Tag: remix

Disquiet Junto Project 0519: Looking Glass Remix

The Assignment: Remix yourself from another point of view.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, December 13, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 9, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0519: Looking Glass Remix
The Assignment: Remix yourself from another point of view.

Step 1: Think of a prior recording you’ve made that you want to revisit.

Step 2: Think about what you were like when you made the recording you selected in Step 1: what state of mind, where you were in your life.

Step 3: Think about who you are now, and how you are different from who you were then.

Step 4: Remix the recording you selected in Step 1, reflecting the difference in who you are now. Treat it as if you are a different person from the one who recorded it, which may in some cases be the case.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0519” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0519” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0519-looking-glass-remix/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, December 13, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 9, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you. Don’t necessarily let old you make the decision.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0519” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to 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. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 519th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Looking Glass Remix (The Assignment: Remix yourself from another point of view) — at: https://disquiet.com/0519/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0519-looking-glass-remix/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.

Buddha Machine Variations No. 40 (MBP BMV VCV)

A series of focused experiments

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Been a while. This is a new entry in the occasional Buddha Machine Variations series. The previous one was about 10 months ago. This was a test run of something I’ve never done before: recording video straight off my laptop (a MacBook Pro), bypassing the microphone in favor of the internal sound. Oddly, such a routing isn’t an immediate option within macOS Monterey, so I had to use a third-party tool, in this case Loopback from Rogue Amoeba. Recorded in QuickTime. Edited in iMovie. Cover image in InDesign. The source audio is one of the tracks from the original Buddha Machine, created by the duo FM3. It’s been looped and processed in VCV Rack (this is the Pro edition, but there’s probably nothing going on in this patch you couldn’t do in the free edition, except a few of the modules may have had a fee associated with them). In any case, this was more a proof of concept, or of several concepts: (1) could the routing work, and (2) would this all happen without the new laptop’s fan turning on. In both cases: yes!

Video originally posted at youtube.com/disquiet. There’s also a video playlist of the Buddha Machine Variations.

Disquiet.com 25th Anniversary Countdown (5 of 13): Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet

An archival ambient advent calendar from December 1st – 13th, 2021

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Just shy of 10 years after I founded Disquiet.com, I did something here I hadn’t done before: rather than write about music and sound someone produced somewhere else, I published music that I myself had assembled.

In 2006, Brian Eno and David Byrne posted (for free download) stems from one of my favorite albums of all time, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and asked people to remix them. I listened to what people had posted and I found nothing that was particularly appealing. Most of the tracks just slotted the provided raw material above rote 4/4 percussion. So, I sent the Eno/Byrne project news to some friends and musicians I corresponded with, and I asked if they’d participate. The response I got back was, in essence, uniformly: This is cool, but the tracks showing up on the official website leave a lot to be desired. So, I told everyone I’d post the results of their work on Disquiet.com instead. A dozen musicians participated, resulting in this collection:

  1. “Help Me Help Me” – AllThatFall
  2. “If You Make Your Bed in Heaven” – Roddy Schrock
  3. “Leftover Secrets to Tell” – Pocka
  4. “Secret Life Remix” – Stephane Leonard
  5. “The Black Isle (Byrne/Eno Remix)” – (dj) morsanek
  6. “Hit Me Somebody (Help Me Somebody Remix)” – MrBiggs
  7. “Being and Nothingness (A Secret Life Remixed)” – john kannenberg
  8. “Somebody Help Us” – My Fun
  9. “Hey” – Mark Rushton
  10. “My Bush in the Secret Life of Ghosts” – Prehab
  11. “Not Enough Africa” – Ego Response Technician
  12. “Helping (Help Me Somebody Remix)” – doogie

This was almost a year before SoundCloud launched, so the natural place to post the music was the Internet Archive, the offices of which are about a mile from where I live. (The offices are actually a block from where I lived when I first moved to San Francisco in 1996, but the building wasn’t the Internet Archive then. It was a church.)

It’s hard to describe what a transformation this collection was both for this website, and for my sense of how I relate to and communicate with musicians. In the following years, I’d release a series of other such compilation albums, largely inspired by the work of Hal Willner, and eventually I’d open up the format (moving from narrow commission to open call), resulting in the Disquiet Junto music community.

More details, and all the audio, in the original post. And major thanks to Brian Scott of Boon Design (boon.design) for the gorgeous cover.

Disquiet.com 25th Anniversary Countdown (2 of 13): LX(RMX)

An archival ambient advent calendar from December 1st – 13th, 2021

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet.com 25th anniversary countdown, day 2 of 13. In 2012, I had the pleasure of engaging eight musicians to explore the sounds of Lisbon, Portugal. These were: Steve Roden, Robin Rimbaud, Pedro Tudela, Kate Carr, Shawn Kelly, Marielle Jakobsons, Paula Daunt, and João Ricardo.

The project was done with an old friend of mine, Jorge Colombo, the phenomenal illustrator, photographer, and designer, to accompany an exhibit of his at the time. In the spirit of Fernando Pessoa (whose The Book of Disquiet provided the name for Disquiet.com), who wrote under (from within) numerous different heteronyms (or authorial identities), each participant did two tracks: one under their own name, and one under their pseudonym.

The result was this album:

They all worked from a single shared audio source: an ambient soundtrack of field recordings of urban Lisbon created by Elvis Veiguinha for Jorge’s installation exhibit.

More details at disquiet.com/lx-rmx. Design by Brian Scott of Boon Design.

Night After Night

A remix by Van Stiefel

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One of the great internet pleasures is to have your music reworked, all the more so to find that someone has taken one of your guitar loop experiments and expanded it to a nearly 30-minute amalgam of coded glitch refraction and improvised soloing. This reworking is by the saintly and enviably talented Van Stiefel.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/vanstiefel. More from Stiefel, a professor of music composition at the Wells School of Music of West Chester University of Pennsylvania, at vanstiefel.com.

And here’s my original, by way of comparison: