Night After Night

A remix by Van Stiefel

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One of the great internet pleasures is to have your music reworked, all the more so to find that someone has taken one of your guitar loop experiments and expanded it to a nearly 30-minute amalgam of coded glitch refraction and improvised soloing. This reworking is by the saintly and enviably talented Van Stiefel.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/vanstiefel](https://soundcloud.com/vanstiefel/disquiet-night-there-and-back-remix). More from Stiefel, a professor of music composition at the Wells School of Music of West Chester University of Pennsylvania, at [vanstiefel.com](https://www.vanstiefel.com/).

And here’s my [original](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/night-there-and-back), by way of comparison:

Disquiet Junto Project 0501: PKD Playback

The Assignment: Record the sound of a Martian daydream, interrupted.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, August 9, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 5, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0501: PKD Playback

The Assignment: Record the sound of a Martian daydream, interrupted.

Step 1: Early on in the Philip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” a man name Quail has a daydream interrupted. He dreams of visiting Mars, but then reality intrudes: “the daylight, the mundane noise of his wife now brushing her hair before the bedroom mirror — everything conspired to remind him of what he was.” As the reader will learn, Quail has in fact already visited Mars, subsequent to which his mind was wiped free of the visit. His daydream at the start of the story is as much a remnant memory as it is a wish to be fulfilled. Keep this scenario in mind, and maybe read the short story.

Step 2: Record the sound of some realistic-feeling alien landscape, perhaps Martian, and then at the very end of the recording have real-world sounds appear to break the spell.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0501” (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 “disquiet0501” (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-0501-pkd-playback/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0501-pkd-playback/)

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.

Note: Please post one track per 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:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, August 9, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 5, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you, with or without the Martian time-slip.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0501” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

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 501st weekly Disquiet Junto project — PKD Playback (The Assignment: Record the sound of a Martian daydream, interrupted) — at: https://disquiet.com/0501/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0501-pkd-playback/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0501-pkd-playback/)

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is used via NASA/JPL-Caltech:

[https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/perseverance-s-left-navcam-views-ingenuity-during-its-third-flight](https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/perseverance-s-left-navcam-views-ingenuity-during-its-third-flight)

Sawtooth Waves IRL

Or: Horticulture at work

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I was mostly struck by the quiet irony of the word “plant” on the sign. Only later, when I got [home](https://www.flickr.com/photos/disquietpxl/51353752328/in/datetaken-public/) from my walk, did I connect the orange and white angles on the sign to the angles at the top of the fence, and how the top of the fence casts a serrated shadow on the sidewalk. (Someone on Twitter subsequently [pointed out](https://twitter.com/kaboodlesound/status/1422806241500348416) that the sawtooth could, itself, be a musical score.)

Rhythm, Approaches, Publishing, and Unlike Minds

Four Disquiet Junto observations from community member Marty Petkovich

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Joule, aka Marty Petkovich, today posted the following four thoughts about the Disquiet Junto music community, which is based around weekly composition prompts. I am reproducing them here (from the [llllllll.co](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0500-humming-to-your-selves/47215/36?u=disquiet) message board) with Marty’s permission:

> 1. It creates a weekly rhythm in the creative process — even when I can’t participate, I think about where I would take the challenge upon release of the prompt.
>
> 2. It forces me to use equipment and technology that I might not otherwise try, and I am always happy to move past the barrier of new approaches
>
> 3. It forces me to publish/produce which is really the only way to get ideas out of my own head and into another medium. Ideas are easy, producing them is hard – and material only gets better when there is a persistent effort to build a volume of work.
>
> 4. It provides an audience of unlike-minded artists having vastly greater talent and with so many different approaches to the same challenge who listen and thoughtfully comment on the work — even if the listening is only the first 15 seconds, it means that I should make the first 15 seconds worth hearing.

If Marty’s name is familiar, it may be because he proposed the Carillon Quotidian project we did back in April: [disquiet.com/0487](https://disquiet.com/0487/).

Gaseous Shimmering Ambience

From Tokyo-based Yreil

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is gaseous shimmering ambience, and there there is gaseous shimmering ambience, and few things shimmer like “Solitaire,” a new track from Yreil, aka Christian Yreil. It is a massive billowing orchestral pause, like someone caught in bullet time a split second of the tuning-up just before a symphony gets underway, and then managed to extend it, lingering in its luxuriant spaciousness for well over five minutes.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/yreil](https://soundcloud.com/yreil/alone). Yreil, who has a second SoundCloud account, [soundcloud.com/liery-zanmu](https://soundcloud.com/liery-zanmu), is based in Tokyo, Japan. Found via a repost by [Marco Lucchi](https://soundcloud.com/marcolucchi).