Disquiet Junto Project 0624: Fresh Pair

[disquiet]

Just a note that I still need to move the email list from Tinyletter to another service, likely Substack, since it’s free, or possibly Buttondown or another, but I’m still sorting out the plan.

This post popped up at disquiet.com/0624 (thanks, powers of automation) shortly after 12:10am Pacific Time on Thursday, December 14. (I was asleep at the time.) The email containing those instructions went out via tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto later in the morning (after I woke up), and then I posted them here, on the Junto Slack, and at my Mastodon account, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram, etc. And if you’re on a platform, like Mastodon or Instagram, that uses hashtags, please use the #DisquietJunto tag. Much appreciated.

. . .

Disquiet Junto Project 0624: Fresh Pair
The Assignment: Combine two influences, however disparate they may be.

Yesterday, the 13th of December, marked the 27th anniversary of Disquiet.com, and I figured it makes sense for this week’s Disquiet Junto to pay tribute to two cultural figures who have informed it.

Step 1: Think of two cultural figures who have made unique and strong impressions on you.

Step 2: Rather than think of what they have in common, think about the individual impact they have had on you.

Step 3: Record a piece of music that expresses the two, distinct forms of impact you arrived at in Step 2.

Seven Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0624” (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 “disquiet0624” (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-0624-fresh-pair/

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.

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, December 18, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, December 14, 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 624th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Fresh Pair (The Assignment: Combine two influences, however disparate they may be), at: https://disquiet.com/0624/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0624-fresh-pair/

The photo of the painting, by Joseph Siffrein Duplessis, of Benjamin Franklin is in the public domain. The photo of Fernando Pessoa in the public domain.

[lucasgonze]

Neat idea.

The first part is thinking about people.

• Hildegard von Bingen
• Richard D. James
• The counterguy at the bodega in Bushwick who gave me a glass of cheap rum on Thanksgiving
• That guy in Grenoble who kicked me in the nuts and took my hash

So many fun people to think abut.

[disquiet]

And the project is now live.

[DeDe]

Happy anniversary DISQUIET !
27…wow, that’s a life time.
Bravo.

[xiiixxi]

Happy Aniversary to you …

Fantastic challenge this week. Really made me dive deep. At first I found it really difficult - not finding two figures that have affected me, but really drilling down into just how … and then I realised that I was massively overthinking it and it became almost easy …

My two cultural figures are Anton Webern - The composer whose work I studied most closely at uni, and John Peel, the DJ who’s musical integrity when i came to what he actually liked to listen to and play other people dominated my listening habits from about the age of 12 until … well, I never stopped listening whilst he was broadcasting.

What I took from Webern was his love of process - like Bach, he followed patterns, see where they went - and saw them through (mostly), in a manner that was totally integrated into the music he wanted to make. And from Mr Peel it was just his honesty about what he liked regardless of what anyone else might think, and his confidence that doing that was the right thing to do …

My earlier mistake in trying to write this piece was trying too hard to integrate these influences - in the end I just found a process I liked the sound of and saw it through to the end - which I’m happy to say produced something I like … job done

By the way - a quick plug - or plugin to be exact - The sequencer I have developed and used for many a challenge here over the last year is finally as finished as it can be, and is freely available to anyone who uses a Mac from KVR [ XiiixxiQ by XiiixxiQ - Euclidean Non-Linear Step-Sequencer Plugin VST3 Audio Unit ]. If you use it and like it please leave a review at some point and hopefully I might get someone on board to develop a Windows/Linux and/or Standalone version.

[ray_cobley]

The two figures in question are John Cage & Harold Pinter, to whom the two words of the title refer. The track is a live electronic sequence created in Pure Data, a little reverb added.

[disquiet]

And the playlist is rolling:

[Marco_Lucchi]

pairing Scriabin and Debussy, surface and obsession

long live Disquiet Junto

[krakenkraft]

This piece of music is a fusion of two opposing philosophical influences: Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Kant motif is structured and simple, reflecting his emphasis on rationality and moral imperatives. It has a friendly tone consistent with Kant’s belief in ethics. His motif also has a preachy element that is meant to remind us of Kant’s belief in universal laws and also that his writings are frankly quite boring.

In contrast, the Nietzsche motif is darker and wilder, reflecting his challenging and often provocative and mostly interesting ideas. The more chaotic (and randomnized) nature of his motif reflects Nietzsche’s commitment to individual will and his rejection of social norms (or even his own ideas).

However, they also had some things in common, such as a great interest in the emerging natural sciences or the fact that they struggled with the idea of a God.

Ultimately, the Kantian theme prevails and has the last word, as Nietzsche is frowned upon for influencing the difficult to understand and often misunderstood “Ubermensch” idea, whereas today we (some of us) actually try harder to act according to Kant’s theory of reason, even if a look at the news teaches us that we as humankind simply don’t succeed in doing so.

[Hugh_Prat]

Hey All,
I went with the 2 guys in this picture.

These two mystery men had a huge impact on me as a young man.
I think you might hear something of them both in this.

