Disquiet – Page 655 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Jana Rockstroh Heads to Space

A new album of longform synth music

January 7, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="http://jajaouterspace.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-space-observation">Music for space observation by Jaja</a>

Jana Rockstroh, the German musician who records simply as Jaja, composed and performed *Music for Space Observation* after hours as 2017 was easing into 2018. It was released the first day of the new year. The album contains three longform tracks, each between 22 and 30 minutes, of slow-paced ambient music. As the title suggests, this is space music: outer, inner, room-filling, head-expanding. It’s all loose sine waves given seconds — and, seemingly, eons — to chart their course. Slight modulations lend a sense of development to the glacial tones, texture provides a richness sometimes lost in synth-heavy work, and layers (especially on the opening track, “Far Beyond the Realm of the Stars”) introduce metric play even when there is no self-evident rhythm. While the first two pieces (“Far Beyond” and “Earthrise Over the Moon”) are often lovely and soft, the closing piece, “In the Realm of the Nebulae,” ventures into darker corners of the evening sky, as white noise and urgent drones threaten to encompass the listener.

Album originally posted at [jajaouterspace.bandcamp.com](https://jajaouterspace.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-space-observation). More from Jaja/Rockstroh at [cyan-music.com](http://www.cyan-music.com/jaja/).

What Sound Looks Like

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

January 6, 2018January 7, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Toward the end of its run as a federal penitentiary, Alcatraz introduced radio to its prison cells. The 5’x9′ rooms had a small wired metal box. The metal box had two jacks, one for each of a pair of broadcast options available to prisoners, excepting those in solitary confinement. There was a jack for sports and there was a jack for music, our chipper park ranger tour guide explained to us today. Prisoners had headphones that they could plug into either channel. A guard at a central control room monitored the stations and would censor any news deemed too sensitive by simply muting the given signal. Prison life is all about a heavily mediated experience, being cut off from the world. Inmates at Alcatraz also required a cord to communicate with visitors, who spoke via those familiar phone-like connections; the interlocutors saw each other only through small and exceptionally thick windows. The one variable beyond the prison system’s powers was the sonic makeup of the environment, of the bowl that is the San Francisco Bay. From the island of Alcatraz, prisoners could apparently hear the frivolity of Fisherman’s Wharf and other coastal pleasure zones, a mile and a life sentence away.

*An ongoing series cross-posted from [instagram.com/dsqt](http://instagram.com/dsqt).*

What Sound Looks Like

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

January 5, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Whoever wrote this had various options. The word “Broken” certainly does the job, though “Please knock” would have provided some welcome advice to a first-time visitor, and “Fix me” might have served as a snarky plea for help. If you focus in on the bell itself, you can see that this installation isn’t original to the structure. The paint reveals a previous arrangement, perhaps even a subsequent fix-it job: the missing screw in the upper left suggests failed attempts to address the situation. There’s an immediacy to the writing, to the recognizable heft of the Sharpie, and to the way it follows the contours of the textured exterior wall. Indeed, there’s a finality to “Broken” that makes the word perhaps the most fitting choice. It is poised above the button where, in an alternate universe, or at least a block over, you might find the number of an apartment, or the family name of its dweller. Here there is only the voluminous silence that exists when such a simple device rests longing to be repaired. Some visitor might even ever so briefly ponder if “Broken” is someone’s name, rather than immediately sense it to be both a practical statement about the object and a caption for the underlying emotional state of urban tenancy.

*An ongoing series cross-posted from [instagram.com/dsqt](https://www.instagram.com/dsqt/).*

A Dozen Years in the Dragon’s Eye

Marc Kate, Geneva Skeen, Yann Novak, and others celebrate the label's anniversary.

January 5, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="http://dragonseyerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/steel-dragons-eye-twelfth-anniversary">Steel: Dragon's Eye Twelfth Anniversary by Various Artists</a>

The great record label Dragon’s Eye celebrated its 12th anniversary with a name-your-price, nine-track collection last month. The album is titled *Steel* and it consists of outtakes and rarities from various members of the Dragon’s Eye roster. If you need one track recommended as a point of entry, start with the lengthy “Deface VIII” by Marc Kate. It’s like the sonic equivalent of a black-gel lava lamp let to run in a bright, empty room. The sound is as if one thick substance is heard to transform in detail as the piece proceeds, a globular instance of shimmer, a hum made present with the sheer suggestive physicality of its undulating resonance. For the most part it is a voluminous thing, many faceted yet singular. At times it momentarily branches into soft estuaries, yet even then they work in parallel, not individual forces but parts of a collective whole.

The entire album is recommended, from the throbbing noise of Geneva Skeen’s “In the night mind of the night world,” to the tornado of coruscation with which Jake Muir’s “Untitled” gets going, to the dense deep bass of “Ride It Out” by the label’s creative director, Yann Novak.

Also featured on *Steel* are pieces by Steve Pacheco, Tobias Hellkvist, Robert Crouch, wndfrm, and Fabio Perletta. The album is online at [dragonseyerecordings.bandcamp.com](https://dragonseyerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/steel-dragons-eye-twelfth-anniversary). More from Dragon’s Eye at [dragonseyerecordings.com](http://www.dragonseyerecordings.com).

Disquiet Junto Project 0314: Cold Start

The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.

January 4, 2018January 5, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the [Disquiet Junto group](https://disquiet.com/junto/), 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.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0314) above for the duration of the project.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, January 8, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 4, 2018.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0314: Cold Start**

The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.

Welcome to a new year. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one sentence:

Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each year since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. At the start of the seventh (!) year of the Disquiet Junto, it is a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: If your hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0314” (no spaces) in the name of your track. If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to my locating the tracks and creating a playlist of them.

Step 2: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 3: Please consider posting your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0314-cold-start/

Step 4: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, January 8, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 4, 2018.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0314” 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: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 314th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Cold Start: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it) at:

https://disquiet.com/0314/