Robert Henke’s new album, Signal to Noise – Volume II, is all about time, or more to the point, can be experienced as an expression of, a reflection on, time. To begin with the tracks are all drones, lengthy extensions of tone for its own sake. They aren’t just held notes. No, as drones, they are dense, ever-shifting totalities in constant sonic flow. The longest of these is nearly 13 minutes, and the shortest is more than half that. There is well over an hour of music on this album of just seven tracks. In addition, this second set of Signal to Noise reaches back in time, doubly: first to 2004, when Henke’s first Signal to Noise album was released, and second to 1989, when the instrument on which this music was made, the Yamaha SY77 FM, was introduced to the market. This is meditative music that is, itself, a meditation on these various interwoven concepts: immersive listening, harmony and texture as artistic ends unto themselves, the long influence of ancient machines, and the through lines of individual artistic legacy.
At this moment, the Disquiet Junto music community has begun the third week of its three-week “trios sequence.” These trios make up one of my favorite examples of Junto projects, and we’ve done it pretty much every year for many years now, and I’ve even considered doing it twice a year. I think people would enjoy that.
One irony of the “trios sequence” is that while it’s among the most popular projects for Junto participants, it also involves some of the longest sets of instructions. I work hard to keep instructions concise, even pithy, but I also, over time, have tried to compensate for previous misunderstandings or ambiguities. As a result, the instructions have grown.
Along the way, I also got in the habit of tracking Junto participants’ tracks in the trios sequence, using a shared read-only document. I do this with a primary aim: I want to, as moderator, do my best to make sure that, within reason, as many solos as possible have the opportunity to become duets, and as many duets as possible have the opportunity to become trios. I fear the complicated document, like the lengthy instructions, could be off-putting for people. I’m not sure explaining its inner workings helps much, but I figured I’d take this opportunity to break it down. It is, from the start of the first project in the sequence to the end of the third, very much a “living document,” in that it is constantly changing, not just adding data about new tracks but even shifting some explanatory text. Also, over the years, the document’s format has changed, benefiting from previous years of experience. Below is an attempt to break down and explain what’s what in the shared Google doc:
A — Introductory Text: This yellow cell is just a little introductory statement about the document and the projects. I adjust this text occasionally over the course of the sequence of the three trios projects. Almost everyone who visits this document does so from somewhere else, like from the Lines (llllllll.co) discussion threads or from the Disquiet Junto email newsletter or via social media, and so they already have a sense of what the document is before they get to it. This particular section, in yellow, is more for those few people who, for whatever reason, arrive at the document cold.
B — Main Column: This initial main column (of three total), or set of columns, contains the first week’s entries, which are the solos. There were 54 solo in all for this project. The reason they are spaced out vertically, with lots of what look like blank lines, is because come week two, when the duets were made, many of the solos became duets more than once. When a second duet is made of a given solo, a new row is introduced below it, so the two duets can be stacked in the second main column. If you look closely, those inserted rows are not blank. The columns have quotation marks in them, to signify “same as above.”
C — Un-duet’ed Solos: Of the original 54 solos created in the first project, there were 7 that, unfortunately, were not turned into duets. After the duets, in week two, started popping up, I began highlighting in yellow the solos that had not yet become duets. At first they were interspersed among the other solos. After a while, I collected them at the top of the list, to prioritize them further. Eventually, when the duets project was over, I moved them to the bottom of the list, since they naturally don’t play a role in the third week. A few of the solos became duets pretty late, at least one the morning that the trios project began. Late additions made for a nice gesture, giving as many people as possible the chance to hear their solo in context. At least one of the solos wasn’t easily downloadable, which may have contributed to it not having been selected.
D — Blank Area: This bottom portion of the second main column, for the duets week, is, per C above, the set of 7 solos that didn’t become duets.
E — Black / Gray / Blue: You’ll note that some of the text in this second main column is gray, while the majority of it is black. All the tracks begin in black text, and when the solos became duets and the duets became trios, I gray out the text, just to single they’ve been used. Anyone who participates in week two or three can turn any solo into a duet and any duet into a trio. The reason I highlight the distinction is twofold: A, just to nudge the unused tracks; B, because anyone who does an additional duet or an additional trio is asked to do so on a track that has not yet been utilized. Also, if you look to the right, you’ll see one little cell in blue. That individual column is, as in the other two main columns, where I count how many tracks have appeared. I mark the most recent one in blue, just to make it easy for me to recall when another one pops up.
