Disquiet – Page 803 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Disquiet Junto Project 0180: Matryoshka Music

Use the Russian nesting dolls as a model for a musical composition.

June 11, 2015June 12, 2015 / By Marc Weidenbaum

20150611-matryoshka

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on [SoundCloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) and at [Disquiet.com](https://disquiet.com/2012/01/27/the-disquiet-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 early evening, California time, on Thursday, June 11, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 15, 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 0180: Matryoshka Music

Use the Russian nesting dolls as a model for a musical composition.

Step 1: Consider the Russian nesting doll called the matryoshka, in which hollowed-out wooden figurines are designed to be stored inside each other, excepting the smallest doll, which is solid.

Step 2: Compose a short piece of music that somehow takes as its basis the doll’s structure. (For a further constraint, imagine a matryoshka consisting of 6 dolls.)

Step 3: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.

Step 4: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This assignment was made in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, June 11, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 15, 2015.

Length: The length of your finished work is up to you, but between two minutes and four minutes is probably best in this context.

Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this assignment, and 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 “disquiet0180-matryoshkamusic”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:

More on this 180th Disquiet Junto project — “Use the Russian nesting dolls as a model for a musical composition”— at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0180: Matryoshka Music

The White Noise of Summer

Leslie Rollins in the field

June 10, 2015June 11, 2015 / By Marc Weidenbaum

This is not an industrial variant on synthesized white noise. It is not a composite of fractured random sonic particulate across the audio spectrum. Well, it is, but it isn’t synthesized; it isn’t the result of software or hardware. This crunch, this rumpled-paper sonority, this harsh, brush-like texture — it is a simple field recording. The subject of the microphone is the interaction of wind and grass. Writes Leslie Rollins, of Berrien Springs, Michigan, in a brief accompanying note:

>A recording of wind moving the tall, brittle grasses which occupy the dividing line between the sandy shore and the beginning of dune elevation in Warren Dunes State Park. It was a blustery day with constant wind rustling the stalks. I was able to wedge the two contact microphones at the base of two clumps and they held them, almost like a clothes pin, while the wind whipped the tops. I was surprised how sharp and pointy the drier stems were as they jabbed me while I got the microphones in place.

Perhaps most remarkable is the sheer length, the uninterrupted consistency.

20150611-grass

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/337is](https://soundcloud.com/337is/marram-grass). More from Rollins/337is at [facebook.com/337is](https://www.facebook.com/337is).

Guitar + Echo

Another entry in Taylor Deupree's sound diary

June 9, 2015June 9, 2015 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Another track in Taylor Deupree’s ongoing, endlessly satisfying journal of his musical activities. It’s a short piece, just under two minutes, all guitar and echo. In his liner note to the piece he talks about the technology behind it. The specifics are at the [link](https://soundcloud.com/12k/june-08-2015-re-201) for those with the interest and vocabulary. His detail in his notes is not gearhead talk. It’s an expression of his thinking, his compositional approach through technology. Here all that consideration surfaces with an electric guitar set on an echo you can almost see, so hard in its reverberance that it brings to mind not so much ripples in water as it does dominoes falling in slow motion.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/12k](https://soundcloud.com/12k/june-08-2015-re-201). There’s also an ongoing playlist of Deupree’s 2015 Studio Diary, currently at 46 tracks, or [almost two and a half hours of music](https://soundcloud.com/12k/sets/taylor-deupree-2015-studio). More from Deupree, who lives in Pound Ridge, New York, at [taylordeupree.com](http://www.taylordeupree.com/).

The Phantom Waveform

Adventures in modular synthesis

June 8, 2015 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Screen Shot 2015-06-07 at 2.20.50 PM

You’re working at your modular synthesizer. It’s nothing particularly technical, what you’re up to. There’s an oscillator that emits a variety of waves: sine, saw, triangle, and so forth. You patch the oscillator into a filter, and the filter into a mixer, and the mixer into a speaker. It’s one straight channel. Its buzzes, sonorously, at least to your ears. Then you patch another, slower-moving oscillator into the filter as well. This secondary source makes the filter all the more complex, though in the end it’s just tweaking one source wave. It has texture. It moves back and forth. It grows and swells. Then you turn on the sequencer, and let its syncopated triggers send pings through the system. As time passes, you move things around, doubling and tripling the variations on that original source signal. You slow one oscillator, and then you change the waveform sent from another. You let the filter cut off one range of the spectrum, and then another. You pitch the tempo of the sequencer slower, and slower still. You adjust the balance between a handful of cables now routed through the mixer. The sequencer is being fed into plugs for which it was not entirely intended, and yet the end result is exactly what you’d hoped for, a burr-like beat that’s like an occasional metronomic absence in the soft, noisy wave. You’re learning as you go. And then you look back at the filter, and something is odd. There is nothing at the moment plugged into its “Audio In” jack. There is no source audio. At some point you’d removed that cable, and the speaker has yielded no sign of that absence. There should be no sound at all, except perhaps those sequencer blips. There is, technically, no source audio for what is happening in your synthesizer. Somehow, though, in this largely analog modular setup, the electric hum has taken on a presence of its own. There is a ghost oscillation caught in a signal loop. At some point you’ll need to turn off the machine, but for the time being you listen to the beading hum, ponder the phantom waveform, and marvel at the small dark hole in that empty jack.

*The current stage of my rig is pictured above, and an occasionally updated system view is at [modulargrid.net](http://www.modulargrid.net/e/racks/view/139419).*

Jmmy Kpple’s Home Life

Domestic sounds, turned this way and that

June 8, 2015June 8, 2015 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Only three comments into the Jmmy Kpple track does its source material surface. In retrospect, there were clues. The track title, “weakov injune,” in the glitch spelling that’s at the core of Kpple’s generous pleasure center, suggests either a week off or a weak oven, or both. The sole accompanying text, aside from his standard “#cheap concrete” tag, is the spaced-out word “/ d o m e s t i c i c i t a t i o u s.” This is domestic sound, turned into something else, in this case a drowsy, dolorous clanging that slowly builds to a mild clamor. It’s just loose enough to be mistakable for a quotidian field recording, though of the deep bowels of a municipal substation, not of a contemporary residence. You might have been left imagining that Kpple had, indeed, wandered underground with a tape recorder, had he not responded to someone complimenting the piece — “Love the subtle metallic chords” — with the experimental-sound equivalent of a tell-all: “thanks – s’all slow-motion kitchen implements.”

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/jmmy-kpple](https://soundcloud.com/jmmy-kpple/weakov-injune). More from Jmmy Kpple, based in England, at [twitter.com/jmmy_kppl](https://twitter.com/jmmy_kppl), [jmmykppl.tumblr.com](http://jmmykppl.tumblr.com/), and [mixcloud.com/jmmykppl](https://www.mixcloud.com/jmmykppl/).