I’ve given* dozens of talks, presentations, interviews, and lectures about the Disquiet Junto music community over the past 13 years, and Benjamin Franklin, who first coined the word “junto,” remains a deep well I keep going back to. I’ve shared this mention of Franklin’s original 1727 Junto (from his autobiography) many times, and each time I’ve always been sure to underline what’s seen here in purple.
And yet only now have I noticed the additional part, which I’ve underlined in red, about “without … desire of victory.” One thing I was certain about the Disquiet Junto from the start, back in January 2012, was that it wasn’t going to be a competition. And now I realize that was part of Franklin’s own plan from the start.
*most recently for Donnell Alexander and Lev Anderson’s West Coast Sojourn podcast and at the Lines meet-up at Mission Synths earlier this this month
The Assignment: Share a peek out your window and some sounds inspired by the view.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.
Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.
Disquiet Junto Project 0700: View Frame The Assignment: Share a peek out your window and some sounds inspired by the view.
Step 1: Take a photo out your window, with a little bit of the frame in view. Show people a glimpse of your world.
Step 2: Record a short, simple piece of music inspired (or otherwise informed) by what you see.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0700” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.
License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 700th weekly Disquiet Junto project, View Frame — The Assignment: Share a peek out your window and some sounds inspired by the view — at https://disquiet.com/0700/
“Fabulation for K”, from a forthcoming album, New Environments & Rhythm Studies, by Andrew Pekler, delays the delivery, to the point where the delay turns out to be the point. Almost a full two minutes of teasing chords and glitchy wisps (or wispy glitches) into “Fabulation,” after what on any other such track would have been the mere five to ten seconds prior to a steady beat kicking in, there’s a hint of a white noise pause — and then all over again it holds back, until quite suddenly it’s over. The track is a study in avoiding the obvious. “Cumbia Para Los Grillos,” the other currently available pre-release track, has a somewhat similar vibe, that of being stems of a whole other song, more parts than whole, and as a result more rewarding than what it might have become. “Cumbia” feels somewhat more fleshed-out than “Fabulation” is, mixing water-drop xylophones and moody organ-like haze, but it leaves plenty of room for the imagination. “Los Grillos” is Spanish for crickets, so perhaps the piece’s title is an acknowledgement of the backgroundedness of what Pekler is up to.
The album is due out June 27, 2025, on the label Faitiche, founded by Jan Jelinek. I saw the two of them play in San Francisco earlier this month.
This following bit is from The Black Ice, the second novel in the series by Michael Connelly about Los Angeles police detective Hieronymus Bosch:
I love that Connelly, back in 1993, foresaw Eric Eberhardt’s long-running youarelistening.to project, You Are Listening to Los Angeles, which pairs meditative music and police scanners. The original site suffers today from the inevitable situation in which embeds stop functioning dependably (something my own site’s older posts are rife with), but you can check out recordings in Eberhardt’s NTS.live show.
The author Warren Ellis, in his 2013 novel Gun Machine, quotes his own fictional detective, John Tallow of the NYPD, referencing Eberhardt’s work:
Eberhardt started You Are Listening to Los Angeles in 2011 and later expanded it to other cities. As he said to Roman Mars on the 99% Invisible podcast, “Some people think it’s peaceful. Some people think it’s creepy.”
