mysterious Benedict Society, This Is Us).

▰ Morning sounds: ticking clock (the only one in the house that ticks, in the kitchen), passing cars, distant motorcycle revving (now drawing closer), overhead jet plane, low level hum of the refrigerator

▰ The foghorns are in full-blown Wookiee-in-heat mode

▰ The Roddenberry Archive (roddenberry.x.io) of all the major Star Trek Enterprise ships in 3D is pretty cool, but it feels like a missed opportunity in that, far as I can tell, there’s no sound, which was such an important part of the place-setting in the shows and movies:

▰ Now this took me back: “The History of the Bay Area’s Most Notorious ’90s Rave Warehouse” (sfgate.com). The article itself was published a year ago, but the events at the Oakland International Trade Center (near the Home Base store, from which the space took its name) were back in the 1990s, not long after I’d moved to California. I used to joke, back at the time, that it shoulda been called Home Bass. I recall one night with Juan Atkins and Derrick May, where they played for hours without seeming to look at each other once and yet remained perfectly in sync. Magic time. I remember a DJ — maybe someone in Cold Cut, or maybe Kid Koala? — had a camera focused on the turntable’s tone arm, projected on a huge screen. Anyhow, lots of great memories. My favorite spot was standing in the void between two different simultaneous acts, and enjoying how the contrasting music overlapped. Eventually cellphones changed everything. You no longer got lost in the crowd. Safety-wise, definitely a good thing, but it also changed the experience irreparably.

Numbers Stations by the Numbers

Lots of music beyond that famous Wilco track

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I knew that the band Wilco had used audio from a “numbers station” in some of its music long ago. The song, “Poor Places,” appeared on the album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which took its title from the source audio. Numbers stations were (and in some cases apparently still are) peculiar vestiges of Cold War times, simply voices sending out coded messages as sequences of spoken numbers, fully in public, usually on shortwave radio. Presuming the utilized code is strong enough, this information can exist out in the open, and be easily received by its intended audience, with no one else having any knowledge of what is actually being communicated.

This new video, from a YouTube channel called Ringway Manchester, runs through source numbers station audio that has been sampled on numerous music releases over the years. I had no idea this many songs had used numbers stations. And the comments below the video are full of additional examples and details (Thanks, Mark Rushton, for having shared this with me!)

Disquiet Junto Project 0591: The Loneliest Number

The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio.

/ 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, May 1, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 27, 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 0591: The Loneliest Number
The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio.

Please note: While this is the start of a three-part project, you can participate in one, two, or all three of the parts, which will occur over the next three weeks.

Step 1: This week’s Junto project is the first in a sequence intended to encourage and reward collaboration. You will be recording something with the understanding that it will remain unfinished for the time being. Your part will be done, but more will happen. Read on.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music using any instrumentation of your choice. Conceive the piece as something that leaves room for something else — other instruments, other people — to join in.

Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly two to three minutes in length, as described in Step 2.

Step 4: This is important: be sure to make your track downloadable because it may be used by someone else in the next Disquiet Junto project, and then after that.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0591” (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 “disquiet0591” (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-0591-the-loneliest-number/

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. Usually between one and a half and three minutes works well for this project.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 1, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 27, 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 591st weekly Disquiet Junto project, The Loneliest Number (The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio), at: https://disquiet.com/0591/

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-0591-the-loneliest-number/