Disquiet – Page 716 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Listening to Yesterday: Two Bells

Yoga's hidden curriculum

August 15, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

1. two bells on a string

2. a bird landing

3. the piano that isn’t in another room

4. an elbow popping

At the start of yoga yesterday, the instructor rang two bells. The action was functional as well as ritual. That is, the salvo of her practice was functional beyond the function of ritual. There was a plan, an approach, a hidden curriculum. In an effort to direct people toward silence, it can be counterproductive to employ anything too verbal, too explicit, too overt — that is, anything other than silence.

The two bells hung at the ends of a single string. She rang them to draw the collective attention of the class. Then she directed us into a proper seated position: legs crossed, back high, face forward, arms at rest. Then she initiated a few minutes of silence. Just before the silence began she instructed us to listen to the silence. At the end of the silent period she passed the bells around the room. Each person rang the bells in turn and named, at the instructor’s request, something we’d heard in the silence. One person mentioned a bird landing. I’d heard it, too: large wings flapping in a strong breeze. Another person mentioned her belly grumbling. Another mentioned the piano. I’d heard the piano, too, but not the grumbling.

The piano was prerecorded. Earlier, just as the class was about to start, the instructor had turned down a CD of classical music, and as we took our seats an orchestral track gave way to this solo piano piece. The change in volume, the change between tracks, and the change in the room, which had quickly gone from chatty to quiet upon the instructor’s entrance, nearly convinced me that the piano was playing from another room entirely.

When the two bells on a string had run the full circle, when everyone had spoken about what they’d heard when the room had been silent, they were returned to the instructor. She explained that the listening exercise had several purposes, one of them quite practical. She wanted us to listen to our bodies as we proceeded. The instructor wanted to us to listen for if and when our bodies — a crack in the back, a pop in the elbow, a more nuanced signal somewhere else — asked us to be cautious. We had exercised external listening to focus the mind toward internal listening. If she had told us this point from the start, it wouldn’t have been half as effective.

Donnacha Costello’s Inviting Austerity

A new album, Mono No Aware, and a decade-old treat

August 14, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The Dublin, Ireland”“based musician Donnacha Costello’s *Mono No Aware* is an extended suite of tracks that are austere as they are inviting. Each piece, from the lightly punctuated “Mountain” to the more sedate and transient “Saudades” to the ecstatic pixelation of “At Sea,” depicts a pristine sonic moment. Many, like those three, are widescreen, white-noise vistas caught during a digital sunset. Others, like the opening track, “YÅkoso,” and the piano-tinged “Slowly, Through Fog,” introduce more traditionally musical elements, and yet achieve a similarly austere, sedate affect. They speak of Costello’s patience, and they reward patient listening. Every track on the album is the accumulation of subtle shifts that yield a sizable aesthetic impact. On “Slowly, Through Fog,” for example, there’s an increasing sense of echo that consumes what came before; even as the slow pace proceeds, the sense of scope expands significantly. The same could be said of the album as a whole.

<a href="http://donnachacostello.bandcamp.com/album/mono-no-aware">Mono No Aware by Donnacha Costello</a>

As a bonus, just a few days before releasing *Mono No Aware*, Costello uploaded a decade-old track, “Modul.Stress,” which he’d recorded in 2005 for a giveaway CD in a publication of the Raster-Noton label. “Modul.Stress” is a marvel of hyper-minimalist techo. An incredibly spare beat, a split of white noise trimmed to a truncated plosive, sets the initial pace. It plays out for nearly a minute like the pulse of some high-end, surgical-grade equipment. From there the piece expands in small steps, additional tiny beats here, little pneumatic blasts there, and occasional held tones syncopated and timed for maximum mood.

<a href="http://donnachacostello.bandcamp.com/track/modul-stress">Modul.Stress by Donnacha Costello</a>

Tracks originally posted at [donnachacostello.bandcamp.com](https://donnachacostello.bandcamp.com/). More from Costello at [soundcloud.com/donnachacostello](https://soundcloud.com/donnachacostello) and [twitter.com/donnachatweets](https://twitter.com/donnachatweets).

