Disquiet – Page 790 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

The Choir in the Echo

A dubby treat from the Bell Mechanical

September 1, 2015August 31, 2015 / By Marc Weidenbaum

By name and sonic appearance, this track “Choiroid Dub #11” by the Bell Mechanical is a choral recording treated until it becomes an echoing space unto itself. The soft syllables are electronically transformed until they sound like several aircraft landing at once in slow motion. There’s a voice intoning throughout, not the voice of the choir, but some intent narration that is never quite audible, like an old-time political speech or an especially dry book-on-tape. Eventually an organ appears, bringing the piece to a quasi-liturgical close.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/the\_bell\_mechanical](https://soundcloud.com/the_bell_mechanical/choiroid-dub-11). More from the Bell Mechanical, based in Salem, Massachusetts, at [thebellmechanical.bandcamp.com](https://thebellmechanical.bandcamp.com/) and [twitter.com/the_mjl](https://twitter.com/the_mjl).

Freiband Communes with Bass Communion

A barren-ambient snippet of their new collaboration

August 31, 2015 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The Important Records label has posted a gorgeously minimal swath of barren ambient music off a release by Bass Communion (Steven Wilson) and Freiband (Frans de Waard). It is like digital marbles let lose over and over in some dark, dry space, a space whose contours seem to expand and contort as the piece continues. It opens in near silence, and it isn’t so much that it gets louder — though it does — as that the silence gets closer and more consuming.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/importantrecords](https://soundcloud.com/importantrecords/bass-communion-freiband). More on the release, titled simply *Bass Communion / Freiband*, at [importantrecords.com](http://www.importantrecords.com/imprec/imprec423). More from Wilson at [stevenwilsonhq.com](http://stevenwilsonhq.com) and de Waard at [fransdewaard.com](http://fransdewaard.com/).

Disquiet Junto Project 0191: Held Chord

One chord to rule them all – on several instruments.

August 27, 2015August 29, 2015 / 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.

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

This assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, August 27, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 31, 2015.

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 0191: Held Chord

One chord to rule them all — on several instruments.

These are the steps:

Step 1: Choose a chord you can play on several instruments. You can choose any chord you’d like.

Step 2: Make recordings of yourself playing that just chord on several instruments.

Step 3: Edit those individual recordings into one long continuous track, in which the chord slowly (and smoothly as possible) changes from one instrument to the next. The complete length of the finished track should be about one minute.

Step 4: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.

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

Deadline: This assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, August 27, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 31, 2015.

Length: The length of your finished work should be approximately one minute.

Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this assignment, 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.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0191-heldchord”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

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, please be sure to include this information, and link to (and identify) the two SoundCloud pages for the source audio you selected:

More on this 191st Disquiet Junto project (“One chord to rule them all — on several instruments”) at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0191: Held Chord

Irritant in the Haze

JoÃ£o Ricardo dissects techno from Porto, Portugal

August 26, 2015August 24, 2015 / By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a fly in JoÃ£o Ricardo’s ointment.

The ointment is a dense, flowing expanse of minimal techno. It is all churning, elegantly desiccated haze. There are whorls within whorls, and a thudding backbeat that is as cloudy as it is fierce.

The fly is a little bit of noise, like a bad seam in a looped sample, or the click of a turntable where the needle is stuck at the record’s end, or a bit of static on the phone that makes you think someone is listening in. It’s a tiny little irritant that turns the haze — the track is titled “Fugue” — into something more foreboding, more anxiety-provoking, more compelling.

Track, from his album *Soon* off the Arctic Dub label, originally posted at [soundcloud.com/ocp](https://soundcloud.com/ocp/fugue). Ricardo goes by ocp, an acronym that expands to “operador de cabine polivalente.” More from him at [joaoricardo.org](http://joaoricardo.org/). Get the full album at [davewesley.bandcamp.com](https://davewesley.bandcamp.com/album/ocp-soon). Both Arctic Dub and ocp are based in Porto, Portugal.

What Sound Looks Like

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

August 25, 2015August 25, 2015 / By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of every video shoot, the recording engineer calls “room tone” and everyone sits or stands in place, in silence. Usually there is someone on the shoot who doesn’t know what “room tone” means. They know enough, though, to stay silent until the engineer announces that enough audio has been captured, enough of the space’s inherent sound, its sense of space, its echo, its ambient foundation. I like figuring out who is unfamiliar with the term “room tone” and then discussing the concept with them. It isn’t, by any means, difficult to grasp that such a tone would be useful. Say you want to place a title card in the video. If you have no sound, then the viewer would experience a sudden drop in sound when the title card appears and a sudden sonic jut when the footage cuts back in. Discussing these two different silences — digital silence and room silence — always makes for a good conversation starter. In the right company, it extends into a broader consideration of assumptions about the concept of silence, how it is a platonic ideal, not a physical reality, as well as to how various types of silence — an echoing space, the light chatter of a workplace, the random intrusions of street noise — lend their own meaning.

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