Disquiet Junto Project 0584: Generations

[disquiet]

Disquiet Junto Project 0584: Generations

The Assignment: Bridge a gap in your musical taste.

Step 1: Think of a sort of music you enjoy now that a much younger you might not have.

Step 2: Think of a sort of music that younger you enjoyed that you no longer are as fond of.

Step 3: Compose a piece of music that bridges the gap or otherwise finds common ground between the two types of music from Step 1 and Step 2.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0584” (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 “disquiet0584” (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-0584-generations/

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.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.

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.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 13, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 9, 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 584th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Generations (The Assignment: Bridge a gap in your musical taste), at: https://disquiet.com/0584/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: Disquiet Junto F.A.Q. – Disquiet

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0584-generations/

[disquiet]

And the project is live

[xiiixxi]

Years ago I ended most days (if I wasn’t out) listening to the John Peel show on late-night Radio 1. I’d been listening to him since I was about 13 and continued to do so well into my 20s. There was a time in the late 80s, early 90s when the still very guitar-dominated, post punk music that was his staple was subtly, and increasingly invaded by type of dark electronic music - mostly consisting of a constant 909 kick -doused in plenty of reverb - over a single synth chord, or simple sequence, that was subject to a slow filter opening … once it was open it immediately closed again leaving just a hanging reverb and ever-present kick. I can’t really remember who were responsible - probably just transient bands of the time recording one of his much sough after sessions.

I can’t listen to that sort of music now - way too repetitive -but I loved it at the time just for that reason - dour and moody sounds you could literally hypnotise yourself into a coma with. I didn’t like the really rhythmic house of the time - too commercial - and equally repetitive in its own way. So from that late 80s indie era I am trying to add bit more of a rhythmic element - but trying to stay within the stylistic parameters - hopefully making something John Peel might have played …

Sunday 12th March
One of the reasons I really love some of these challenges is that they can sit with you for days - resulting in much mulling and experimentation with other tracks and ideas. Below is another track I finished this morning taking a pre-existing piece - Liminalism; created mostly with trying out zero-input sound creation from an ErbeVerb - and adding the type of techno/dub beats I have been playing with for this project. A bit of TechNoise I would have steered clear of back in the 90s even if I had the imagination (or technology) at that time to create it. Not a replacement for this week’s offering above - just a supplement.

[DeDe]

Hi, I will go for an hybrid jazz-rock (jazz vs rock) cause when i was a kid and a teen I just couldn’t dig jazz. It was all rock and classical music for me. My mind changed around 19 y/o.

Last month we where tracking some improvisations with my friend Miguel Yanover on sax, it was supposed to fulfil a “night city jazz cue” request.

This was wasn’t selected cause it was too “rock” and not really “jazz” but I know that my teenager self will like it because of that, still I think the duet sax+bass has a jazz swing that I appreciate now.

That duet is what we actually played live, no editing there, I just removed the firs 3 minutes. We played over a pre recorded (by me) drum track and later I overdubbed a Hammond Organ trying to save this one from the trash lid.

Still, this is a great candidate to be a “forever unused” track. So I’m glad to mix it this morning and share it here.

Cheers
dd

photo by Reynier Carl

[ray_cobley]

[disquiet]

The playlist is now rolling:

[The20Watt]

The first music I bought with my own money was Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’ when I was 12 years old. These days it’s mostly streaming or old LPs from the thrift store - with not much 80s hip hop in the mix - but I did pick up a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album recently, and Godspeed You! Young MC is too good of a name to pass up!
This was made on my phone with GarageBand instruments and a clip of Pat Robertson talking about dancing I found online to bring it all together. Bust a move!

[bassling]

Generations [disquiet0584]

The Junto prompt this week stirred a lot of thought about music I liked when I was younger.

In the end I’d repurposed a piece of music from countless childhoods and brought to it an instrument that stirred a child-like wonder for me.

I also reflected on sequenced and performed music, which had been a consideration through various genres I’d liked when younger.

