Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ This is my favorite of some of the recent pieces that guitarist Simon Farintosh has posted, maybe because it feels especially close to the original in tone, like the pace of the source material and the size of the room in which it was captured. Farintosh is best known for his transcriptions for classical guitar of Aphex Twin’s music (about which I’ve interviewed him). Here he does “The Frail” from Nine Inch Nails.
▰ Gorgeous trio, featuring frequent Disquiet Junto participant De Vis with bassist Roy Mastega and a horn player I’ve yet to identify. It’s somewhere between a slowed down “Love Supreme” and an especially stripped down Jon Hassell.
▰ And I’ve been spending a lot of time with some other albums I’ve mentioned recently, notably Years of Ambiguity from keyboardist Kjetil Husebø, supported by Eivind Aarset and Arve Henriksen, and Travel from the Necks.
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means @[email protected] (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.
▰ The siren of the emergency vehicle passing by sounds like a goose with its feathers on fire
▰ The 2024 Oscar race has already begun outside my window, where insane wind is loudly pursuing a Best Sound award
▰ The zombie episode of The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House is so great — watching characters come alive by being undead. Such a wonderful series.
▰ One thing I love about the process of returning a library book (besides, you know, the free* part) is imagining who will get it next. I just returned Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, which I held onto after I finished reading it because I kept sneaking peeks back at passages I’d noted. I kinda wish there were a way, with local libraries, to opt into a “book chain,” where you can meet people who read the same book around the same time.
*yeah yeah taxes — shaddup
▰ Me this morning: I probably don’t need this second large screen in the office.
Me this evening: I could use a third large screen.
I know a few people who have actually left social media behind, but a lot of the time people who argue for exiting social media mean one thing by it, while participating — sometimes quite heavily — on another: no Facebook, but plenty of Mastodon; no Twitter, but loads of Instagram; no TikTok, but knee deep in Reddit. It’s a bit like people who mention with some frequency how there’s no TV in their home, but thanks to the “it doesn’t count” screen called a laptop or a tablet, they’re more than fluent when it comes to the latest prestige series.
Like many things, social media in moderation — both in frequency and subject matter — can be fine. This was all on my mind as conversation unfolded on a post I made the other day about a hand-me-down Sony cassette player-recorder — not here, but on Instagram, where the benefits of #hashtags brought people I didn’t even know to the post. And they, along with others I do know, shared their experience with cassettes, including (see the screenshot above) tips about the object in hand.
Email Announcements: This Tinyletter webapp is become less usable as we get gain members. We’re nearing 2,000 subscribers. I will likely switch to Substack or to another (free) service at some point this year. Suggestions appreciated. No matter what service I end up using, subscription to this announcement list will, absolutely, always be free. (The main issue with Tinyletter is I now can’t send more than five emails a month without going over the limit of recipients, and that means I can’t send out occasional other important news, which I’d like to do sometimes.)
Profile Series: Earlier this week I posted the sixth in the currently weekly series of Junto Profiles, this one with longtime Junto member Jason Richardson. I have a bunch all set to go, and more in the works. If you’re interested in being interviewed for the series, just let me know. I ask that you wait until you’ve been a regular participant for nine months. Much appreciated.
Collaboration Projects: One of the most popular Junto projects each year has been, in fact, three or four projects — the sequence where we create trios asynchronously one week at a time. We haven’t done this yet in 2023, but we will in the near future. Also this year, I’m thinking about either doing it as a quartet, or doing both a trio sequence and a quartet sequence at different times during the year. In either case, one such sequence is coming up soon. Or soon-ish.
The Assignment: Fast forward an old track to make a new one.
/ 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, March 20, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 16, 2023.
These following instructions went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).
Disquiet Junto Project 0585: F9
The Assignment: Fast forward an old track to make a new one.
Step 1: Many media playback apps for laptops (among other devices) include the option to fast forward through a track manually. Some apps have settings that allow you to adjust the length of the gap that will be jumped. Find a tool that can do this. VLC (videolan.org/vlc) is recommended. In VLC you can jump forward in set lengths of time by repeatedly pressing (not holding, but repeatedly pressing) the right arrow on your keyboard.
Step 2: Try this process with a few of your own recordings: hitting the right arrow at a steady pace (as quickly as every split second, as slowly as every two or three seconds).
Step 3: Locate a track of your own where doing what is described in Step 2 yields a result you find pleasing.
Step 4: Record what the result of Step 3 sounds like for one of your pre-existing tracks. (This may be old hat, if you have used Loopback or similar software. You could also just record the output from your laptop’s speaker.)
Step 5: Use the result of Step 4 as the foundation for a new piece of music. You can add as little or as much as you would like to it.
Notes: (1) You may find you can simulate this effect. (2) You can loop the result of Step 4 if what it yields is too short.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0585” (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 “disquiet0585” (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. Just because it’s fast forwarded doesn’t mean it needs to be short.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 20, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 16, 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 585th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Generations (The Assignment: Fast forward an old track to make a new one), at: https://disquiet.com/0585/
