DJ Shadow Posts Sample Live Set

The Miami fallout moves from words to audio

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Since the **DJ Shadow** brouhaha earlier this month (see: [“DJ Shadow cuts short Miami club set”](http://blog.sfgate.com/dailydish/2012/12/17/dj-shadow-cuts-short-miami-club-set/)), when the beat innovator refused to alter his set at the request of a club promoter, one with good reason may have been wondering what, exactly, Shadow even sounds like these days. It’s been a long 16 years since his *Endtroducing…..* album put him on the map, with its abstract yet populist approach to rhythm and sampling. After the recent Miami situation, words were traded in the press, with Shadow (aka **Joshua Davis**) seeming more pleased at the attention than perturbed, and the club eventually [apologizing](http://www.spin.com/articles/dj-shadow-apology-miami-club-mansion). Shadow has gone a step further now, and posted on his [SoundCloud account](https://soundcloud.com/djshadow/all-basses-covered-low-end) a 45-minute set from July. Abstract, it isn’t, but as a beat-heavy and slick, seamless survey of several crates worth of varied source material, it’s certain fun — and more than anything, it makes the club look really, really silly:

Oh, and if you’re wondering what exactly made the club promoter anxious, it was reportedly “Spit Thunder” by Netherlands-based Krampfhaft:

Live Marcus Fischer Recording (MP3)

From a concert earlier this month

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

**Marcus Fischer** has posted a brief, elegant excerpt of a recent live performance, a solo work whose threadbare quality hides an intense array of details. As he explains in a brief accompanying note, even the underlying whir was the result of trial and error: “you can hear the pulsating buzz of snare drums throughout this recording. i was able to hit the right resonant notes to vibrate the drum heads along with the music. the it was something i had thought about playing around with and the result was really satisfying. i would love to play in that room again and try to make use of more of the drums natural resonant qualities.”

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/mapmap](https://soundcloud.com/mapmap/outset-live). More on the piece at [unrecnow.com](http://unrecnow.com/dust/433/).

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Well, that's a hassle. The auto-Twitter post plugin Twitter Digest worked the first week, didn't the second. Shouldn't be this complicated. ->
  • Today's productivity powered by OPT COMMAND â—„ â–º in VLC. ->
  • RIP, Lee Dorman (b. 1942), bassist on proto-drone rock classic "In-A-Gadda-De-Vida" by Iron Butterfly:… ->
  • Morning sounds: sleeping toddler's steady breathing, percussion of rain against the windows ->
  • Holiday music I can get behind: "Silent Night" covered by Scanner and by Robert Fripp: http://t.co/W9YmZqkI ->
  • "My phone is silent, hella silent." Overheard at Target. ->
  • RIP, Mike Scaccia (b. 1965), guitarist (Ministry, Rigor Mortis). Reportedly seizure due to strobe light. http://t.co/3sf2zzSY ->
  • And on Sunday, December 23, 2012, Marc Weidenbaum ceased capitalizing the "t" in t-shirts, though he retained the hyphen. ->
  • 25 musicians have produced 60-second audio journals of 2012: https://t.co/T79e44JI. Do consider joining in. Deadline is Monday, 11:59pm. ->
  • This horrendous cover of "Cecilia" has stumped Google's song identifier software. Or, more likely, simply fried the code. ->
  • I'm not at Jump Festa, but "Tokyo Dawn" by @naotko reminded me of waking early to watch kids disembark in Chiba: https://t.co/z2FnPwrv ->
  • Part of the point of @djunto is it's dependably there if you have time, so there will indeed be a 52nd project on Thursday: netlabel remix. ->
  • At café writing before holiday dinner. Yesterday's crazy lady not here today. Haunted by what she said: "I make money by confessing my sins" ->

    • Continue reading “Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet”

The (First) 52 Weeks of the Disquiet Junto

From ice in a glass to dirty minimalism to netlabel remixes – and onward

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Right now, around the planet, musicians are at work on the 52nd weekly project in the Disquiet Junto series. The projects began on the first Thursday of 2012 with a simple request: take the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it. The response was strong enough to suggest the projects be announced weekly, and that in turn has led to almost 1,700 tracks by almost 280 active contributors, and to concerts in 4 cities around the United States. The 52nd, in which three tracks from the Bump Foot netlabel are being combined into one original work, is due, fittingly, one minute before midnight on New Year’s Eve — that’s 11:59pm wherever you are. The Junto will continue into 2013, right on schedule, with a new project next Thursday, January 3. Here is a recap of the projects from year one of the Disquiet Junto:

