Jan 2014: “You’re [publishing a book on Aphex Twin](http://www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900)? Does he do anything anymore?”
Dec 2014: “Aphex Twin’s *Syro* [nominated for a Grammy](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-grammys-2015-dance-music-categories-refreshingly-credible-20141205-story.html).”
Each Thursday in [the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) and [at Disquiet.com](https://disquiet.com/tag/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.
This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, December 4, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 8, 2014, as the deadline.
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 0153: Groove Lock
The Assignment: Record a short sound intended to be set on repeat.
SoundCloud recently introduced the ability for a track to be looped on the website. That is, the listener can hit a button (details at disquiet.com/QVvCF) and the track will play over and over. This week’s project will make use of that feature. This week’s project will also, I should note, inform next week’s project. But you can do next week’s without doing this week’s, and vice-versa.
Step 1: Record a short, original piece of music/sound of between roughly 3 and 9 seconds intended to be set on repeat.
Step 2: Upload the finished track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 3: Listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Length: Your finished work should be between roughly 3 and 9 seconds long.
Deadline: This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, December 4, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 8, 2014, as the deadline.
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.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0153-groovelock”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 153rd Disquiet Junto project — “Record a short sound intended to be set on repeat” — at:
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 project by Stuart R Brown:
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I regularly sent out an email newsletter. And as the years passed and email became more of a burden and less of a source of wonder, I did it less and less frequently. (And even further back, in 1994, I founded the email magazine of Tower Records, called epulse, which ran for a decade.) But for various reasons I’ve picked up the habit again, and having done a new entry for the last three Tuesdays in a row, I feel fairly confident that I’ll continue doing it henceforth. Maybe not every week, but with some regularity. Much of the material will appear here, or vice versa, but there will be material that is specific to the newsletter, more cursory, off-the-cuff things like lists of current fixations and obsessions (the most recent newsletter, posted [yesterday](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet/letters/disquiet-2014-12-02-double-nickels-on-the-buddha-machine), included *”text-to-speech … “always on” listening devices … the not-quite-silences of conference calls … sound effects in comics … sound design of TV shows … getting reacquainted with the sound of rain”*). Also unique to the newsletter are occasional contests to get free stuff, such as downloads of new albums as well as books, and who knows what in the future.
Here’s the subscription form:
Or you can sign up at [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet).
Ambient music is often, purposefully, less than the sum of its parts: small elements that in combination seem to distract from each other, creating a void where, with a slight adjustment, instead there might have been fierce collisions and considerable density. Listening to the brittle, elegant, just-shy-of-neutral glisten that is “Alunecând din glasul unui înger” (or “Sliding the Voice of an Angel,” translated from the Romanian), the ear moves from rough textures to echoed piano to ringing phones to piping rhythmic elements, none of which last long enough to serve as a point of orientation. Instead, one meanders through a gentle, ever so slightly worrisome landscape. Hard to believe this is more than one person making this little sound, but it is both Alexandru Hegyesi, who goes by Shanyio, and Nicola Fornasari, who goes by Xu. Hegyesi is credited with piano and “fx” and Xu with “amplified objects, bells and pedal effects.” The track is the final one off a recent Shanyio album, *Pribegie* (which means “wandering”), available at [shanyio.bandcamp.com](https://shanyio.bandcamp.com/album/pribegie).
More from Xu/Fornasari at [substance.it](http://www.substance.it/) and from Shanyio/Hegyesi at [shanyio.bandcamp.com](https://shanyio.bandcamp.com/).
School visit souvenir.
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
