Disquiet Junto Project 0476: IAH Forecast

Note: Just one track per participant.

Disquiet Junto Project 0476: IAH Forecast

The Assignment: Here’s your next single’s cover. Now record it.

Step 1: This is the cover of your next single:

Step 2: Now record your single.

Note: The photo was shot in Houston, Texas, by Robert Boyd and is used with his permission.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0476” (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 “disquiet0476” (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 tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0476-iah-forecast/

Step 5: Annotate your tracks 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 the end of the day Monday, February 15, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 11, 2021.

Length: The length is up to you. However you picture it.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0476” 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 476th weekly Disquiet Junto project – IAH Forecast (The Assignment: Here’s your next single’s cover. Now record it.) – at:

https://disquiet.com/0476/

The image that is the source of this project is by Robert Boyd (www.thegreatgodpanisdead.com) and has been used with his permission.

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-0476-iah-forecast/

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

10 Likes

And the project is now live.

4 Likes

Perfect timing this week!
I was loading up my DAW to make some music as the Disquiet Email came in… so seemed the perfect thing to do.

I went with the flow with this one… I went with some foggy sounding synth and pulled out an old field recording from the A11 dual carrageway by the Norfolk / Suffolk border. I let the field recording play and just improvised some synth at once over the top. I recorded that in 1 take and then went to the arrangement.
I added a drum rack - an effect on the whole thing… making a nice dubby slow rhythm. It picks up a level or two and I added some other elements of synth and ambience. It was quick and simple to make. This was a good fun experiement to do.

16 Likes

I lived in Houston for 9 months in 1997. Lived and worked on Westheimer Rd. I worked near River Oaks at a tech startup. My wife worked somewhat nearby on Greenway Plaza at what is now Invesco.

The food in Houston was excellent. One time, Dusty Hill from ZZ Top was behind us in line at a BBQ joint and ordered “a quart of jambalaya”. Yes, he was dressed like he was on stage. I thought it was the perfect Texas moment. Although a close second was going out with Ann’s co-workers to somebody’s horse farm in the country and one her co-workers rode a horse backwards very fast. Nice people.

There should be more cars on whatever road this is. I remember the traffic was crazy. And the air often smelled of gas, the result of being close to oil refineries.

This track is a combination of several pieces of mine: Aleodeology’s “Time Travel Destination in the Past”, “Simulated Gravity”, “Aleodeological Travel”, and “Empty Interstate Due to Microaggressions”, along with my side band Vibrating Wires’ “The Long Drive Out”, “The Path to REM Sleep”, and “Southwestern Desert” - and some field recordings of rain that I recorded.

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Sound, light, vibration, chemical, and radio pollution as portrayed by a piezothing on various iron surfaces.

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I’ve managed to get this together within a few hours of seeing the prompt, which makes a change for me. From this rather evocative image I took fog / haze, traffic / hiss, grey colour / texture, and the rigid regular shapes of the concrete balconies.

I used three layers: a reverb-processed snippet of an old scrapey contact-mic recording, a generated drone, and some tape hiss. Some simple trimming and layering, balancing the levels until it sounded good alongside the picture.

12 Likes

I was in Houston not too long ago–going back soon–wasn’t there long but like @markrushton I remember the traffic, steady whoosh of cars and trucks along the roads and freeways. I coded up a “whoosh machine” in ChucK, noise thru lowpass filter reverbed and panned, with a delayed version panned to the other side and pitch shifted for some spaciousness. Then I ran various versions of it with different frequencies on the pan and filter sweep, filter Q and so on. Fun! Here’s the code:

9 Likes

Had some time this evening to be creative and sat down to make something just in time for the project email to arrive. I noodled around in vcvrack for a bit until I came up with a little melody that I liked. Ended up being the opposite of the cover image for the single, so I guess I’m going with the ironic contrarian approach to marketing.

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Hi all. Imagined I was sitting near the window in the picture and sketching the scene with a pen on an envelope.
Recorded some sketching of the scene with clippy mic.
Found some recording of traffic in Iris vst and looped it. That went through an effect to make it sound more distant (waves delay with delay turned off :))

Added some sounds with Norns and Flora script.

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A misty, foggy, rainy day. High enough above to hear it, far enough away to be above it, close enough to smell it, vague enough to float away into wherever your thoughts take you, then you center yourself, back, back, again, don’t lose yourself, don’t lose focus, it returns.

