#12

[H]e conconcoted a complex and expensive set of pedals and effects for his electric flute, which he was always primping and improving in his spare time. It used to sound incredible (he incorporated time delay, fuzz tone, wah-wah, and echo effects) […]
—from Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards by Al Kooper

5 Likes
#13

I enjoyed this prompt and as with the last two, just jumped into it. I’m actually really enjoying the process I’m developing with writing to these, so thank you for organizing this, Marc. I’m looking forward to listening to everyone else’s contributions.

Here’s how mine worked out:
To start with, I brought in three sounds: a melody, a looping sample, and a bouncing ball patch, all run through effects skiff. The point of the prompt is capture something slowing down, eventually ending in stasis.

My melody was running with Squarp Hermod, which is a couple of days new to me and I hit record before I figured out how to adjust tempo, so I looked at my sample because slowing down the bouncing ball patch would be tricky. I started lowering the volume of the melody and bouncing as I reduced the speed of the sample playback on Morphagene and got really into it.

I think I made this work nicely and hope you enjoy it.

Edit after listening to posts above mine:
@Glitcher and @Aaah - your pieces blew me away. Thank you for that.

7 Likes
#14

This was one of the most inspiring juntos and I’m happier than usual with my track (perhaps because I am sort of unemployed lately and I’m taking my time for this endeavours, more than I usually can)
I had this little melody I wrote last week, it was a slow 30 seconds little thing for classical piano I kept aside to develop someday.
As for the challenge prompt I tried to make it fast and then slow down to the initial slow tempo and beyond, almost to zero (stasis)
But as much as I liked the slowing down I didn’t feel the fast start suited the music so I went for a symmetrical structure slow-accelerando-fast-rallentando-slow-stasis(coda)
I performed two piano parts, an upright bass and a muted piano basses. Added some granulated soundscapes from the different tracks treated thought several plugins and experimented with that to create textures.
The rest is just reverbs and playing around with tempo, something I really cherish.

Composed and performed by DD in Paris, France Friday 7th November 2020
Two pianos
Upright bass (pizz and bowed cadenza)
Mutes piano basses (mallets)
Treated soundscape

17 Likes
#15


Just a little organ improvisation. Two voices gradually descend in pitch, slow down and merge into drone.

10 Likes
#16

He All, I took some short samples from Autechre’s new album Sign and made a crossfader loop to be the beat. I added some arps from a the Synthi plug in.The beat is slowed down by transposing unwarped down an octave 4 times, The synth part is then slowed down and the fx is affected by lowering the tempo.I am more of a believer in entropy vs. stasis but I do share hope for rebirth. I will spare you my political rant but I will say I was in a very dark place Wednesday morning around 3 a.m. My mood has slightly improved but please remember that even in the red areas there is about 1 in 3 people thinking their neighbors have lost their freaking minds and we are thankful for the blue areas keeping us somewhat sane.

Peace, Hugh

13 Likes
#17

… a friendly Multitude, led by a beat and drunken bells marching slowly but happy into oblivion.
A dream? An allegory? True in some way?
There is sadness and hope side by side.What s strange track.

Inspired by the book “Oniritti” by Botho Strauss.
Tools: Zoom ARQ96, Boss SY 300

6 Likes
#18

Exercise in gradual decrease in tempo with lengthening of notes. Sounds created in Pure Data.

6 Likes
#19

At the end of a hard week, time can seem to come to a stop. You enter a state of doom-scrolling and mental daze…

This is a response to the weekly Disquiet Junto challenge “Vade in Peace” - but also a response to the current week’s events both in the US and my local Denmark.

The piece is constructed of a lot of good, sampled analog voices and strings, mangled through old electronics and time-travelled to a halt…

6 Likes
#20

Frenetic activity from 4 oscillators and some percussion, modulated by 8 attenuverted LFOs + a couple of random walks + EGs, all gradually slowed down into a reverb wash by a master LFO.

8 Likes
#21

Key: C-minor
Tempo: starts at 90 BPM, ends at 10 BPM
Meter: no discernible meter

There are three sound layers: a static background wavetable chord, a wailing lead, and a short harmonica or accordion-like chord denoting each pattern’s change.

The tempo slows down with each pattern. I’m using the filters to control perceived velocity of sounds as well. Stasis is achieved at 4:50. Then I bend the rules introducing filter motion to the now static sound. This goes on for another two minutes which breaks another guideline, i.e. to make the track short.

