There’s a cool event at Mission Synths (in San Francisco) this Thursday, May 22, at 7pm. I’ll be giving a little talk about asynchronous musical collaborations (e.g., the Disquiet Junto community) as part of it. There’s sure to be a bunch of interesting work (technology, performances, theory, practice) being shared by the participants. There are two posters, one with the lineup as it stands, and the one that announced the event in the first place:
We’re well into spring, even if seasons change on a dime in San Francisco. That means lots of baby birds. This one somehow made it into the garage. It was so tiny a breeze might have brought it inside. I heard what sort of sounded like a chirp, and thought maybe the car or water heater were making noises. I approached cautiously, but the thing was either too young to recognize danger of the approach of a larger animal (i.e., me) or too petrified to do anything. I shooed it out. It couldn’t fly. It just sort of hopped with the aid of its fledgling wing power. I imagine it may have literally just fallen out of its nest.
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.
Today, that means two live sets.
▰ If this live set by the Jeff Parker ETA IVtet was an EP, it’d be one of my favorite releases thus far this year. And if you’d told me any of the other players (in addition to guitarist Parker: Josh Johnson, alto saxophone; Anna Butterss, bass; Jay Bellerose, drums) was actually the leader, I’d have believed it.
▰ I very much enjoyed Nicolas Collins’ recent book, Semi-Conducting — Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket, and think with some regularity about the anecdote in it when a young Collins walks bt Miles Davis‘ home in Manhattan and hears the trumpeter experimenting with a wah wah pedal. It’s a common element in Davis’ electric-era work, and especially central to this live concert, which was recorded at Chateau Neuf in Oslo, Norway, on November 9, 1971. That’s in between the two albums he released that year: Jack Johnson and Live-Evil. Davis’ band is: Keith Jarrett, keyboards; Gary Bartz saxophone; Michael Henderson, bass guitar; Leon “Ndugu” Chancler, drums; and on percussion, both Don Alias and James Mtume.
At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.
▰ Had an MRI for an old wrist injury, and yes, throughout the noisy process I thought, “I think I have this album.” Just wasn’t sure if it was by Mark Fell or Zimoun, or someone whose name I’d forgotten. And despite the racket, I did fall asleep, much to my surprise.
▰ It occurs to me that popcorn is the rare food item for which the sizable majority of the times I’ve eaten it has been in the dark.
▰ I feel another burst of blog evangelism coming on, but for the moment I’ll just say that if you’ve been thinking of starting a blog, then take this message as a sign that, yes, you should start a blog. In short: help make the web more human.
▰ Just under two weeks until the 700th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto music community project. It’ll begin on May 29.
▰ That thing where you update a favorite piece of software and immediately notice a new issue that you know is gonna cause their support line a heap of pain for the next few days
▰ We’re living in a golden age of movie/TV scores, not just the quality of the music, but the availability of the recordings, especially as it regards TV, for which album releases didn’t exist back in the age of vinyl/cassettes/CDs at the scale they do now.
▰ A beautiful sunny day means plenty of emergency vehicles flying by on their way toward the ocean
▰ Finished reading the first Bosch novel, The Black Echo (my ninth novel of this year), while in the back seat of a car headed south from very Northern California, the sort of zone where handmade roadside signs announce the future site of an imagined state of Jefferson. When the book ended, I immediately and seamlessly used my phone as a modem so I could — despite a weak signal and thanks to a library system at that moment still a five-hour drive away — put the second book in the series, The Black Ice, on my Kindle, and settled right in. Almost halfway done already. Also making progress on Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and Sandro Veronesi’s The Hummingbird.
In the Disquiet Junto music community, which has been going on weekly with shared composition prompts since January 2012, there are a few projects we do each year, notably the first of the year and the last of the year, and then somewhere in between there’s a three-part (sometimes four-part) sequence in which musicians around the world collaborate to record trios (the fourth part is if we tag on a remix stage).
In the trios sequence, the first week people record solos. We had over 40 solos by the end of the first week this year. The second week, people select a solo, pan it to the left, and turns it into a (temporary) duet by recording a track panned to the right. And the third week, these “duets” become trios, as musicians add a final piece to the resulting constructions.
Great works and fantastic forms of collaboration result as the weeks progress. It’s an incredible way for musicians to hear their own works in unexpected contexts, and an informative compositional experience to record while leaving space for others.
It’s always appealing to my ear, in particular, when multiple re-users turn a given solo into a variety of duets, and the duets into varied trios. Hearing the same foundational tracks put to different ends by different people can be revealing.
The second of these three projects is currently underway. You can read the instructions at disquiet.com/0678. Usually with Junto projects I just hit send on the instructions and sit back and listen as the tracks appear, adding them to a playlist being about all I have to manage.
However, with the trios sequence, I get more directly involved, maintaining a necessarily complex online-viewable spreadsheet so Junto participants can sort out what has been done with their music, and what music they might, in turn, try a hand at. I love when I pull up the webpage and something like this pops up, showing me that a bunch of people are checking out the documentation.
I usually update the Junto’s weekly playlists once or twice a day as the given project unfolds, but for these trio projects I attend to the spreadsheet almost hourly, trying to keep on top of things. It’s exciting to watch and listen as the family tree of these tracks comes into full bloom.
Here’s a glimpse of what it looks like currently. Again, details are at the link above. The duets — really one-third-empty trios — are due by 11:59pm (your local time) on Monday, May 19, and then the final trios phase of the projects begins next Thursday, May 22. Join in if you have the time and interest.
