Disquiet Junto Project 0108: Free Bassel

Create a soundscape for the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20140123-freebassel

*Each Thursday at [the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/groups/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](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/).*

Tracks by participants will be added to this playlist as the project proceeds:

This project was published in the evening, California time, on Thursday, January 23, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 27, 2014, as the deadline.

20140123-palmyra3

20140123-palmyra2

20140123-palmyra1

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 0108: Free Bassel

For this week’s project, we’re going to create soundscapes for an ancient Middle Eastern city. And in the process, we’re going to raise awareness about an imprisoned open-source developer with strong ties to the Creative Commons community. Bassel Khartabil, before his arrest on March 15, 2012, in Damascus, was working on several projects, among them a 3D rendering of the ancient city of Palmyra. Much as Bassel was trying to revive an ancient world, you are, in essence, keeping one of his projects alive while he is incapable of doing so.

The project instructions are as follows:

Step 1: View this video for background on Bassel’s digital Palmyra project:

Step 2: If you aren’t viewing this instruction on the Disquiet.com project page, go to the following URL to view three still images from Bassel’s 3D work:

Disquiet Junto Project 0108: Free Bassel

Step 3: Create a soundscape of between one and three minutes that might be employed in an immersive, completed digital visualization of ancient Palmyra.

Deadline: Monday, January 27, 2014, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be between 1 and 3 minutes in length.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, 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 “disquiet0108-freebassel”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, be sure to include this information:

More on this 108th Disquiet Junto project (“Create a soundscape for the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra.”) at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0108: Free Bassel

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

The Disquiet Junto Project List (0001 – 0639 …)

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

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

More on the campaign to free Bassel at

Home

For their collaboration on this project, special thanks to: Niki Korth, Barry Threw, and Jon Phillips.

Post-Classical Sequel

A peek at a new Christina Vantzou album

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20140122-cv

The second album from Christina Vantzou is due out on February 24. Titled *No. 2*, it follows her earlier *No. 1*, which was released in late 2011. The new album is on the label Kranky, which is home to such notable musicians as Jessica Baliff, Greg Davis, Grouper, and Keith Fullerton Whitman, as well as the Dead Texan, which is Vantzou’s collaboration with Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid, also on the Kranky roster. Kranky has posted a track from *No. 2* in advance of the album’s release. “Going Backwards to Recover That Which Was Left Behind” is a slow-moving chamber piece that builds as it goes, its increasing density of instrumentation at each moment in an eager, quiet struggle to keep the increasing momentum from undoing the stability of what the piece has accomplished thus far. Melodic fragments are repeated on varied instruments, the orchestration swelling as it passes its midpoint, and a reticent horn section — reminiscent of David Byrne’s *Knee Plays* — eventually filling things out. Absolutely beautiful.

Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/kranky](https://soundcloud.com/kranky/christina-vantzou-going). More by Christina Vantzou at [christinavantzou.com](http://christinavantzou.com/), which is where the above images are from.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 23 (“Tassels”)

A track per day up through the February 13 release of my 33 1/3 book

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

SAWII22

cover-from-Bloomsbury-siteI am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at [amazon.com](http://www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/) and [Bloomsbury.com](http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii-9781623567637/). The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, [an early draft of the introduction is online](https://disquiet.com/2012/08/31/saw2for33third/), as is [the book’s seven-chapter table of contents](https://disquiet.com/2013/11/14/aphex-twin-chapter-titles/). The book’s publisher posted [an interview with me](http://333sound.com/2012/12/04/the-33-13-author-qa-marc-weidenbaum/) when I was midway through the writing process.

*There is some irony to doing this countdown since the book is already shipping to folks who pre-ordered it via an online retailer such as [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/), but the official date stands, and that’s the target — the end date — of this countdown, February 13.*

This piece is about as far from the concept of a “song” as the album gets. “Tassels” is a noise whorl, a burred whorl, a flangy spray, a sequence of undulating static. It is a thick mass of white noise that gets the appellation of “song” — gets categorized as “song” — for the simple reason that it is one track among two dozen or so on a record of things that are occasionally taken as songs, that broader understanding itself more a matter of context and format than of form. “Tassels” is a song by association. Beyond that association, it is anything but a song.

There are, in essence, two portions to the material that make up “Tassels”: There is the noise and there is the tone. The noise is like that of a passing jet plane, its fuselage drone a slow-motion experiment in doppler fantasia. The tone is a sinewy curve of synthesized anxiety; if it suggests an airborne vehicle, it would be more spacecraft than plane, and considerably less likely of Earth origin. The track is the less the score than the sound design to a sequence of an unscreened *Alien* sequel. There’s a long hallway, and a lot of dead crew mates, and things are almost certainly going to get worse. Perhaps this is why “Tassels” appears toward the end of the album. It’s a premonition of exiting the chill-out room.

Here it is, reversed:

More on my Aphex Twin _Selected Ambient Works Volume II_ book at [amazon.com](www.amazon.com/Aphex-Twins-Selected-Ambient-Volume/dp/1623568900/) and [Bloomsbury.com](http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/aphex-twins-selected-ambient-works-volume-ii-9781623567637/).

Thanks to boondesign.com for the sequential grid treatment of the album cover.

The Drone, Writ Long

A new piece by Elizabeth Veldon

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The latest Elizabeth Velvdon track is quite distinct from other recent work of hers. Where her [“The Pure Water, Filled with Light””](https://disquiet.com/2013/12/15/silence-beyond-punctuation/) was a solo piano work marked by [brief moments of melodic fragments and sudden stoppages](https://disquiet.com/2013/12/15/silence-beyond-punctuation/), her “The Frost Is Setting In” is a deep, “longform” drone that tests the listener’s patience at the same time as lulling the listener. Like those two opposed responses, the track comes in alternating waves, short ones that arrive in brief, dependable cycles, like a boat adrift on a mechanical current. The word “longform” is one that she herself has applied to the track as a tag, along with “minimalism” and “cold drone” and, for good measure, simply “drone.” The word “longform” is used most often in description of online writing, of pieces whose length allow for a depth of exploration and insight, research and perspectives. Here, there is certainly an immersive intent, but the piece, quite the contrary, is still and singular, despite its extended length.

Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/elizabethveldon](https://soundcloud.com/elizabethveldon/the-frost-is-setting-in). More from Veldon, who is based in Glasgow, Scotland, at [elizabethveldon.tumblr.com](http://elizabethveldon.tumblr.com/), [twitter.com/elizabethveldon](https://twitter.com/elizabethveldon), and [elizabethveldon.bandcamp.com](http://elizabethveldon.bandcamp.com/).