Disquiet – Page 505 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Forging Rhythmic Similarities

A collaboration between João Ricardo, Henrique Fernandes, and Jorge Quintela

August 21, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="http://skupina.bandcamp.com/album/sublumia-liquid-aesthesia">Sublumia: Liquid Aesthesia by João Ricardo, Henrique Fernandes and Jorge Quintela</a>

*Sublumia: Liquid Aesthesia* is the trio of João Ricardo, Henrique Fernandes, and Jorge Quintela working in collaboration. They combine myriad tiny sounds, from closely experienced field recordings to minuscule devices to composed tones making subtle variations, all in the service of forming a detailed sound world that derives the exotic from the familiar. Such things, apparently, as field recordings of insect noise, the burble of boiling water, and the mechanistic click of unidentified gadgetry gather to a forge singular listening undertaking, one in which the similarities between the source materials, notably in rhythmic terms, provide a conceptual through line. Liner notes explain that the recordings originated as the sound of a combination performance and sound installation: “The objects that integrate it use the sound capture and projection of light from and on water and several electromechanical elements, such as air pumps, dc motors and sound induction devices, without resorting to manipulation or any type of artificialization of the sound sources or lighting.”

Album originally posted at [skupina.bandcamp.com](https://skupina.bandcamp.com/album/sublumia-liquid-aesthesia).

Disquiet Junto Project 0451: Ursula’s Silences

The Assignment: Make music inspired by a line from A Wizard of Earthsea.

August 20, 2020August 23, 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 Monday, August 24, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 20, 2020.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0451) for the duration of the project.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0451: Ursula’s Silences

The Assignment: Make music inspired by a line from A Wizard of Earthsea.

Step 1: In the classic fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea, its author, Ursula K. Le Guin, writes the following: “For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.” While the words are her own, of course, they are spoken not by the narrator, but by the book’s main character. The statement occurs toward the end of the book. For emphasis, Le Guin informs the reader that the character, whose name is Ged, speaks the words “slowly.”

Step 2: Consider how the statement can be applied to music, to sound, to the linear unfolding of a composition.

Step 3: Record a piece of music inspired by the Le Guin text: one sonic object at a time, with attention paid to the spaces, the silences, between those objects as they are introduced.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0451” (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 “disquiet0451” (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-0451-ursulas-silences/

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 Monday, August 24, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 20, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. Remember: it’s a sentence, not a novel.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0451” 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 451st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ursula’s Silences (The Assignment: Make music inspired by a line from A Wizard of Earthsea), at:

https://disquiet.com/0451/

When Music and Video Are Truly Paired

A live performance by mafmadmaf

August 19, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

This is far from ambient, so it won’t be going on my live-ambient video playlist, but it’s an excellent live video. There’s no sound until just about the 30-seconds mark. That’s because mafmadmaf, the musician whose hands dart in and out of view, up until then is still getting the patch started. That is, he’s still adding cables, and until enough are connected, his small synthesizer setup has no sound to make. And then it begins. First with a drone, a low undercurrent of foundational noise. Then the rapid clicking of industrial action, like a fervent sewing machine doing its duties. Not every cable connection alters the sound. Some, as at the opening, are subsets of multi-stage efforts to accomplish a sonic goal. The beauty of this piece, including the intent rhythmic quality, is how precisely the sounds and image correlate, how the viewer takes in the music not merely as sound, but as connected to the device from which it emanates, much as the music itself is predicated on connections made with patch cables.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leu_bSCx3S4). More from mafmadmaf, who is based in Guangzhou, China, at [mafmadmaf.com](https://mafmadmaf.com/).

ClockSkip In Effect

Simple evening beat experiment

August 19, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Simple evening beat experiment: four pulses in sync, each triggering a different percussive envelope of a different spectral subset of a pair of waveforms heard in combination. One of the waveforms is having its pitch alerted occasionally, both in and out of sync with the overall rhythm. The element of chance results from the four triggers all being muted on occasion (slightly less than 50% of the time) by the ClockSkip function in the Hemisphere alternate firmware in the Ornament and Crime module. Envelopes courtesy of the Xaoc Zadar. Waves courtesy of a pair of Mutable Instruments Plaits (here in the form of clones: the Antumbra Knit).

Video originally posted at [youtube.com/disquiet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGeZjjTaAZk).

A Modular Study

By mafmadmaf

August 18, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The ER-301 is a great and powerful synthesizer module, not in the Wizard of Oz sense, where there’s a man behind the curtain ready to spoil any sense of wonder, but in the sense that it requires significant effort due to, as the musician mafmadmaf puts it, the considerable amount of depth and complexity it represents. All of which said, in what is billed as a first study here, mafmadmaf induces a tremendous operation of chamber electronic music from it. Initial pulses glitch out, yielding trailing drones that combine with rhythmic trills, filigrees of error. In time, a seesaw melody gently brings the disparate pieces into a lulling whole.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccuBRpixpmc). More from mafmadmaf at [instagram.com/mafmadmaf](https://www.instagram.com/mafmadmaf/).