Now on Slack.com: Disquiet Junto Discussion

A test run is underway of the popular messaging tool

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Screen Shot 2016-06-15 at 8.31.07 PM

There is now a Slack team set up (at [disquietjunto.slack.com](http://disquietjunto.slack.com)) for Disquiet Junto discussion.

If you want to participate, send me your email address. I’m at [email protected]. Apparently Slack is invitation-based, so I need to send you an invite to join in.

The general idea for the Junto Slack is it’s a replacement for the discussion boards that were once quite active on SoundCloud, before the service mothballed them, and it’s a complement (or temporary stand-in) for the [disquiet.com/forums](https://disquiet.com/forums), which are running on a somewhat antiquated platform (Vanilla Forums). The disquiet.com/forums will likely be upgraded at some point later this year to a better platform, but for now the Slack team is where Junto conversation will be focused — of course, there will still be plenty of talk on Twitter, which is where many of the initial core group of Junto participants first (virtually) met up, and elsewhere.

As of this moment there are 26 members of the Slack Junto, and there are 8 channels underway, pictured up top. We’ve been (re)introducing ourselves, talking about playlist curation as cultural participation, comparing physical and software modular synthesizers, and sharing videos of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Taylor Deupree, and others.

What Sound Looks Like

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

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s not every day that one of these doorbell images gets a sequel. Fact is, it’s not all that often that I come upon the same doorbell twice. I don’t keep track of their locations, and while I have a good sense of where some of them are, many are lost in my wandering. This one originally, weeks back, only had that A label in the upper left (see here), and at the time I pondered whether the remaining apartments would be labeled up/down or left/right, or in a circular pattern for that matter. As it turns out, it’s up/down, though there’s always the chance that these apartment-button associations aren’t official. Maybe the new lettering is an act of banal, site-specific graffiti vandalism.

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

Space Age Surveillance Thrills

Courtesy of the new album from Italy-based Sonologyst

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s much to recommend the new Sonologyst album, starting off with its evocative title, *Silencers – the conspiracy theory dossiers*. That colorful language may set a high bar for sonic surveillance thrills, but the album delivers, especially with its final track, “NASA Secret Tapes.”

Barely two minutes in length, “NASA Secret Tapes” loops snippets of space-age chatter with sonar swells. It’s a testament to those swells — which ring like massive bells pitched high, their tones extending unnaturally relative to their frigid timbre — that the track would be just as effective minus the “This is Houston. Say again?” dialogue, flavorful as it is in its retro flourish. Those tones are endlessly listenable. Sonologyst artfully tweaks them, turning the background ambience into something with subtle rhythmic purpose.

The “NASA Secret Tapes” track is up top, and here’s the full album:

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/sonologyst](https://soundcloud.com/sonologyst/nasa-secret-tapes). Full album at [sonologyst.bandcamp.com](https://sonologyst.bandcamp.com/album/silencers-the-conspiracy-theory-dossiers). More from Sonologyst, who’s based in Italy, at [twitter.com/sonologyst](https://twitter.com/sonologyst).

Playing a Keyboard with a Phone Book

Peter Speer puts a little pressure on the definition of a live performance.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Just how little action can one take and still be considered a performer? If [yesterday’s featured video](https://disquiet.com/2016/06/12/genaura/) nudged at the inherent idea of a “live” performance by [showing generative software mid-process](https://disquiet.com/2016/06/12/genaura/) (no human required), then today’s video re-introduces human physical interaction but in a very simple way.

The video, titled “Yellow Pages Tone Cluster,” begins with a humorous touch worthy of John Cage: A few seconds in, the artist Peter Speer places a massive phone book, its front cover ripped off, atop an electric keyboard, and thus sets in motion a broad, dense uber-chord that plays for nearly 11 minutes straight.

“Motion” may not be the right word. What the phone book creates on the keyboard is a multi-octave held chord, quite the opposite of motion. That chord changes only due to the ear’s sensitivity to overtones and waveforms, and Speer’s subsequent small changes. He alters the chord as it proceeds. Specifics aren’t laid out at the video link (the only text is “The lost art of playing a keyboard with a book”), but as it goes the organ tone takes on beading and phase-shifting, glitch wonderment and reduction to a sheer shimmer. And at then end Speer removes the phone book. The ceremonial bow is implied.

One side note: This video is a good example of how the very thing that can make computer music a tough sell in a concert setting works exceptionally well on streaming services like YouTube and Vimeo, where the audience has such GoPro-style proximity (“goproximity”?) to the sort of small gestures that are lost with a live audience. The only way something like this would register in front of a group of people is if there were an effort made to include a properly framed live video projection during the performance — of course, while the scale would make the performer’s movements legible in concert, it would also potentially overstate their gravitas. (I should mention, I’ve seen plenty of shows where this sort of projection occurs but it’s usually for more flamboyant playing styles and often isn’t framed particularly well.)

Unfortunately I can’t add this to [my “Ambient Performances” playlist](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/30/a-youtube-playlist-of-ambient-performances/) because the playlist is on YouTube and this video is on [vimeo.com](https://vimeo.com/126705785). More from Peter Speer, who’s based in Chicago, Illinois, at [diode-ring.com](http://www.diode-ring.com/). Video found in a discussion about minimal physical mixing consoles at [llllllll.co](http://llllllll.co/t/minimal-mixers/1897/97?u=disquiet).

In the Key of G(enerative)

The software patch as live performance

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“System has decided to generate in G.” G is the key, and generative is the mode. That line is one of the many captions that illuminate the software patch in action in this video. You don’t have to fully comprehend, or even read, the text to appreciate the correlation between the virtual patch (signal flows, triggers, and such) and the sounds that emerge as the piece proceeds.

The text and patch, both by Siegfried Mueller, depict the inner workings of GenAura, Mueller’s “Generative Ambient System.” The video is almost half a decade old at this point, and the interface of the toolset, Max/MSP, in which the software was coded has come a long way since then, but the music remains nuanced and entrancing, and Mueller’s concise distillation of process is a great example of how watching a generative tool enact its own decision-making is a form of live performance.

The word “indeterminate” is often associated with generative music because chance is a key factor in many generative systems. The thing to keep in mind is that when it comes to GenAura it can be said that the music *is* determined — it’s just determined by the decision-making of the software itself, which of course extrapolates decisions built into the DNA of its code by Mueller.

It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing [YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-) of fine [“Ambient Performances.”](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/30/a-youtube-playlist-of-ambient-performances/) Video originally posted five years ago on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSrFO6_2Z80) by Siegfried Mueller, who developed the software.