Disquiet Junto Project 0707: Chain of Practice

The Assignment: Make music from how you make music

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

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. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0707: Chain of Practice
The Assignment: Make music from how you make music.

This project is the third of three that are being done by the Disquiet Junto in collaboration with the 2025 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 3 through 7. The festival topic this year is « Kette » — which translates, as the organization explains, to “Chain”: “Chains connect but they also bind. They create relationships but also restrictions. As a gift they look nice, feared when used in vice, and yet they can span bridges across fire and ice.” All three Junto projects this year engage with the work of Svetlana Maraš, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 festival.

We are working again at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the seventh year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern. Tobias helped prepare this week’s compositional concept.

Step 1: Think about your artistic practice.

Step 2: Write down one sentence that in some manner describes your artistic practice.

Step 3: Record yourself, or someone else, reading the sentence that resulted from Step 2.

Step 4: Use the recording made in Step 3 as the sole source material for a new musical/sonic composition.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0707” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0707-chain-of-practice/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you.

Deadline: Monday, July 21, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 707th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Practice — The Assignment: Make music from how you make music — at https://disquiet.com/0707/.

Aphex Twin (032c Edition)

I was interviewed by Cassidy George

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Back at the start of the year, a special issue of 032c, the culture magazine named for a Pantone color, included writer Cassidy George’s lengthy A-Z of the great Aphex Twin. The roundup, which ranged from “Acid” to “Zealous,” with stops in between for “Chris Cunningham,” “IDM,” and “Xtal,” among other topics, included a quick little Q&A with me. Here’s my section:

That bit was filed under “Ambient,” in between “Analord” and “Bank.” This is from the Winter 2024/25 issue. The full run-down is online at 032c.com.

Price Tag

Record shopping down memory lane

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Three price tags stuck to each other

When I got back home from the store — with a gift receipt — I carefully peeled off the price tag, only to find a second and, in fact, a third tag underneath. The sandwiched price tag was inaccessible. The lowest of the three was from my former employer, Tower Records. This close-up photo, unretouched, better reflects my aesthetic-emotional experience of peeling off the labels than did the actual object in my hand at the time. There is so much detail here, notably those little slits, which I believe existed to make it impossible to remove a tag and affix it to another, more expensive item. The archeology of tactile media, the cycle of records being sold again and again back into the used bins, the visual wonders of mechanical typography — it’s all there, smaller than a postage stamp.

On Repeat: Glitched, Prepared, Installed

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.

▰ There is seemingly nothing Matt Madden can’t do. He’s foremost a highly inventive cartoonist, and also an expert guitarist. This is an ambient glitch track of shifting drones that I’ve been playing on repeat. Matt, an old friend, is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

▰ I owe thanks to Bruce Levenstein for introducing me to For renstemt klaver, a collection of contemplative recordings by Jo David Meyer Lysne, based in Oslo, Norway, utilizing a remarkable prepared piano of his own invention. I include the cover here to give a glimpse of what is going on. More information in the album’s liner notes, available on the album’s Bandcamp page.

[bandcamp width=640 height=340 album=1377699424 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 artwork=small]

▰ I owe a debt to Patricia Wolf for introducing me to the work of Pablo Diserens. This video is a concise documentation of a 2024 exhibit by Diserens, alytes, at Espacio Vilaseco in Lugo, Spain. The pinging calls are those of the midwife toad. Diserens is based in Berlin, Germany.