Self-Destructing in 8 Bits

A lofi implosion by Michigan's Luminous Fridge

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The great thing about great 8bit music is how it sounds as if it’s about to fall to pieces. The first half of “Phantom Spikes The Punch” by Michigan-based **Luminous Fridge** sounds like three different video games vying for your attention in a dusty old arcade. There’s white noise from a dying speaker cabinet, the blippy melody of a nocturnal adventure, and the heavy beats of a first-person shooter. Together, they form an abstract sort of pop song, one barely holding onto its own self-containment. And then, as if with the flip of a switch, near the 45-second mark, everything shifts. The music gets markedly more contemporary, the beats and tune gathering themselves with a sense of lounge-ready decorum — less Pacman, more Amom Tobin.

Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/luminousfridge](https://soundcloud.com/luminousfridge/phantom-spikes-the-punch). More from Fridge at [luminousfridge.bandcamp.com](http://luminousfridge.bandcamp.com/).

Acoustic + Electric = Splendid (MP3)

Complementary parts in a track by San Francisco's Edison

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s not so much that opposites attract as that they complement each other. In the case of “The Sighs” by San Francisco”“based **Edison**, aka **Nic Dematteo**, the opposites are those old purported rivals, acoustic and electric. The acoustic is a rhythmic guitar part. The electric is the beat — not so much a beat as a beat plus underlying tonal foundation. That foundation has almost half a minute to cement itself before the guitar appears, some Sunday-morning chords and squeaky strings heard against the slowly developing rhythm. What makes the track work is that neither section is stagnant. The beat eventually goes into a double-time loop and the guitar, just after a bleepy melody suggests that “electric” has its own way with a tune, gives up in a gentle surrender. And then the guitar reappears for a refreshing coda. The whole thing is a delight.

https://soundcloud.com/edison/the-sighs

Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/edison](https://soundcloud.com/edison/the-sighs). More from Edison/Dematteo at [buttonsofdoom.com](http://www.buttonsofdoom.com/).

The Children Next Door in NYC (July 26 – Aug 1)

Film for which I did music supervision and, with Taylor Deupree, sound design

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From July 26 through August 1, *The Children Next Door* is screening every night at 7:40pm at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan. The theater is located at 34 West 13th Street. The movie was directed by Doug Block (*The Kids Grow Up*, *51 Birch Street*) and produced by Lynda Hansen. The score is by the talented Taylor Deupree, which whom I shared sound design duties. I handled music supervision for the film.

Anthony Kaufman wrote of *The Children Next Door* at the Sundance blog, [“Doug Block’s searing short … attains a level of pathos as deep as any feature-length documentary.”](http://blog.sundancenow.com/festival-coverage/docutopia-23-the-kids-arent-all-right%E2%80%94innocence-lost-at-doc-nyc) It’s had a great response at numerous film festivals, including DOCS-NYC and the Seattle True Independent Film Festival, at both of which it received special jury prizes. It had its international premiere at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival in Greece.

Here’s the trailer:

Trailer hosted at [vimeo.com](https://vimeo.com/50225024). Additional production details at [imdb.com](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2344458/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) and [thechildrennextdoor.com](http://www.thechildrennextdoor.com/). Theater website at [quadcinema.com](http://quadcinema.com).

SoundCloud Blog on “Creating with Constraints”

Great series of interviews – I'm honored to be a participant.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130723-sc

Major thanks to SoundCloud for having posted [this interview](http://blog.soundcloud.com/2013/07/23/creating-with-constraints-communal-sound-making/) with me as part of its ongoing blog-post series on the value of creative restraints. Previous posts in the series have looked at [Madeleine Cocolas’ weekly music compositions](http://blog.soundcloud.com/2013/07/18/creator-constraints-52-weeks/), musicologist [Gilles Helsen’s everyday recordings](http://blog.soundcloud.com/2013/07/16/creator-daily-recording-recomposed/), and [Kyle Vande Slunt’s sound design experiments](http://blog.soundcloud.com/2013/07/15/creators-daily-sound-design/).

