Disquiet

The musician who goes by hijaq. (with a period) has been posting a track a day this year, many of them short little single-instrument experiments — and, better yet, recorded live as videos. The process makes for a fantastic project, one that I’ve seen various musicians, including Marcus Fischer and Taylor Deupree, undertake in the past.

Recording one track a day can be transformative. Something happens to musicians who do this, in ways creative, intellectual, and meaningfully practical. A lot of skills and habits are refined and accrued as time passes, muscle memory levels up, and new techniques are explored both cursorily and in depth.

In the growing body of short pieces, Hijaq. displays a predilection for small, handheld devices, like the Minichord and the HiChord, sometimes combining them through overdubs or adjusting them simultaneously in real time.

There is a “cozy” — in the sense of mystery novels and video games — quality to the solitude and the simplicity of Hijaq.’s activities, whether a given day’s effort amount to a one-minute ditty recorded in a field:

or a little beat made with some pads on a desk:

or a Teenage Engineering gadget sampling excursion on a picnic bench:

Definitely check out this short, chord-focused piece, which inventively splits the screen about halfway through:

And Hijaq. has a Bandcamp page for further exploration.