Disquiet Junto Project 0389: Long Then

Disquiet Junto
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Disquiet Junto Project 0389: Long Then
The Assignment: Take an old song, and make it (much) slower, and add something.

Step 1: For this project you’ll be reworking an old piece of your own music. Reading through the instructions first may aid in your selection process.

Step 2: Choose an old piece of music of your own. (Define “old” as you like. “Preexistence” is the main factor.)

Step 3: Slow it down considerably (at least by a third, maybe by much more).

Step 4: Add one or two new elements that proceed at the piece’s new pace.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0389” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0389” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation a project playlist.

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

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

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0389-long-then/

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.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, June 17, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 13, 2019.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better, though short may not apply this week.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0389” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Consider setting 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 389th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Long Then / The Assignment: Take an old song, and make it (much) slower, and add something — at:

https://disquiet.com/0389/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0389-long-then/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

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The project is now live.

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Havent been able to participate for the longest time due to work but looking forward to getting involved again!

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Hello everyone, I hope you are well.

This week’s submission is based on an unreleased track from an E.P. I recorded last year in which all compositions were based on the chemical formulae of simple acids.

I slowed down this track from it’s intended 104bpm to 70bpm.

I added a delay and granular filter (in Ableton) to the chiming bell (thank you for asking, @ryanscottmattingly):

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I also added that granular filter to the two panned return tracks. I think the track has acquired an intensified sea-sick quality.

I wrote about the initial process over on wordpress, where you can also find links to two lo-fi videos I made for the project. Both videos are based on the public domain film Have I Told You Lately That I Love You? (University of Southern California, 1958).

Best wishes, htnc

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I put up a snippet of the original as well, if you want to see that for contrast.

I grew up in a real shithole, but I didn’t mind. I had no idea other people lived differently. Woodbine was the street I lived on for many years when my Mom moved us in with her parents. She and I shared a tiny bedroom with the paint turning colors from cigarette smoke. This piece was originally my way of trying to get at the innate simplicity of how I felt those rural days where so many things are unnecessary or unattainable. There’s really not a boredom as much as it’s all rather glacial as the days just kind of bleed into years.

Marc- I would love to blog. It’s something I keep putting off, but I feel re-inspired to get started by the dialogue/diatribe witnessed on your twitter.

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I made a 26-second song last year. (It was more an effort at confronting my fear of recording than a musical work.) The concept wasn’t that great to begin with and the result was ultimately such an embarrassment that I don’t want to share it even though I suspect that that’s sort of part of the point of this Junto… so but anyway the first half was distorted bass + voice and the second half was squeaky clean piano + voice. For this, I layered the two halves together, slowed it by a factor of 2.5, paulstretched another 2.5x, and ran it through Eventide’s Physion plugin with high-feedback delay (quarter notes at the new slowed tempo) on the transient component and a long reverb on the tonal component. Delay time has a tiny bit of random modulation for some warbles. I’m not sure where the pops are coming from but that’s something else I added c:

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That would be excellent. Let me know if you do.

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Been many months since I was last here. I started with a track from about 10 years ago, actually its more of a sketch, with just a chord progression over an odd number of bars with a baseline. Original BPM was 70, slowed it to 40BPM, added an “ambient” drone, percussion and a kind of… “solo”… Would like to spend more time on it.

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nice synchronicity here, i happened to be looking through an old backup drive yesterday and found some live projects that i thought were lost and was going to rework some anyway.

this is a guitar and bass track from 2010 with 6 layers. just over 2 minutes long, changed the tempo in live so its about 10 minutes long.
i never used to use any of the live fx, i’d decided they weren’t very good without actually trying them, i just used podfarm back then.
i added a bit of reverb and delay on some of the tracks so it there was variation in the amount of stutter

i had that pessimistic nostalgia listening to this ‘i used to make good music’ it’s just different really.

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The original is a standout track for me as I find it both hilariously funny and unredeemably awful, so a perfect candidate for a remix.

This is a ‘live remix’ of “I Said I Wanna Watch Cartoons” by Happy Flowers, from the 1989 album Oof. I run one copy of the song at half speed, pitched down to half, through echo and reverb. Then I add a drum machine slowed down to half; also its tempo is controlled by a LFO for a slightly seasick feel. Finally I add a granulated copy of the song (“song”) where I control the pitch, length of sample and other parameters using a little MIDI controller. All this is coded in ChucK.

a little about the Happy Flowers: we (me and my friend John; a duo) started out in the early 1980s making obnoxious noise at the end of punk-rock shows so that people would leave, but they stayed, and then asked when we were playing again. We went on to record a bunch of albums on Homestead, tour Europe, record at the BBC, and make a DVD with the drummer from Goo Goo Dolls. Bizarre! But true.