F — Basic Info: This colorful row is just basic header information for each of the three main columns. It repeats key information, like the deadline and the playlist link. Over the course of the given column’s respective week, I keep count here of how many tracks have appeared.
G — Arrows & Dittos: If you zoom in here, you’ll see there is, in the gray vertical line between the first and second main columns (and as well between the second and third main columns), a pattern of arrows and quotation marks (or ditto marks). The first time a solo is turned into a duet, there is a little arrow showing the transition from one column to the next. Any time a second, third, etc. duet is added, those are marked with quotation marks. Same happens when duets eventually become trios.
H — Yet to Come: And since I made this screenshot early on the morning of the third project, there is a lot of white space in the third main column, which is the trios column. There were four or five tracks when I first woke up, in California, and two or three more arrived while I was getting things going, like posting the instructions on the llllllll.co message board, which is where most Disquiet Junto discussion occurs, and on social media, among other places. This column will continue to fill up as the days pass, and there will almost certainly be duets that give rise to more than one trio, in which case the document will add rows, as well.
And here’s an update: A musician opted to make a trio by first combining two of the solos, rather than working from a duet. This allowed two solos that had not become duets to still be built upon. That creative choice required me to think for a moment about how to represent the activity on the grid. I did the following:
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.
Disquiet Junto Project 0749: And a Three (3/3) The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio.
Please note: While this project is the third of a semi-annual three-part sequence that unfolds over the course of three consecutive weeks, starting two weeks ago, you can participate in any or all three of those weekly parts.
There are two versions of the instructions for this week’s project — one very short, the other very long, should clarifications prove useful. (You can do three tracks this week, if you’d like, just be sure to read the longer set of instructions if you elect to.)
. . .
Very short version (roughly 25 words): Select a track from last week’s duet project (disquiet.com/0748) and add a third part dead center between the left and right stereo channels to complete a trio.
. . .
Very long version of the instructions (roughly 650 words):
These instructions are fairly lengthy. Please read carefully.
Please note: While this week’s project is the third part of a three-part project sequence, you don’t need to have participated in either of the first two parts to participate in this third part.
Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the third in a sequence that encourages and rewards asynchronous collaboration. This week you will be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0748). Note that you are finishing a trio: you’re creating the third part of what two previous musicians began, filling the space between them. Please keep this in mind.
Step 2: The plan is for you to record an original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to a pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by numerous musicians to choose from, 76 at the time of publishing this post (note: my counting got screwy so the numerical order doesn’t exactly represent the order in which the tracks appeared, but the count is correct). There is a full list of them in this read-only spreadsheet:
(Note that it’s possible another track or two will pop up, and some may disappear. Things are fluid on the internet.)
To select a track, you can listen through all those and choose one, or simply look around and select, or you can come up with a random approach to sifting through them.
It’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece (more on this in Step 5 below).
Step 3: Record a piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and it should be placed dead center between the left and right stereo channels. When composing and recording your part, do not alter the original piece of music at all. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.
Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it may be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.
Step 5: In normal circumstances, Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. However, as with the preceding project that led up to this one, you can contribute more than one track this week. You can do up to three total this time. For your first, you can choose any track from the duets, no matter how many times others may have employed it. If you choose to do a second or third, please do a track no one else has used yet (it’s understood that between when you select a duet track and finish your trio, someone else may have popped up and used it, which is perfectly fine). Throughout the project I will keep an updated list in the Google Drive document of what has been utilized:
You’ll note that in the spreadsheet, almost every track has two URLs. The first URL is where the given track appears online, so you can download it and add to it. The second URL is the place on the llllllll.co message board where the project discussion took place. It is strongly encouraged that you look at that discussion link for the track you select, because many of those posts include additional contextual information there, such as BPM, key, and instrumentation.
The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. That, foremost, is the spirit of this project.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0749” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one or two tracks this week (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If you feel inspired to post more than two tracks (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which are the two “main” renditions for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.
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 749th weekly Disquiet Junto project, And a Three (3/3) — The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio — disquiet.com/0749.
Major thanks to Ethan Hein for writing about the Disquiet Junto music community I’ve moderated for the past 14 and a half years (or more to the point, the past 748 consecutive weeks). Here’s a link to Ethan’s newsletter issue (from which the above quote was extracted) about the Junto, in which musicians respond each week to a composition project that I send out.