My idea was to create a separate but complementary piece that ran independent, then I noticed afterwards how I’d adjusted the number of bars to suit the sequenced music from the clock.

[Kitzmann]

Like most lads growing up in the late 70’s the guitar was the king of instruments and like most of my peers I worshiped at the various alters of the guitar gods. Here, subtlety was not a requirement and the louder and the more over produced the better.

But then I graduated, went to university, read Deleuze and soon was grooving to the likes of Nurse With Wound, Throbbing Gristle, Brian Eno and Einsturzende Neubauten. I made music on tape machines, combed back alleys for old duct work to bring to my dorm room so that I could hook them up to contact mics and generally found pleasure in the obscure and at times unlistenable.

Hence my homage and mangling of Boston’s “More than a Feeling,” which I would not listen to now. Although I would listen to listen to a cover of it by Genesis P-Orridge.

A note on method:

I sampled various bits of the song on a Music1010 BitBox, then sent various excerpts into Meng Qi’s Winger Pinger and recorded that. Then I randomly selected parts of that recording and sampled them with a Polyend Tracker, using the random fill and note section to jumble the samples and then played the whole thing through the Zoia to further chop and process it and recorded it once more. As a result the song is basically unrecognizable, even to the most discerning of copyright lawyers. But if you listen closely enough, a whiff of a riff still comes through. Barely.

And true to the era, instead of just one song, I have created a concept album. So there are nine songs, all around 30 seconds long. Each one is less or more than a feeling I once had.

[Hugh_G_Twatt]

Hey All,
I started with the riff from “Ahead” by the band Wire. They were a huge influence on me in my early 20’s. I was into Wire, The Pixies and The Fall. That was my big 3 back then. I also chose it because is also very easy to play.
My daughter controls the bluetooth on the car radio because she has more of what Nietzsche would call “The Will to Power” than her brother or me. So it is a lot of Kpop but also some pretty cool stuff. It is funny a lot of the stuff I used to like is in her playlists because of an app called Tik Toc where those songs are used in videos. I have never tried the tik tok thing but I hear it is quite popular with the kids but not so much with the US government. So it must be doing something right.
So of all her stuff I listened to I really like Lana Del Ray. That is something I definitely would have vomited to in my misspent youth but I dig it now.
The only thing I don’t like about her being the DJ is she will change songs after about 45 seconds. Kids don’t listen to complete songs now, much less a whole album. I tried to get them to listen to the album “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd and they couldn’t last more than 3 minutes of the intro before I was shut down.
UPDATE: My previous track was blocked by copywrong so I had to really distort things which i think is a better representation of my early self with Lana. It has more “art” factor but it is rather noisy.
Hope all are well.

Peace, Hugh

[XHG]

A generation lasts 20 to 30 years, so I tried to compare my musical taste over such a period. Identifying styles that I appreciated in the past but not so much a generation later was not that difficult. I certainly am not as fond of metal, breakcore or other harsh music as I used to be, though I still see the quality in much of what I once liked. I found it much more difficult to guess how my teenage self would have reacted to my current taste. I suppose I would have frowned upon country music or traditional folk music? As I did not want to make a breakcore country crossover, I went for “early 90s techno” vs. “experimental instrumental”.

I chose Up by Ilsa Gold from 1993 (50’000 views on YouTube), which I liked very much as a teenage rave kid (not so much today), and Little Jimmy by Andrew Macintosh from 2022 (50 views - come on!), which I guess would have found pretty boring. I then ran them through Granchild on Norns. The result has three parts Ilsa, Jimmy (both ~1 min) and Ilsa&Jimmy (~2 min).

[kterauch]

These days I enjoy listening to reggae even though I’ve never made reggae music and didn’t listen to it growing up. When I was little I used to love the songs I learned going to elementary school in Japan. Yup, school chorus songs!