More about “I Said I Wanna Watch Cartoons”: this was a typical studio recording, wholly improvised live straight to 2-track while it was recorded, no overdubs and no mixing after the fact. We would go into the studio with a list of ideas for song titles, pick a title and roll tape. If the engineer (usually Don Zientara at Inner Ear) had any new toys, we’d try them out. Here we’re singing (“singing”) through a pitch transposer. John attempts to impose some narrative but I can’t be bothered, I just scream “I SAID, I WANNA WATCH CARTOONS” over and over. Not entirely sure about the instrumentation; fuzz bass and guitar for sure, possibly our wee Casio SK-1 as well.

Here’s the original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXzp6kmAtOA

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I’ve arranged four half-speed instances of one of the older songs on my computer, a Junto from early last year.

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Used a track from my album Recollage, stretched it with PaulStretch plugin, and added sampled double bass, and some delay throws.

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I haven’t had the time to participate in the last few weeks so doing this today was a real treat!

I took an old solo guitar piece of mine as the starting material. It’s usually a waltz played at around 170bpm but for this project I started by recording myself playing the initial theme an octave up at around 90bpm. I then reduced the speed by half again by pitching that recording down an octave. I then granularised that recording (which enabled me to slow it down a little further still) and recorded the resulting track to my dictaphone. One new thing that I added was a rough sine wave bass track to bring out the bass motion that had been lost in my mangling process. Another new thing is a glitchy layer of various octave up effects that gradually fades in.

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Composed and performed by DD

7 tracks of bowed upright basses (Paris , France November 2010)
Acoustic upright piano (Buenos Aires, December 2010)
Acoustic guitar (martin J15) (Paris , France June 14th 2019)

For Disquiet Junto Project 0389: Choose an old piece of music of your own. Slow it down considerably. Add one or two new elements .

Looking for old tracks to rework for this prompt I re discovered 3 MiniDisc with the soundtrack I composed for a Tennessee Williams play back in 2010.
I shared and published some of those tracks over the years (including disquiet0257 and naviarhaiku264) but there’s still a lot to be remixed and re-used , many bowed upright bass pulses and noise that appeared all the time during the play.
For this one I used the score for « page 20 » of the script, bowed upright basses, upright piano and vinyl noises. Original track in Em (the basic pulse plays on the lower E string of the basses.
I added an acoustic guitar (in Em) and the transposed everything 4 steps down to C minor and recorded a new guitar part on that new key and slower tempo.

Pitching down the low E of the basses gave a profound C that really makes a difference, and the slower pace made the thing even more menacing.
This proved to be an interesting idea @disquiet , thanks for that.
I’ll do this with other tracks from that theatre play, thanks to the inspiration of this challenge.
Cheers
DD

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I recorded this about 30 years ago.
Now slowed it down and added that nightingales to the music.

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Two years ago I wrote Pavane For A Broken Wubby. My granddaughter was greatly attached to a WubbaNub giraffe pacifier (https://amzn.to/2WDILG9) that she called her Wubby. As time goes on pacifiers need to be removed so my daughter cut a hole in the pacifier’s nipple. When I set my granddaughter down for her nap she realized that there was no longer suction in the pacifier and started crying, saying that her Wubby was broken.

The piece was originally written for Violin, Viola and Cello and marked Largo. I slowed it way down by marking it Grave, extended the piece, changed the instrumentation, and added an extra instrument, so this revision is written for Horn, two Trombones and Bass Trombone.

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Last week’s Junto submission, slowed from 120 bpm to 90 bpm, with the addition of the World’s Longest Echo at key structural points (https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/19/5324896/worlds-longest-echo-recording-112-seconds)

Hear the original: https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/phone-disquiet0388

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A pitched down version of a noise recording (amplifier and radio) that took place in Ghent, Belgium in 2001.
Added reverb.

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I like how that echo comes back!

Reminds me, I know a guy who recorded at that site:

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I can see opening credits rolling as this plays.

Love the crackling, that sort of texture gives me an idea…

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