Disquiet Junto Project 0076: Dream Sound Dream

The Project: Use the sounds of the room in which you sleep as source audio for a score to you describing your dream.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130613-pillow

*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/).*

This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, June 13, 2013, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, June 10, as the deadline.

Below 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 0076: Dream Sound Dream
>
>This project is about dreams and surveillance. It involves the human voice. Some projects require unique resources that not everyone necessarily has: access to an iOS or Android device, ability to record a specific sound, even the simple availability of requisite time. This specific project requires that you have a dream — which not everyone will — sometime between the launch and the close of the project. Then again, if you don’t have a dream, perhaps you will devise an interesting alternative approach.
>
>In this project you will create an original recording that consists of you describing in words a dream or a portion of a dream. The score to your verbal description of the dream will consist of music made from sounds recorded during your sleep. The idea is to explore the feedback correlation between dreams and the sounds of the environment in which those dreams unfold.
>
>These are the steps:
>
>Step 1: Set up a recording device to record the sounds of the room in which you sleep. (Avoid recording any material for which you do not hold the copyright, such as the radio playing from an alarm clock.)
>
>Step 2: Put a notebook or equivalent device (tablet, phone) near your bedside.
>
>Step 3: When you wake, either quickly write down what you recall from your dream, or record yourself speaking about what your recall from your dream.
>
>Step 4: If you opted to write down your dream, then proceed to record yourself recounting the dream.
>
>Step 5: Between Step 3 and Step 4 you have a recording of you describing a dream. Now take the audio that resulted from Step 1 and use elements extracted from that audio as source material for what will serve as score and sound design for your spoken description. You can manipulate the extracted elements as you wish, but do not add anything else to them.
>
>Step 6: Combine the spoken and score/sound-design tracks into one track. You have now completed the project.
>
>Deadline: Monday, June 17, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
>
>Length: Your track should have a duration of between 30 seconds and five minutes.
>
>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: Include the term “disquiet0076-dreamsound”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track. Also use the tags “spoken word”and “dream”for your track.
>
>Download: Please consider employing a license that allows for attributed, commerce-free 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 76th Disquiet Junto project, in which the sounds of the room in which you sleep serve as source audio for a score to you describing your dream, at:
>
>https://disquiet.com/2013/06/13/disquiet0076-dreamsound/
>
>More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
>
>http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Image of pillow via Creative Commons and [flickr.com](http://www.flickr.com/photos/fwoclothing/6885001943/in/photolist-buprd4-983cu4-7QZVcm/).

Cues: Free Oval Downloads, Porcini/Rós Streams, …

Plus: Boards of Canada speak, Drew Daniel on melancholy, more

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130612-ovalfree

â—¼ ***Oval Gratis:*** **Oval** (**Markus Popp**) has posted for free download four complete albums from 1998 to 2001: [*Aero Deko*](http://oval.bandcamp.com/album/aero-deko), [*Dok*](http://oval.bandcamp.com/album/dok) (embedded below), [*Pre/Commers*](http://oval.bandcamp.com/album/pre-commers), and [*Ovalcommers*](http://oval.bandcamp.com/album/ovalcommers). They’re also streaming at those addresses. … Related: Popp has posted a series of audio interviews at his [SoundCloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/oval-official/sets/oval-interviews) account. So far there are two in English and two in German. … Update (20130613): A fifth free album download has been added, 1999’s [*Szenario*](http://oval.bandcamp.com/album/szenario).

â—¼ ***Trainspotter Spotter:*** New **Funki Porcini** album, *Le Banquet Cassio*, streaming at [funkiporcini.bandcamp.com](http://funkiporcini.bandcamp.com/releases). Among other highlights, there is a track, “Foamer,” featuring a looped sample of a trainspotter freaking out over the sound of a horn:

◼ ***Sigur Day:*** The new **Sigur Rós** album, *Kveikur*, is streaming for free at [amazon.com](http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=amb_link_377414262_3?ie=UTF8&docId=1001227931&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=hero-quick-promo&pf_rd_r=1NQVC6ACSZ7ZDZ1E3NM1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=1565148902&pf_rd_i=B00C1GBOU6).