7 Likes
#22

Sounds fantastic and nothing like my assumptions about this instrument, super intriguing.

2 Likes
#23

The start of your track sounds like a soundtrack to some early Aronofsky. But the more we slow it down, the more it’s pleasant. The turning point is at around 1:30 I guess, it’s rather easily to tell due to the helpful bass drum. The reverb takes over and by 3:00 it’s mostly ambience. Feels like the reverb is also pitching downwards? Around 4:00 the oscillators sound like creatures.

I wonder how this would sound like if with the increasing reverb wetness you decreased the dry signal in the mix. In my track for example only the lead has any dry signal at all.

2 Likes
#24

Yes, I did this to some degree but it might work better taken further, good call.

1 Like
#25

In honour of this momentous, protracted and horrendous week, I decided to take up my electric guitar, channeling days of anxiety into a short improvisation where I force myself to slow down.

There are key two aspects to the improvisation: the rolling action of my right hand and fingers, and moving my left hand from the top of the guitar neck to the headstock.

When the piece begins, I’m at the top of the neck rolling my fingers over the strings as fast as I can, then as I descend the neck, this action slows. In addition to this, at the top of the neck I wanted the notes to be less distinct, but rather than using dissonance or block of sounds, to purposefully mute the strings with my left hand.

The guitar is tuned to modal G (CGDGBE) and I used G as the point of reference for my left hand as it descends, making notes corresponding to the root and constituent notes of a G major scale more apparent.

I’m running the electric guitar through a short delay with a bit of reverse repeat on it to leave vanishing traces of the previous notes/actions.

The improvisation was trickier than I thought and took several takes to get a version to my satisfaction.

4 Likes
#26

This is Arturia Pigments, Klevgrand Hillman and Klevgrand Skaka being slowed from 200bpm to 20bpm before fading out completely. The three are processed through AudioThing’s Wires and Waveshaper’s Echo Cat for some distress and warble. The Skaka track is doubled before passing the original tracks through Eventide’s Physion. Then all tracks are passed through Puremagnetik’s Pastfabric and finally Eventide’s Blackhole.

8 Likes
#27

Enjoying the contributions!

@RPLKTR Yours is outstanding. I saved it on YouTube.

@wasabicube I loved the vibe on yours!!

4 Likes
#28

I think this might actually be my first submission for a Disquiet Junto, so I’m excited for that! Loved the prompt. This short composition was made in Max, with a patch that decreases its tempo with every repetition. The drums are synced to the “master tempo” so to speak, with a relatively simple pattern in sixteen steps. The synth voice is FM8, which is sent notes in intervals of perfect fifths that transpose up and down throughout the piece. The patch in FM8 had some delayed LFOs, with an aim being that the timbre opens up a bit as the notes are sustained longer towards the end of the piece. A simple programmatic error lead it to repeat the stutter one extra time at the original tempo and I liked it enough not to fix it, even though it technically violates the rules!

6 Likes
#29

Back to the Arturia plugins for this one, combined with some granular synthesis on the drums. Fair bit of automation in Ableton for changing tempos, echo and reverb tails.

6 Likes
#30

This piece is based on the call of a silver gull - or in Noongar, Djenark - who would gather the spirits of unborn children who were trapped beneath the ocean or on islands, and bring them to the mainland. When Djenark reaches the mainland and washes the beak in the Swan River, these spirits are released and can have a chance at becoming fully-fledged humans.

Layer 1: Recording of silver gulls by the Swan River, gradually slowed to ~8x.
Layer 2 + 3: Layer 1 with resonators.
Layer 4: Layer 1 with echo effect.

6 Likes
#31

Two voices panned left and right (more or less), each decreasing in tempo in discrete steps until stasis is reached. Eurorack modular system.

Started off with an overly complicated setup of clock dividers to reduce the tempo in steps using CV, but ended up manually stepping down the tempo by having the two voices controlled on my BSP sequencers and reducing 1/16 - 1/8 - 1/4 each by hand followed by then dropping out individual gates to further slow things down. Ideally I would have liked a solution that had discrete steps (i.e. not just pulling down the BPM knob) but with finer gradations, my clock divider setup might have allowed for that, but I (ironically) ran out of time!

7 Likes