So I recorded a song I still remember from when I was seven or eight - 翼をください, “Give Me Wings” - in reggae style. I basically took a 20 min crash course in faking reggae style. It’s a bit rough, but I had a ton of fun making it. Thank you for the prompt!

[Pineyb]

I did a bit of a sidetrack here… A song (and band) from my distant past that I always disliked intensely … and still do. I did always like Electronic music. So I processed the old song into something electronic that I like.

[krakenkraft]

I wanted to start with a signature sound I enjoyed in my youth, the strings with phasers from early Jarre albums like Oxygene or Equinoxe (which in this case is Cherry Audio Voltage Modular with the Fifth Dimension Phaser Factory).

The original idea was to smoothly add noisy elements that represent my todays taste, in this case mostly voice recordings from myself whispering and again my squeaking chair (all in Ableton Simpler). The original track title was ‘Phasernoised’ and I was doing this in Ableton Live.

After adding some sequenced stuff, some kind of theremin-ish theme (Cherry Arp2600) and soft beats I really liked the loop playing for hours in the background while printing out paper for last years tax declaration (I do not make this up). And because of this I felt like it should be one of my 1h tracks in 2023, that try to be true to the ambient idea of background music.

I don’t feel wrong about it: After all, my taste hasn’t changed so much, I enjoyed soft and lush sounds when I was young, and now I enjoy subtile changes, endless tracks and strange noises and even a kickdrum, that I would have rejected in my youth (in this genre of music, not in general).

So if you listen for a progression you have to ffwd and skip thru, but maybe you just want the fun of the complete hour.

[leonclowes]

When starting this week’s prompt I set out to make a track that combined 80s electro pop (music I loved when I was younger) with a soundscape (music I like now). Instead though it more turned out like a track with nods to acid house (music I like now but didn’t at the time) with an industrial track (music I like less now but was into at the time).

[kterauch]

Now I’m so curious to know the song and the band. Can’t figure it out from your piece, which is the point of your composition!

[RabMusicLab]

This project was motivating from the start, but it turned out not to be so simple for me.

First I thought about music I liked through different phases of my life. And I recognized that I still like most of it. I have to go back to my elementary school days. At that time I liked Schlager. I don’t know how to describe it in English, cheesy pop songs with german lyrics. I don’t like this sort of music anymore. And I certainly wouldn’t have liked drones then - I learned to appreciate them only rather recently.

I had difficulties to figure out a common ground, so I decided to just melt them.
For the Schlager I searched on freesound and looperman, but there is only a small selection of german lyrics. I found the recording I used now - but for me this sounds more like the great german chansons of Hildegard Knef. For the music I just looked what I happened to find in the Cubase Mediabay for guitar and bass. So what I got was already much “better” then a typical Schlager.
Then I built the drone. First I created sounds for Padshop (the granular Synthesizer included in Cubase) with fieldrecordings of orchestras warming up and choirs. I added different effects and automated them.
And then I added the “Schlager”, first hiding it behind reverb and modulation and fading it in and out.

I really like the result, but have to admit that I missed the genre Schlager.

[kn00t]

I am grateful for the time when I was singing children songs with my family. Later my younger self loved to experiment a lot with music software and explore almost everything the software can do … without actually creating some music. For this track I used the sampler in Renoise for recording and another sampler in VCV Rack for processing.

[Pineyb]

Mid 1960s song from an American band with a couple of hits. Clue in the title.

[wasabicube]

I used to listen to a lot of baroque chamber music. Now I’m partial to drones and noise. (Having said that, this prompt was quite challenging as I like a broad range of genres. But it is true I’ve not listened to Telemann, Bach or Vivaldi for a while.)

This was based around a 120bpm recording of my modular incorporating pitched modulated square wave, the Shakti feedback generator and Music Thing Modular Mini Drive. I recorded a chord progression on my acoustic guitar and added several layers of pizzicato strings. This is taken over by a drum track (Klevgrand Slammer) and bass (Arturia DX7 Lately Bass) and then eventually morphs into the modular recording with delays and reverb.