In addition to focusing attention on the ongoing Disquiet Junto projects and the *Insta/gr/ambient* compilation, the piece quotes frequent Junto music-maker Naoyki Sasanami, who is better known as [Naotko](https://soundcloud.com/naotko) on SoundCloud:

>Naoyki Sasanami regularly participates in the Disquiet Junto group’s challenges every week and compares them to “experimental trials”that are opportunities for sound design. “I feel like I’m playing a weekly chess game using sound.”

Here’s a snippet of the article:

>If you’re interested in making music as part of a communal group, Marc shares some advice: “First, I would not model whatever it is you want to do too closely on what other groups have done. Instead, I would identify the loose knit community that you find of interest, and think long and hard about that community’s motivations, about the way its constituents both produce and consume sound. I would try to develop a group approach with those unique characteristics in mind. Second, I would be prepared to alter your approach as time proceeds, in response to what the participants contribute, both in terms of the ideas they share with you but also, and equally importantly, the behavior, the predilections, the habits, they display.”

Read the full thing at [blog.soundcloud.com](http://blog.soundcloud.com/2013/07/23/creating-with-constraints-communal-sound-making/).

And thanks, as well, to Jorge Colombo for having taken the photo that accompanies the interview. Colombo’s photographs were the inspiration for the 2012 [*LX(RMX)* compilation](https://disquiet.com/2012/02/14/lxrmx-lisbon-remixed/) that featured music from Scanner, Steve Roden, Kate Carr, and Marielle V. Jakobsons, among others.

Reworking Emma Hendrix (MP3)

A bagpipe derivation by Larry Johnson

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130721-hornpipe

Some of the best posts about exploratory Creative Commons music online are themselves works of music — not text posts, like the ones I do here at Disquiet.com, posts that are a kind of semi-casual public processing in words of recent listening, but music proper: reworkings, remixes, and answer tracks that in the course of revisiting the source audio make considered statements about it.

**Larry Johnson**, who goes by **L-A-J** on SoundCloud and elsewhere, frequently pops up on this site having taken a recent subject of of Disquiet Downstream post as the source audio for a reworking. Recently he focused on a piece by the talented **Emma Hendrix** that itself had taken the drone of the bagpipe and made proper, contemporary drone music out of it. Hendrix’s, titled “Prominal,” is a scintillating piece — imagine the proto-minimalist, raga-esque burble of the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” turned into a frantic pulse, like a cicada having a heart attack. She writes of the track’s origin:

>Promial is sourced entirely from the introductory notes of a Sailor’s Hornpipe. It is intended to envelope the sailor’s tradition in the vast expanse common to both the sea and the drone of the bagpipe. It was commissioned by the Community Radio Education Society’s (CRES) Media Arts Committee in Vancouver Canada in 2011.

Johnson, in his “Promial [Emma Hendrix] Remixed,” digs into the drone within her drone (that is, the drone within the drone within a drone), pulling a see-saw fragment from Hendrix’s piece and moving it about this way and that, nudging it to and fro, teasing out chance harmonics and rhythmic details.

This is his revision:

https://soundcloud.com/l-a-j-1/promial-emma-hendrix-remixed

And this is Hendrix’s root track:

Johnson version originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/l-a-j-1](https://soundcloud.com/l-a-j-1/promial-emma-hendrix-remixed), and the Hendrix at [soundcloud.com/emmahendrix](https://soundcloud.com/emmahendrix/promial). Hendrix is based in Vancouver, Canada; more from her at [emmahendrix.com](http://emmahendrix.com). The above image is from the Project Gutenberg ebook of *The Little Skipper* by George Manville Fenn ([gutenberg.org](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20544/20544-h/20544-h.htm)). Johnson used it as the “cover” for his cover version.