Gear

  • Tascam DR-40X (field recording)
  • Ableton Live 10 Standard
  • Magix SOUND FORGE Audio Studio Pro 13 (mastering)
  • Native Instruments KOMPLETE KONTROL S61 (input)
  • Novation Launchpad MK2

Instruments

  • Kilohearts Phase Plant - Arpeggiating Effectous
    • Native Instruments Raum - Yellow Memories
  • Native Instruments Lo-Fi Glow - Detuned
    • Output Portal - Ambient Lake
  • Field recording of rain, drain and traffic (myself)
    • Output Portal - Heaven Reveal
    • Kilohearts Reverb - Ambience Dark
  • Native Instruments Lo-Fi Glow - Lullaby Blips
  • Native Instruments Lo-Fi Glow - Simp Le Church
9 Likes

As soon as I saw the name of this prompt, I hoped it would be Houston-related and I wasn’t disappointed. (For those who don’t know, “IAH” is the airport code for our larger airport.) Houston is home so it was nice to confirm that this was a photo from Houston and the instructions were great.

I’ve had the idea to try to fake some hiss-filled tape loops recently and made my first effort with two of the tracks on my submission. I did this two ways: The main, airy track is a drone from 4ms Ensemble run into Valhalla Supermassive into Wavesfactory Cassette. I also tried my hand at using LRMSMSLR for the first time and recording in stereo and was pleased with the result–the sound was very full (I processed mids through QPAS and sides through Mimeophon). Lots of modulation throughout the patch with 16n, which is a method I have become fond of, though I need to work on arriving at some different sounding patches. For the second attempt at a tape loop sound, I played Tetrax through Bastl Thyme and processed with Wavesfactory Cassette into Valhalla Shimmer. I think both sound interesting and it’s definitely an avenue I intend to explore further.

I finished the track with some random percussion that was mostly dry (it had a bit of echo on it) which I think provided a nice contrast to the other two tracks.

10 Likes

Disquiet Junto Project 0476: IAH Forecast

Not sure where this brain fart came from… a new genre? Blues Hop? I just threw a bunch of stuff at a blues riff and went from there. Vocal sample courtesy of Amy Kirkpatric.

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Love this one, and love the pic. mist/fog is such a global (globalizing?) thing. Any city could use it to get on approximately the same mood. Like a landscape’s tuxedo.

This photo could be any city , dressed like that, could be my hometown Buenos Aires (a city that fog suits so well).
There’s a tango standard “Nieblas del Riachuelo”, full Buenos Aires misty cityscape, so I went for a homesick tango nostalgia and jammed wit myself this one:

Nieblas Panamericanas

Spanish guitar
Upright bass
Drums (brushed)
Melodica (mimicking a Bandoneon)


as a “Non Submission” (like our prolific @DetritusTabuIII use to say) I share this one as a curiosity, it’s an electric take of the same idea. The “city landscape” suits the electric better IMO but there’s a little melody/riff that appeared when jamming on the acoustic that didn’t pop up here.
I guess the acoustic is more “musical” and the electric is more fit for the photo, but not sure how it sounds to you guys.

I tag both for the project and let @disquiet choose which one to make it to the playlist…

16 Likes

The image reminded me of the bushfire smoke that blanketed much of Eastern Australia about a year ago.

So I’ve remixed a recent song about climate change and given it an entirely new shape, as well as rearranging the lyrics.

Click here to hear the tune and see the video, which shows the drive between Wagga Wagga and Bathurst one morning (although it was foggy as this looked a bit like it might be smoke).

7 Likes

great video…

1 Like

eeeh… well…
(Have never been there. The closest I have been is about 1900km (1180mi) away.)

Leaning out. Looking down. H-town. Under my skin
Breathing in. Finding strength. H-town. Making a grin

What if Sam (General Sam Houston) could see us now.
What if Sam could walk our streets.
Streets of H-town

Crying out. In the night. H-town. Trying so hard.
Misty life. Distant light. H-town. Got the wrong card.

10 Likes

Excuse my ignorance, what does IAH stand for?
Google says indice d’apnée hypopnée (IAH)

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IAH is the three-letter code for the Houston airport.

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The airport’s IATA code of IAH derived from the stylization of the airport’s name as “Intercontinental Airport of Houston.”

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