Disquiet Junto Project 0732: Color Drenching

The Assignment: What does it sound like?

/ 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 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 also generally appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0732: Color Drenching
The Assignment: What does it sound like?

Step 1: Consider the design concept of “color drenching.”

Step 2: Record a piece of music that you think sounds like color drenching.

Note: The New York Times has described “color drenching” in interior design as “meaning the walls, ceiling and even trim are painted using the same [color].”

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0732” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0732-color-drenching/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, January 12, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

License: It’s preferred (but not required) 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 732nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Color Drenching — The Assignment: What does it sound like? — at https://disquiet.com/0732/

Jamuary 2026 03–05

Three more, so five days so far

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Hey, I’ve made it five days into Jamuary, so not so bad. (More on what Jamuary is here.) I’m not going to post all of these as individual posts, but since I was pretty happy with the fifth one, I figured I’d tie the most recent three into one post.

▰ 05\31 — “Ives Talkin'”: I’ve lately been making a lot of field recordings, mostly of what people might think of as noise: urban and rural, interior and exterior, and various realms in between. Among those recordings are occasional snippets of other people: speaking, singing, making music, doing things. Recording people feels, to me, a bit like taking photos of people, which is to say I’m not entirely comfortable with it. In particular, I’m not sure I’d share field recordings of musicians overheard on the street. What I’ve done here, in contrast, is to take two field recordings and combine them, the source material pushed past the point of recognizability. In VCV Rack I then placed those two quite different recordings into a pair of sample modules, and then set four markers in each, the positions determined by sample and hold of a noise source. I then put those through respective switches so they rotated through, and those outputs through switches that went back and forth between the two different sources. Then I slowly ratcheted up the speed at which that back and forth occurred, faster and faster, manually, until I finally jumped back to a slower pace, which brought it all to a conclusion.

▰ 04\31 — “Chatter Boxing”: Three sounds in one, all excerpted from field recordings. The underlying structure that sets the pace is a small snippet of an industrial drone, courtesy of the regional power company’s backup generators, put on repeat. The two other elements are both chatter, one from birds and the other from humans, repeating in differing patterns. What might be discerned as a melodic bass element is some background music playing during the recording of human chatter. All done in VCV Rack.

▰ 03\31 — “Re: Generators”: Third day of Jamuary, working just in VCV Rack. I had this field recording of the noise from massive generators temporarily installed in the neighborhood during a recent citywide power outage. The volume was just shy of 100 decibels. I slowed the track down, which significantly lowered the pitch, and then ran two slightly out of sync treatments. One of them turned on and off a high-pass filter, while the other glitched out the sounds. Think of it as processing infrastructure-induced trauma.

#30s Two Block Drone

Distance is a filter

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

My favorite — or at least my most utilized — synthesizer module is probably the low-pass filter. I like trimming the upper end off a signal. I like how doing so can make a sound feel distant, not just physically but emotionally. There is no active filtering on this recording, however. This is simply a very loud noise, continuously registering at nearly 100 decibels, as heard from roughly two blocks away. Distance, in other words, provides the filter. Massive portable electric generators, running on diesel and each the size of a dry freight trailer, had been placed outside a local substation when power outages hit much of the city. Up close, the sound was painful. Blocks away, it could still disturb your sleep. Out on the street, the drone — present but, of course, invisible — felt alien: unwanted, unexpected, and, foremost, uncanny. As the days went on, the sound became more familiar, but never any more welcome. After power was restored and the machines were turned off, however, I could appreciate the tonality by listening back to a short clip. I could luxuriate in the slow waveforms, and enjoy the way the drone collaborated with the sound of passing vehicles. Recording is a form of capture. I had captured the alien presence with my recording device, and now it was under my control, rather than the other way around.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on December 24, 2025. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of an ongoing series of field recordings that generally last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.

On Repeat: Arnalds, Flugelhorn, Dub

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ This video (and the album it promotes), by flugelhorn player Andris Mattson, exemplifies the reason I do these On Repeat segments. It’s music I listen to a lot, and keep thinking, “Oh, I’ll hold off on mentioning this, because I want to say more,” and then time passes. The album, simply titled Flugel, came out at the start of December, and the video shows how Mattson transforms the sound of his horn live. Beautiful, richly harmonic work.

[bandcamp width=640 height=373 album=105782657 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

▰ This is a little hyper-specific, but I have found myself going back to this single-video collection for one specific note. Ólafur Arnalds, on piano, had some musicians over for the shortest day of the year to play together, and this was the result. At 5:58 — in a video that lasts just over 14 minutes — he lets a motif resolve, and then it just lingers in the air for about nine seconds. Even before it fades, other sounds occur, as the the video shifts from one vignette to another.

▰ Very pleasing dub techno from Pittsburgh-based bytecas, aka Rui Peixoto, all the better because it’s 10 minutes long, so it really becomes encompassing.

▰ Stellar little ambient modular synth sketch by he_nu_ri, who’s based in California.

#30s Bird Bathroom

The real inside the real

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The main dining room of the restaurant drew little attention to itself. The terrazzo tables were functional: smooth surfaces and a complicated enough design to hide dropped morsels and small spills. The lighting came from massive, fabric-covered globes. The main nod to any sort of motif was a series of paintings high on the walls, images of birds so plainly figurative they seemed to have been sourced from encyclopedias rather than from the natural world. The bathroom was small, functional, and nearly as clean as the dining room, despite constant use by diners. What at first sounded inside the bathroom like an echo of voices from outside (though there is some of that, too) turned out to be piped-in bird chatter set to loop endlessly. There were no bird paintings on the bathroom walls, but the ear and eye connected the intention in the dots. This is, in effect, a field recording of a field recording, the real inside the real. (The bathroom photographed here is not the same as the one where the recording was made.)

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Friday, January 2, 2026, in San Francisco. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of an ongoing series of field recordings that generally last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.