Disquiet Junto Project 0168: Three of a Kind

Create an original, multi-part piece with a single audio source.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20150319-lenradin

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 evening, California time, on Thursday, March 19, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 23, 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 0168: Three of a Kind

Create an original, multi-part piece with a single audio source.

Step 1: You will be making a single track with three different parallel lines. It might be easiest to think of them as melody, rhythm, and an ambient foundational bed, but you might also do three counterposed rhythms, or a drone of three varying ambient beds. It’s up to you.

Step 2: Select a single source of audio. Perhaps it’s a segment of pre-existing track, or a single note on a favorite instrument, or a short recording of you humming or breathing.

Step 3: Transform that single source of audio to produce each of the three separate lines you plotted in Step 1.

Step 4: Record the track with those three lines running simultaneously.

Step 5: Upload your track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.

Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, March 19, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 23, 2015.

Length: The length of your finished work should be roughly between one and four minutes.

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 “disquiet0168-threeofakind”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 168th Disquiet Junto project — “Create an original, multi-part piece with a single audio source”— at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0168: Three of a Kind

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

https://disquiet.com/forums/

Image associated with this track by Len Radin, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

triple exposure (No digital manipulation)

This Week in Sound: Wiki Sonification, Rephlex Pharm …

Plus: anthropology, CC goes to MoMA, Tower doc

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A lightly annotated clipping service:

— Wiki Radio: There’s a great example of data sonification in the Listen to Wikipedia project, which plays a tonal real-time score based on editorial occurrences reported in the site’s API, such as new members, new entries, and altered entries. The site recently added hashtags to the data that it parses for its sonic content:

[http://blog.hatnote.com/post/112756032432/the-humble-hashtag-now-on-wikipedia](http://blog.hatnote.com/post/112756032432/the-humble-hashtag-now-on-wikipedia)

— Cornwall Playa: Grant Wilson-Claridge of the Rephlex record label is following up the more famous half of the operation, Aphex Twin (Richard D. James), with a Kickstarter of his own. Wilson-Claridge is looking to raise $30,000 to fund a piece of British real estate for music and parties.

[http://www.factmag.com/2015/03/17/rephlex-co-founder-wants-to-release-idm-album-as-a-piece-of-land-in-cornwall/](http://www.factmag.com/2015/03/17/rephlex-co-founder-wants-to-release-idm-album-as-a-piece-of-land-in-cornwall/)

— Sound Studies: Lengthy, detailed interview with Holger Schulze, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, on the role of sound studies from an anthropological perspective. He talks about the need to document our current practices for future historians, the relation between sound studies and musicology, and his writings on aleatoric (chance-based) sound, among other topics:

[http://www.soundstudieslab.org/interview-anthropology-sound/](http://www.soundstudieslab.org/interview-anthropology-sound/)

— Commerce Clause: The Museum of Modern Art has added the double-c-circle logo of Creative Commons to its holdings. This makes one wonder how an institution purchases something that represents a new approach to copyright:

[http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/45008](http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/45008)

— Tower Power: There’s a new documentary about Tower Records, Colin Hanks’ All Things Must Pass, that just debuted at SXSW, and it’s getting some pretty solid reviews. I worked at Tower from 1989 through 1996 as an editor on its music magazine Pulse!, and on two additional magazines I helped found there, Classical Pulse! and epulse. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

[http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/sxsw-review-colin-hanks-insightful-tower-records-documentary-all-things-must-pass-20150317](http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/sxsw-review-colin-hanks-insightful-tower-records-documentary-all-things-must-pass-20150317)

This first appeared in the March 17, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound”email newsletter: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet).

Brinkmann Color Chart

A track from a forthcoming album

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The brisk, efficient minimalism of Thomas Brinkmann reaches an elegant sustain on “Agent Orange,” a track off the forthcoming *What You Hear (Is What You Hear)*, dedicated to the late Zbigniew Karkowski and due out on May 25. (There’s an extra “w” on the Mego site. Maybe that’s a transliteration thing, or just a spelling error?) The track is a slowly driving assemblage of dense, singular sound, like a mass of brutalist concrete read from the distance as a graphic score, like bug noise reiterated by drastic machinery, like a single helicopter blade inspected in an anechoic chamber. The result is fortifying, the sheer singular motif a marvel of industrial nuance.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/editionsmego](https://soundcloud.com/editionsmego/thomas-brinkmann-agent-orange), the account of the Editions Mego label. More on the record at [editionsmego.com](http://editionsmego.com/release/EMEGO-204). Here, by the way, is my 2000 interview with Karkowski, who died in 2013: [“Sounding Floor.”](https://disquiet.com/2000/10/29/sounding-floor/)