â—¼ ***Sonic Purge:*** “Maybe take an air conditioner hum and run it through Camel Phat and see what comes out.”That’s *The Purge* composer **Nathan Whitehead** on his compositional toolset, at [futurecomposer.com](http://futurecomposer.com/q-a/item/q-a-with-composer-nathan-whitehead).

â—¼ ***Chairmen of the Boards:*** “You can pick out a melody from the squeaking rusty chains of a swing. I once zoned out to a melody I could hear in the TGV [high-speed train] from Paris to Geneva, and it turned out to be harmonics coming from the rails vibrating under the train.” That’s **Mike Sandison**, one half of **Boards of Canada**, in email correspondence with **Jon Pareles** of [the New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/arts/music/tomorrows-harvest-by-boards-of-canada.html) for what is reportedly the only “their only United States interview” for their new album, *Tomorrow’s Harvest* (Warp). There’s also a nice bit about the texture in the album’s track “Semena Mertvykh,” courtesy of the other half of Boards of Canada, **Marcus Eoin**: “It was performed into a dissected VHS deck with the motor running super slowly, so you can hear all the pockmarks, the dropouts on the tape.”

20130612-drewdaniel

â—¼ ***Melancholy Assemblage:*** Great interview, if slightly off the topic of music and sound, at [citypaper.com](http://citypaper.com/arts/books/the-midnight-sun-1.1503521#.UbhQuaury_4.facebook) with **Drew Daniel** of **Matmos** on the publication in book form, *The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance* (Fordham University Press), of what originated as his Berkeley PhD dissertation. Not that it’s entirely off topic, given its focus on “assemblage.” Says Daniel, “I added the concept of the ‘assemblage,’ asserting that melancholy is not just an emotional state inside of one person but a socially extended phenomenon, something that connects bodies, signs, symptoms, and persons together.” The photo, above, is by Chrisopher Myers and it accompanies the interview. It was shot in Daniel’s office at Johns Hopkins University, where he is an assistant professor of English.

Post–Post–Tangerine Dream synthesis

A new track by Jon Monteverde

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130612-xyzr_kx

For all the talk of computer-aided abstraction and broken beats, of post-apocalyptic robotics and machine unlearning, there is an incredible strain of unabashed emotion in much electronic music these days. The sort of thing that once was associated primarily with Tangerine Dream now has a host of far more contemporary touchpoints, from Boards of Canada to the self-reoriented Squarepusher. **Jon Monteverde** balances interests in songs and abstraction in his work, often going to one extreme or the other. He reconciles them in a recent track, “Suddenly.” All Bach-ian chord progressions and hushed cymbals, “Suddenly”is both low key in its unfolding and, yet, outgoing in its aspirations.

https://soundcloud.com/xyzr_kx/suddenly

Monteverde is based in Chicago, Illinois. More from him at [twitter.com/xyzr_kx](http://twitter.com/xyzr_kx).

EDM Minus the Arena Drama

... and at quarter speed – a lovely track by Peter Brombaer

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130611-pollen

“Cosmo Pollen”by **Peter Brombaer** lays sounds — wooshes, rough chimes, muffled beeps — atop a whisp of a song, a beat that barely registers as a trap set and a melody that sounds more like the steady tests of a piano tuner than the stuff of which radio dreams are made. With the distant echoes of trip-hop and the atmospheric syncopations of a Hollywood score, it’s a bit like EDM with all the amped-up arena drama siphoned out of it. It’s quite lovely.

https://soundcloud.com/brombaer/brombaer-cosmo-pollen

Brombaer is based in Groningen, Netherlands. More from him at [brombaer.com](http://brombaer.com/).

The 1:40 Sonic Movie (MP3)

An exercise in scene-setting

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Antiquated piano? Check. Deep echo? Check. Steady rain? Check. Bird song? Check. Creaky additional noises? Check? This is “殺す – destroy dreams..”by Cracow, Poland”“based **Mirrorgirl**. In its brief running, just over a minute and a half, the track suffuses the atmosphere with a romantic sense of dread. It places movie-score elements in a movie sound-design schema, until the two become one whole thing unto themselves, a merger of equals. And if there is ever a chance that someone mistakes the piano as the “musical”element and the other material as something entirely extra-musical, then take note as the collected sounds get warped toward the end, turned back on themselves like some early Beatles tape-loop experiment in backmasking.

Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/mirrorgirl](https://soundcloud.com/mirrorgirl/destroy-dreams).