1: ice cubes ”¢ 2: duet for foghorn and steam whistle ”¢ 3: expanded glass harp ”¢ 4: remixing Marcus Fischer ”¢ 5: adding sounds to everyday life ”¢ 6: remixing archival Edison cylinders ”¢ 7: create through subtraction ”¢ 8: rework Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography ”¢ 9: cross-species collaboration ”¢ 10: remix a previous Junto track ”¢ 11: everyday mechanical rhythms ”¢ 12: cut and paste ”¢ 13: remixing wild Up playing Shostakovich ”¢ 14: sonic version of Matt Madden’s Oubapo story ”¢ 15: aural RGB ”¢ 16: sandpaper and dice ”¢ 17: transition between field and composed ”¢ 18: relative prominence ”¢ 19: graphic score (photo by Yojiro Imasaka) ”¢ 20: use the NodeBeat app ”¢ 21: the four seasons ”¢ 22: sonic decay ”¢ 23: palindrone ”¢ 24: a suite of sonic alerts ”¢ 25: remixing project 24 ”¢ 26: making music from your trash ”¢ 27: turm the instruction text into sound ”¢ 28: remix a netlabel release ”¢ 29: music from water, inspired by William Gibson’s Count Zero ”¢ 30: sounds from silence ”¢ 31: Revisiting a 1955 Yoko Ono Fluxus piece ”¢ 32: sonify the 2012 U.S. presidential election polling data ”¢ 33: making music with a turntable but without vinyl ”¢ 34: Use the theme song of the Radius broadcast as the source of an original composition ”¢ 35: Make music from a sample page of Beck’s Song Reader sheet music ”¢ 36: Reworking Bach into abstract expressionism ”¢ 37: The sound of commerce ”¢ 38: Make a fake field recording ”¢ 39: Combine three tracks from the Nowaki netlabel into one ”¢ 40: Turn a Kenneth Kirschner duet into a trio ”¢ 41: Dirty minimalism ”¢ 42: Record a “naive melody” with your oldest and newest instruments> ”¢ 43: Make mechanical roars from the sound of a retail space ”¢ 44: Transition from storm to calm using field recordings from Sandy 2012 ”¢ 45: Combine material from the public domain adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Tom Sawyer ”¢ 46: Investigate a recording of the voting process for its “sonic fingerprint.” ”¢ 47: Turn the muffled voices of a distant party into the foundation of a recording. ”¢ 48: Celebrate the Creative Commons license that allows for derivative works by remixing music from the Three Legs Duck netlabel. ”¢ 49: Make a track, 50% of which is the sound of a tape cassette deck in motion. ”¢ 50: Encode a word or phrase in Morse Code and employ that as a track’s rhythm. ”¢ 51: Create a 2012 audio diary with a dozen five-second segments. ”¢ 52: Celebrate the Creative Commons by remixing three tracks from the Bump Foot netlabel.

More on the Junto at its [soundcloud.com](http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) page.

Disquiet Junto Project 0052: Bump Foot CC

The Assignment: Celebrate the Creative Commons by remixing three tracks from the Bump Foot netlabel.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20121227-bumpfoot

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

This assignment was made in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, December 27, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 31, 2012, as the deadline. Below are translations into four languages in addition to the original English: Croatian, French, Japanese, and Turkish, courtesy respectively of Darko Macan, Éric Legendre, Naoyuki Sasanami, and M. Emre Meydan.

>Disquiet Junto Project 0052: Bump Foot CC
>
>This is a shared-sample project. Create a new piece of music by employing segments from the following three tracks. All were initially released on the great netlabel Bump Foot:
>
>1. The first 20 seconds of “Bongo” off the Aguas Tonicas album Los Desposeídos:
>http://archive.org/download/foot212/foot212_09-aguas_tonicas-bongo.mp3
>
>2. “Broken Robots” off the Gridline album Red Music:
>http://archive.org/download/foot211/foot211_03-gridline-broken_robots.mp3
>3. “The Cat in the Ocean” off the Pics Frunk album Low Voltage:
>
>http://archive.org/download/foot206/foot206_01-pics_frunk-the_cat_in_the_ocean.mp3
>
>We’re doing this to pay thanks to the open-minded Bump Foot, which not only releases its music for free download but also employs the Creative Commons license that allows for derivative works. There are hundreds of netlabels out there, but only a small percentage allow for reworking. These Junto netlabel remix projects are intended to promote reworking as itself a means of music distribution.
>
>Deadline: Monday, December 31, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
>
>Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 5 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 “disquiet0052-bumpcc”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
>
>Download: For this project, your track should be set as downloadable, and allow 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:
>
>This Disquiet Junto project was done as a celebration of the efforts of the Bump Foot netlabel, and to support its employment of licenses that allow for derivative works. These Junto netlabel remix projects are intended to promote reworking as itself a means of music distribution. This track is comprised of three pieces of music, all originally released on Bump Foot: “Bongo” off the Aguas Tonicas album titled Los Desposeídos, “Broken Robots” off the Gridline album titled Red Music, and “The Cat in the Ocean” off the Pics Frunk album titled Low Voltage. More on the Bump Foot netlabel, and the original versions of these tracks, at http://www.bumpfoot.net/.
>
>More on this 52nd Disquiet Junto project at:
>
>https://disquiet.com/2012/12/27/disquiet0052-bumpcc/
>
>More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
>
>http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Continue reading “Disquiet Junto Project 0052: Bump Foot CC”