Disquiet Junto Project 0626: Audio Journal 2023

The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just under five 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 and interest.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 1, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 28, 2023.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.

These following instructions went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). Note that this service will change shortly, likely to Buttondown, due to Tinyletter shutting down.

Disquiet Junto Project 0626: Audio Journal 2023
The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.

As has become the tradition at the end of each calendar year, this week’s Junto project is a sound journal: a selective audio history of your past 12 months.

Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2023 — or you might opt for even more elements, choosing a segment for each week, or each day, for example. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, your own devising, and not drawn from third-party sources.

Step 2: You will then select one segment from each of these (most likely) dozen audio elements. If you’re doing a dozen items, one for each month, then five-second segments are recommended, for a total of one minute. Ultimately, though, the length of the segments and of the overall finished track are up to you.

Step 3: Then you will stitch these segments together, equally weighted, in chronological order to form one single track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.

Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0626” (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 “disquiet0626” (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-0626-audio-journal-2023/

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:

Length: The length is up to you. It will depend on the approach that you employ.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, January 1, 2024, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 28, 2023.

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 626th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Audio Journal 2023 — The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments — at: https://disquiet.com/0626/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0626-audio-journal-2023/

Live Code from Eulerroom

Software as performance

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“Live coding” is a term to describe the means by which performing musicians write and alter computer software in real time while sound is being emitted and itself impacted by the software, thus deploying code as an instrument. That approach draws a distinction between “merely” utilizing software as an instrument, and using the underlying code of software as an instrument. In this video from Eulerroom, a combination of software tools eke out swells of drones that, as the quarter of an hour passes, get slowly morphed, evolving into more complex and expressive burps and squelches, like life stepping out of a primordial ooze. It’s somewhat intoxicating, in a The Matrix sort of way, to watch the cursor navigate the right side of the screen, changing variables and turning on and off segments of text, and then we recognize the impact of those decisions in the sound we hear.

20 Great Albums from 2023

Or "the best," as some put it

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I have long since lost the ability to really put together a year-end best-of list. There’s more music available these days than ever before, and in many ways more better music than ever, if “more better” can be considered a thing. I did participate this year in some year-end voting activities, and toward that end I put together a list of what I thought, respectfully, represented the better end of more better for 2023. Of course, after I completed the following list of 20 such records, still more music came out — but this is, I think, a solid and representative selection:

  • Bill Frisell: Four
  • Dedalus Ensemble: Performing Brian Eno: Discreet Music/Music for Airports/Thursday Afternoon
  • The Necks: Travel
  • Lia Kohl: The Ceiling Reposes
  • Loraine James: Gentle Confrontation
  • Eivind Aarset and Jan Bang: Last Two Inches of Sky
  • Between: Low Flying Owls
  • Markus Floats: Fourth Album
  • Scott Tuma: Nobody’s Music
  • Sarah Davachi: Long Gradus
  • Éliane Radigue: Naldjorlak
  • Ryuichi Sakamoto: 12
  • Boxhead Ensemble: Ancient Music
  • Machinefabriek with Monika Bugajny: Recytle
  • Philip Jeck & Chris Watson: Oxmardyke
  • Marcus Fischer: Dodecalogues (vol.1)
  • Oliver Coates: Aftersun (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
  • Stephen Vitiello with Brendan Canty: Stephen Vitiello with Brendan Canty
  • John Luther Adams: Darkness and Scattered Light
  • Earth: Even Hell has its Heroes (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Year-End Reminder

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Again, apologies if I didn’t write about your music this year. My inbox runneth over, as evidenced by this snapshot of my email folders in their current state. On a positive note, I’ve been working on putting together a Plex server that will greatly improve my ability to process inbound requests for coverage. Details on the submission policy are in this site’s FAQ.

For context: I focus on ambient music, experimental electronic music, contemporary classical, instrumental hip-hop, sound art, and other vaguely related things, related to the extent that the use of technology feels exploratory, intentional — and I must admit I write about virtually nothing with an intelligible vocal.

I should also mention: I get hundreds of inbound emails about music each week, and so I rarely respond. I do listen constantly, and when I find something I want to write about, I write about it. I’m not a great correspondent.

If I’m not going to write about your music, I will almost certainly not write in reply to tell you so, because doing so would mean literally hundreds of additional emails I would have to write each week — emails that would inevitably spur further correspondence.

Soundtrack Effects

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The local public library has a “sound effects” CD category right next to the “soundtrack” CD category, and when the sound effects category is empty — which is pretty much all the time, suggesting all the old CDs are gone — then the two labels, which are on plexiglass, end up overlapping, which in turn yields a merged category called “soundtrack effects,” which is in essence my dream category.

And two friends pointed out something I’d never noticed, which is that the label is misspelled: “sountrack.”