Disquiet – Page 490 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Disquiet Junto Project 0460: Creative Destruction

The Assignment: Show how you got to a tortured sound.

October 22, 2020 / 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, October 26, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 22, 2020.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0460: Creative Destruction

The Assignment: Show how you got to a tortured sound.

Step 1: Through some multi-step process, arrive at a complicated, tortured sound. Keep track of how you got there.

Step 2: Record a piece beginning with the end result: that complicated, tortured sound. Then transition to the start of the process and build back up to the end result, slowly repeating how you got you there.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0460” (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 “disquiet0460” (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-0460-creative-destruction/

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, October 26, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, October 22, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. The sound should be torturous, not necessarily the experience of revisiting it.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0460” 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 460th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Creative Destruction (The Assignment: Show how you got to a tortured sound), at:

https://disquiet.com/0460/

“Wednesday Loops”

Two pedals, one dominant beat

October 21, 2020October 27, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Wednesday night, playing with loops, one seven beats long, the other eight, then layering occasional accent notes. Fade in and out just turning the knob on the amp once the loops were left to their looping. Recorded to phone put in front of the amp. Not sure why the eight-beat loop is more prominent than the seven-beat one, except perhaps that it’s in 4/4 so the brain registers it more easily. Also not sure about that one hiccup at :46 seconds. Something suddenly went out of alignment and then came just as suddenly back into alignment. The bit at the very end isn’t a tape cassette stopping. It just sounds like that.

Maximum Patch Point Capacity

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

October 21, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

This newly arrived synthesizer module appears to have achieved maximum patch point capacity. It may also test the thesis that you can never have too many VCAs. And, indeed, that many unadulterated waves will benefit from [attenuation](https://disquiet.com/2020/08/22/0hp-4life/).

Iwaki/Raffa Split

On the Muzan label

October 20, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/living-distances">Living Distances by Yumi Iwaki & Ryan J Raffa</a>

There’s a lot to recommend the new split release by Yumi Iwaki and Ryan J Raffa, Living Distances (on the Muzan Editions label, out of Nara, Japan). Start with Iwaki’s “April,” a thick bed of throbbing, pulsing tones plus Cheshire Cat choral vocal effects appearing here and there in the mix. Then go for “Correlation,” Raffa’s combination of rattling metallic effects and fragmented field recordings. There’s much much more to the album’s 10 tracks, some more challenging (Iwaki has a thing for fractured dream-state sound design, notably on “Spiral Flow”), others welcomingly lulling (Raffa closes things out with an artificial landscape the listener will be hard put to exit; fortunately it’s the longest track on Living Distances).

Album originally posted at [muzaneditions.bandcamp.com](https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/living-distances). More from Iwaki at [soundcloud.com/iwakiyumi](https://soundcloud.com/iwakiyumi) and from Raffa at [rjraffa.net](https://www.rjraffa.net/). Both are based in Tokyo, Japan.

Freak Flags

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

October 19, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The frequent employment of makeshift address labels on doorbells generally comes across as just that: a quick, easy, vaguely stable response to a specific need. The specific need is to align a given residence (or business) with a push button. The vaguely stable part is that those labels are sure to be rubbed down, ripped off, or otherwise damaged by the elements over time (humans count as elements, alongside rain, wind, and heat). The two such labels shown here are in different states of disrepair, and their non-alignment briefly brings to mind the manner in which opening credits for films starring dual leading actors use techniques to suggest neither is truly more prominent than the other: one may come first, for example, but the other is positioned higher. But what if these seemingly temporary labels are hiding their actual purpose in plain sight? What if they’re temporary precisely because the people who use them harbor some sort of fever-dream conspiracy groupthink that their street address can, in the future, be changed whenever they darn well please? Why, all that stands in their way is casting off the shackles of government overreach. In which case, what if such cheap labels aren’t just purposeful hedges in advance of that simultaneously imminent yet elusive utopia, but visual dog whistles: post-truth freak flags left for fellow travelers to acknowledge with a slight, knowing nod while out for a stroll?