Thanks for joining in, folks. If you can be sure to include in the notes field for your track the material mentioned in the project instructions, that’d be helpful. There’s occasional group spam on SoundCloud, and if the track title doesn’t include the project number, sometimes it ends up getting deleted (not from your account, just from the group).
The deadline for this week’s project is Monday (tomorrow, April 11) at 11:59pm wherever you happen to be.
If you want to subscribe for an announcement-only email list to receive each Thursday’s new project, it’s at http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.
this was a really good junto prompt; thanks @tehn and @disquiet. i was initially planning something complicated involving multiple groups in mlrv, but decided to simply improvise a gentle rhodes melody through reverb, re-recording it eight times.
Hah - my original melody was an eighteen-note one (two repeated five note phrases and then an eight). I quickly discovered that, in total isolation - just playing the thing and counting loops - I honestly kept losing my place in the deliberately repetitive thing I’d chosen.
So: I simplified it down to five notes. Then the only thing to worry about was “timing”.
It’s an interesting way of laying bare bits of musicianship (and how they’ve withered).
This project sent me noodling on “In C” for several days. I didn’t feel anything that came out of that was worth posting, but it stretched me, nonetheless.
Was dealing with my sick partner and other things on the weekend so I didn’t have as much time to work on this as I wanted, so I kept it as simple as possible. Simple for me anyway ;). Here’s my contribution:
You convinced me to try and get an iteration in, just under the wire!
The process used is detailed in the SC description, but x-posting here for ease of consumption:
A small loop from the op-1 was sampled into the octatrack. The crossfader on the octatrack was used to jog around the loop (while also adjusting pitch, filter cutoff, and playback rate). The loop was triggered in real time using an egg shaker resting on top of the octatrack’s trigger. A room mic was set up to capture the egg shaker as well as ambient room noise to allow for additional character in each take. There are four layers.
Not sure if recording the initial loop counts as cheating, but I manually triggered it each time, and never allowed more than a note or two to play back before retriggering, so hopefully not! It kind of acted akin to a clumsy fretless bass.
This was super fun, look forward to participating in future juntos in the future. Thanks @tehn and @disquiet!
Just wanted to mention to everyone who’s joined in — and we’ve had a heap of first-timers, 10 or 11, bringing us to 611 active participants, our of 2000+ members — that when you add a track to your account, please be sure to click “Add to Group” to associate it with the Disquiet Junto group. That way I’m assured to see it, and I can add it to the playlist. I’ve caught a few that weren’t associated with the group, and I’ve added those to the playlist, but I may have missed some.
Btw, the link in the FAQ in “Be sure to click the “Add to group” button below your track’s waveform, and select the Disquiet Junto group. Here’s what the “join” button looks like on the Junto page on SoundCloud:” is broken, it redirects to another page on the wordpress site instead of the intended Soundcloud URL.
I’m going to write more about this on a proper website soon, I hope, but it was brought very much into focus by a set of drawing exercises I did in a design crit before the weekend.
We spent some time - after exploring constraints around only using certain parts of the arm, exploring single-line drawings: not removing the pen from the paper, and not endlessly retracing lines. (Instead, you retrace a handful, but actually spend a time drawing the rest of the room around the subject - as you go up somebody’s shoulder, you realise if you dive left and draw the windowframe behind them, you can loop back down to get the top of their head. You start flattening perspective as strategy).
What this explores is confidence - the moment you can’t feather, or hedge bets, you just have to own every line. Every line means something - but because you’re working within an imposed constraint, you’re less precious about each line; you’re given confidence because you know you’re doing your best within a constraint.
And this felt very similar: yes, I was going to go out of time. No, it was not going to be my magnum opus. And all of a sudden I was freed up to do it a bit quickly, and make something a little unfinished, and cut the performance/composition anxiety and go straight to “huh, now what”.
Which, I guess, is often the work of the Junto projects, but this one felt particularly straightforward to dive into, and the results were perhaps more interesting than I expected.