Disquiet – Page 551 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

After Leaving

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

March 21, 2020May 13, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

After today’s Leaving Records event, I needed some late-night guitar/Norns/Grid time. (Fates, not Norns, but you know.)

Update: Someone on Twitter asked what these things are. The little hexagonal box on the left is a little speaker. I need a louder small, portable amplifier. “Louder” and “small, portable” generally work in inverse proportion to each other along a single axis, so I need to choose where on that axis I want to be. The thing with all the lights in rows is a Monome Grid. The Grid is a controller that does nothing on its own, but lots of different things when connected to a laptop or other devices. The little black box to its right with a tiny screen is a Fates, which is a take on the open-source Monome Norns. It’s the sort of device that makes the Grid sing (or perhaps vice-versa). It runs various scripts and engines that create and/or transform sound. The script I’m running here, called Cranes, lets me loop in real time the sound of the guitar being fed into the Fates. That’s an acoustic guitar in the foreground, and the little black wire stuck onto it is a microphone I borrowed from a friend (given what’s going on in the world, maybe I can return it in a few months). The setup is too quiet. I need a preamp, or maybe to run the microphone through a reverb pedal before sending to the Fates.

The Extended Gap

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

March 21, 2020March 21, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Walking at night to the ocean and back feels ominous. There may be no need for another, more specialized or nuanced word. Virtually everything in the city that isn’t shut down shuts down early these days, so there is little reason to go out at night, except to walk to the ocean and back. Very few cars come and go because there are very few places to come to and go from. It’s quiet in a deeply unfamiliar way, the widespread societal inactivity all the more so. Few if any planes fly overhead. You can walk a quarter mile and not see another human. It’s dream-quiet, movie-set quiet. Until it isn’t. A simple sound carries further than usual. The thud of dinner being delivered outside someone’s front gate a block away registers hard. The extended gap in time between the thud and the sound of the gate finally being opened does, too.

Walking during the day is its own kind of ominous. People move about with their respectful distances fairly well sorted; we’re flour put through a sifter, all evenly distributed. The placidity of that metaphor belies the underlying tension. You see someone you know, and you each nod at a block’s distance, and the nods contain a mutual acknowledgment: we’ll both keep going; chatting at the distance of six feet holds little appeal at the moment. You pause in front of one of the neighborhood’s countless locked gates. The six cavities where once there were doorbell buttons are, of course, mere coincidence. But when socializing in close proximity has become so unwelcome, the gate’s blank face feels like another sort of distancing nod.

The Way Temporary Fixes Become Permanent

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

March 20, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

It isn’t about the arrow, though of course it’s about the arrow. The arrow is what catches your eye, gets you to pause, to ponder, to elect to take a photo in the first place. It also isn’t about that shallow, yellowed old doorbell mounted perpendicular to the right of the gate, though that doorbell is certainly what the arrow is about.

No, it’s about the tape, all that excess tape around the arrow. If the arrow tells us to look up and to the right to locate the doorbell, which it does, then the tape is more of a wink. The tape tells us that this arrow isn’t the first attempt by a resident of this home to direct the visitor’s eye, and index finger, in the desired direction.

If the arrow is intended to divert the eye, the tape draws the eye in toward the collage-like mass, to the assemblage of paper that’s molded around what must, at some point, itself have housed a doorbell, and to the haphazard duct tape that strives to keep the paper in place, and to the tape fragments themselves, which hint at prior signage efforts, and then further out along the surface to the mangled gate front that summons up thoughts of other forms of wear, that potent combination of environment and neglect.

As with so many after-market jury-rigged corrections to suboptimal doorbell fixes, this one is a treatise on numerous topics, all at once. There’s the failure of the original device, the problematic placement of the replacement, the covering up of the discarded ringer, the need to bridge the gap from old to new, the way temporary fixes become permanent ones. And hidden in the background, there is the source of so much of the visual confusion: the gate, of course, which further separated visitors from the front door sometime after the house’s original construction. Which is to say, the arrow was fated. Once the gate was introduced, the home owner (or landlord, or property management firm) had already effectively pointed an arrow in another direction.

After Live: Leaving Records Roster Party

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Emily A. Sprague, and more Saturday at 1pm Pacific

March 20, 2020March 19, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Another day in global mutual self-isolation, another advance notice of a stellar virtual concert. Leaving Records [announced](https://twitter.com/LEAVINGRECORDS/status/1240416919217295360/) that the following will be playing live tomorrow, Saturday, March 21, starting at 1pm Pacific Time. The time zone’s appellation also fits the tranquil electronic music of the performers: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Emily A. Sprague, Brin, Cool Maritime, and Matthewdavid’s Mindflight. Set your calendar to pull up [twitch.tv/leavingrecords](https://www.twitch.tv/leavingrecords) at the appointed time. You may want to set up an account early, if you don’t have one already. This show begins four hours after [Scanner’s announced show](https://disquiet.com/2020/03/17/scanner-march-21-2020/) that day.

Disquiet Junto Project 0429: Solitary Ensembles

The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio that others will complete.

March 19, 2020March 19, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

We’ve done projects along the lines of this one in the past, and it’s always worked out well, with surprising and wonderful results, new connections made, new partnerships forged, unexpected pairings created.

Current circumstances around the world bring new meaning to the project. The idea this week is that you will record the first third of what will eventually become a trio. Next week people will add to tracks from this week, and the week after people will, in effect, complete the trios. Some of this week’s projects will, inevitably, be used more than once, leading to interrelated branches of creativity — and more importantly, connecting musicians around the world.

It’s a foundational concept of the Disquiet Junto, since January 2012, that the participants all gain energy and inspiration from the knowledge that somewhere around the world, other people are cogitating on and acting on the same four-day project as they are. Projects such as this particular one build on that idea by bringing together various subsets of the far-flung Junto community into short-lived, ad-hoc, self-guided groupings — what we’re currently calling Solitary Ensembles.

The difference this time, of course, is there exists a larger set of factors we all have in common at the moment, and we have them in common not just with the 1,500 or so other subscribers to the Junto mailing list, but with the world’s populace. We aren’t just facing this creative challenge together. We are facing a new challenge in the form of the global pandemic and its ramifications — physical, emotional, economic. Which is to say: thanks, as always, for your generosity with your time and creativity, and all the more so during these strange times in which we find ourselves.

Oh, and one procedural note: It’s a rule in the Junto that musicians should only contribute one track per project. That remains the case this week. However, next week, in order for as many of this week’s tracks as possible being re-worked, that number will be increased. At the moment, I’m not certain by how much. I’ll sort that out and mention it next week.

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, March 23, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 19, 2020.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0429) for the duration of the project.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0429: Solitary Ensembles**

The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio that others will complete.

Step 1: This week’s Junto project is the first in a sequence intended to invite, encourage, and reward collaboration. You will be recording something with the understanding that it will remain unfinished for the time being.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice. Conceive it as something that leaves room for something else — other instruments, other people — to join in.

Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly two to three minutes in length, as described in Step 2. When done, if possible, pan the audio so that your piece is solely in the left side of the stereo spectrum.

Step 4: Also, and this is important, be sure, when done, to make your track downloadable, because it will be used by someone else in the next Disquiet Junto project.

**Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:**

Step 1: Include “disquiet0429” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0429” (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 track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0429-solitary-ensembles/

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.

**Additional Details:**

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, March 23, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 19, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better. Two to three minutes is probably about right for this project.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0429” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Given the nature of this particular project sequence, it is 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 429th weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio that others will complete — at:

https://disquiet.com/0429/