What Sound Looks Like

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

August 14, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s no doorbell at this address, just a lock and a sign, the sign superimposed on a previous sign whose directions apparently weren’t sufficient. The newer sign — which is by no means new, the black words nearly merging with the blue tape on which they were written by hand — reads “Knock On Roll-Up Door.” The roll-up door is the door to the right of this door. It’s massive, double wide and double high. Even in a light breeze, the roll-up door’s corrugated metal faÃ§ade bangs against the rollers and tracks. Presumably if you live or work here, you can tell nature’s knock from that of a visitor.

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

Where Piano and Tape Meld

A duet by Danny Clay and Greg Gorlen, both of San Francisco

August 12, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The syrupy, slurpy, melty place that Danny Clay and Greg Gorlen map in intimate, elegiac detail on “marigolds i” makes for an enticing sonic cul-de-sac, a turnaround in which to get pleasingly disoriented, happily stuck. Time, genre, and technology loop back on themselves and on each other.

The piece appears to be a duet for piano and tape cassette, the latter as much a medium for the former as it is a source of sounds itself. Every form of media lends some quality to that which it documents, and the dissolving, warping aspect of the tape here blurs the place between the piano and the droney, nostalgic sonic space the two musicians seek to produce.

The piano, just a few keys hit in slow procession, creates tones that get stretched in static-laced loops, the brittle little seams heard as tiny crunchy footsteps. The tape bends and frays at times, making the piano come in and out of focus as if it’s a landscape seen through a window dotted with clingy raindrops. Occasionally it is quite clear but misshapen, and other times it returns to its proper dimensions but is tantalizingly difficult to fully make out.

This is apparently a track from a longer forthcoming album-length work. Something to look forward to, for certain.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/nocturnalsignal](https://soundcloud.com/nocturnalsignal/danny-clay-greg-gorlen-marigolds-i). More from Gorlen at [cascadingfragments.tumblr.com](http://cascadingfragments.tumblr.com/) and Danny Clay at [dclaymusic.com](http://www.dclaymusic.com/). Both Clay and Gorlen are based in San Francisco.

Disquiet Junto Project 0241: Foreground Effect

The Assignment: Compose a piece of music in which the material processed is secondary to the processing.

August 11, 2016August 18, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

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Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on [SoundCloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) and at [disquiet.com/junto](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. 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.

This project was posted around noon, California time, on Thursday, August 11, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 15, 2016.

Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:

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 0241: Foreground Effect

The Assignment: Compose a piece of music in which the material processed is secondary to the processing.

Please pay particular attention to all the instructions below, in light of SoundCloud closing down its Groups functionality.

Big picture: One thing arising from the end of the Groups functionality is a broad goal, in which an account on SoundCloud is not necessary for Disquiet Junto project participation. We’ll continue to use SoundCloud, but it isn’t required to use SoundCloud. The aspiration is for the Junto to become “platform-agnostic,” which is why using a message forum, such as llllllll.co, as a central place for each project may work well.

And now, on to this week’s project.

Project Steps:

Step 1: Consider the following. New music can often involve flipping a perceived hierarchy: between rhythm and melody, between harmonic and melodic development, and between background and foreground, for example. This project involves flipping another perceived hierarchy: between the effect employed and the source audio on which it is employed (for example, between a flanger and a rhythm guitar line, or a gate and a drum kit, or between a filter and a complex waveform).

Step 2: Create an original piece of music in which the effect is the prominent thing heard throughout, while the source audio changes frequently between varied materials. The compositional goal is that the piece still hangs together as a considered whole unto itself.

Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Per the instructions below, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0241”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: This is a new task, if you’ve done a Junto project previously. In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co post your track:

http://llllllll.co/t/foreground-effect-disquiet-junto-project-0241/4134

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 was posted around noon, California time, on Thursday, August 11, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 15, 2016.

Length: The length is up to you. Between two and four minutes seems about right.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0241”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 241st weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece of music in which the material processed is secondary to the processing”— at:

https://disquiet.com/0241/