Redwoods, June 2021
Scene report
It’s been a good week. Back from the redwoods.
Requisite redwoods-visit photo of one of the greatest buildings of all time:
Communed with an elder from the Parliament of Trees:
Find I want to capitalize “redwoods” after returning from a visit. Like it’s a capital-R place. Back from the Redwoods.
twitter.com/disquiet: Audiobooks, Cylons, Bern
From the past week
I do this manually each Saturday, collating recent tweets I made at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet/), my public notebook. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form or otherwise) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.
▰ Life these days: Walk into a store and find myself thinking, “This place is like someone took all the metaphors of online life and made them physical, right down to the ‘shopping carts.'”
▰ Sleepy. Hence: Was listening to an audiobook read by an actor with a particularly strong British accent and found myself thinking, “This really could use subtitles.” Which is, of course, a book.
▰ After much consideration, I opted not to test this. Far as I could tell, neither did the sheep on the other side.
▰ Feel a bit like a Cylon. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” came on the outdoor speakers at this cafe and I’m incapable of not singing along.
▰ That the concern is old enough that it was recognized some time ago, and that this sign was created and installed, and that it has aged this much since
▰ Excited to announce that the Disquiet Junto is again teaming up with Musikfestival Bern (thanks to Tobias Reber), the annual Swiss event. We’ll be doing three projects, music from which may end up as part of the festival. Details to follow. The first project will involve insects.
▰ Have a great weekend, folks.
– Count how many different bird species you hear
– Listen for repeated interstitial music in shows you binge-watch
– Sort out a way to financially support a musician you like (buy an album or t-shirt, subscribe to a fan club, etc.)
See you Monday.
Guitar x Cello x Pandemic
The Equation of Time by Anthéne and Simon McCorry
The Equation of Time presents the guitar of Anthéne (Brad Deschamps) and the cello of Simon McCorry combined through processing and done so across a great distance. (Of course, for what collaboration wasn’t this the case during the pandemic?) The album’s six tracks let moments of brief ferocity and sharp detail peek out amid vast cumulus gatherings of shoegaze-rich cloud cover. Amid that ambient intensity, riffs can still be located, despite being buffeted by sonic winds. A gray mass reveals, for example, tiny little repetitive, keyboard-like cues toward the end of “Time Past,” the opening cut. On “Time Future,” the penultimate track, the audio processing is dialed back, especially where the cello in concerned, the plucking and sawing heard clearly amid cavernous echoes and artfully tortured extrapolations. “Drift of Stars” has a muted, compressed quality, the sound as if experienced from the other side of thick glass at first, before yielding something in higher resolution, waves of sounds overlapping, converging. The whole set — each track’s title apparently borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s *Four Quartets* — is beautiful from start to finish.
Album originally posted May 22, 2021, at [whitelabrecs.bandcamp.com](https://whitelabrecs.bandcamp.com/album/the-equation-of-time). More from Deschamps at [twitter.com/braddeschamps](https://twitter.com/braddeschamps) and McCorry at [simonmccorry.com](https://www.simonmccorry.com/).
Disquiet Junto Project 0493: AudioCorrect
The Assignment: Think about the utility and the useful failures inherent in autocorrect and apply this to your music.
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, June 14, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 10, 2021.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0493: AudioCorrect
The Assignment: Think about the utility and the useful failures inherent in autocorrect and apply this to your music.
Thanks to Alan Bland for proposing this project.
Step 1: Think about how autocorrect works on your phone, how it sometimes does indeed take your haphazard typing and recognize what you had intended, and yet how also (probably more often) it subtly or even drastically alters the meaning of your intended message.
Step 2: There are numerous existing musical equivalents and approximations to autocorrect that exist as algorithms, such as pitch and tempo quantizers, and autotune. Consider the ones you have used or want to explore.
Step 3: Create a piece of music by either (A) using/abusing one of the musical autocorrect concepts from Step 2 or (B) imagining your own autocorrect algorithm and creating what the result might sound like.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0493” (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 “disquiet0493” (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 tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0493-audiocorrect/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0493-audiocorrect/)
Step 5: Annotate your tracks 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.
Additional Details:
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 14, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 10, 2021.
Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0493” 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 493rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — AudioCorrect (The Assignment: Think about the utility and the useful failures inherent in autocorrect and apply this to your music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0493/
Thanks to Alan Bland for proposing this project.
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-0493-audiocorrect/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0493-audiocorrect/)
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet) for Slack inclusion.