Hope all are well.Peace, Hugh

[bassling]

What'll [disquiet0624]

I started thinking about unlikely pairs and arrived at Uwe Schmidt jamming with a Wattle Bird.

However, a Magpie was available for the video.

[Raincat]

Lee Scratch Perry and Annie Besant.

I’m thinking of Lee Perry in his Black Ark days: cobbled together equipment pushed to its limit, art all over the walls, ritual and magic. One thing that I particularly loved was the story of him digging a hole next to a palm tree, sticking a microphone in the hole and thumping the tree to get a drumbeat. So in a small scale homage I collected some twigs and attatched them to a bit of wood to make an instrument. I recorded four layers of me hitting it with another stick.

Annie Besant (1847 -1933) was a British socialist and radical involved in Women’s Rights, Irish and Indian Home Rule, education for the poor, unions and strike action. Then later in her life, after reading and meeting Madame Blavatsky she converted to Theosophy. She wrote quite a few books on it and one book; “Thought Forms” has always intrigued me. The basic premise of the book is that shapes and colours are a kind of univeral spiritual language and that artist/mediums were able to channel and visualise these invisible energies. I’m not a Theosophist, I just like that idea. One thing the book talks about is Chladni plates and their patterns. I don’t have a proper Chladni plate, but I decided to approximate one with a cymbal screwed onto a block of wood and played with a very tattered violin bow.

Short earthy clonks from the twigs versus long bowed tones from the spirit world.

[XHG]

After overthinking this ten times longer than it took to make the track I decided on Peanut Butter Wolf and Keith Fullerton Whitman. I have a lot of love for Wolf because he published so much diverse, fun, positive music over the years that shaped my taste. Keith I followed since Attention: Cats and then later the Mimaroglu store which opened my ears to a lot of electronic experiments and more.

So combining the two I tried to make a fun, positive track with some electronic sauce to it without going full “DJ ZapruderFilm”. The vocals are from a live version of Gary Wilson’s A Very Small Town. The whole thing is pretty tame so not a lot of Keith in it.

[Raincat]

Well done for setting the bird free! Musically and literally.

[fakeg3nius]

Indeed, as others have already observed, so many people to choose from. Mulled it over a bit and settled on Bob Yates and Richard D James. The first designed, of course, the SID chip, which was in the C64 that I tried to program to produce string and horn sounds. It was my first encounter with computer music and I was kind of hooked. The second person, I encountered through music in my teens, and was a big inspiration before I started to get more into jazz and so on. Recently saw him perform twice live, once in Stockholm and once in Paris, never would have thought that would happen.

[SamPlair]

One influential, mind blowing moment growing up was in high school when my friend Travis shared his headphones listening to Ween’s The Pod. It wasn’t like anything I had heard but was completely familiar in it’s loose 4track sound. They jumped genre’s, followed the effects wherever it took them on the cheapest gear with settings no one would touch with a ten foot microphone. I was obsessed with their mythology, the experimentation and goofball antics. I still wish I could be this free in creating.
The second influence here was a memory of the resurgence of the beats in the late 90’s like Jack Kerouac showing up in GAP ad’s. I worshiped On The Road and Naked Lunch and met Ginsberg in Washington square park to sign my copy of Howl. I bought an old typewriter and took disastrous roadtrips.
I was trying to bring back that naive freedom with no responsibility and endless time. The stream of consciousness and a struggle with those existential questions.

I started with a sketch from a cassette of a modular soundscape, which immediately led me into this train theme which is layered with slight reverb. A simple beat/bassline from a 1st gen kaossilator, about 46 BPM, in the key of A. Forced some weird glitching, leaning into the mistakes. EQ’d with LFO on redux ‘rate’ with slow autopan. Electric picking with Obscura Altered Delay pedal, more LFO modulated chorus in Ableton and some pitched down vocal channeling Dean and Gene. I’m happy to not overthink this one and get weird. I could use more of that.

[jimkang]

This was a really neat assignment that got me to try something that never occurred to me to try!

I chose Slayer and Steve Reich. (A little background on my experience with these artists here.) The piece is a Slayer-style riff played on one guitar and a version of that riff that has an extra half beat so that the two parts are not in phase, Steve Reich-style.

I played two riffs, one of which is two 4/4 bars long and the other which is almost the same but it has a 4/4 bar and 9/8 bar. To avoid making one of the guitars sound like it’s right and like the other one doesn’t know what it’s doing, I put on two drum parts to go with each riff.

I’ve done phase pieces before, but always via purely electronic means because that just seemed like the natural way to do it. I think the phase format does work well with physical playing, so I’ll probably do more of it.

[CoralineAda]

I would have gone in a different direction if I’d noticed the “cultural” in front of “influence”, but as I read it I assumed musical and immediately decided on Gary Numan (1978) meets Gary Numan (2018).

I constrained myself to starting and finishing in a single session-- I’m hoping that continuing in that way will act as a sort of kata or etude for composition & production.

[SinnySounds]

I have been rather busy over the past several days, and was thus unable to complete this assignment by Monday, but I still wanted to participate.

Earlier in 2022, I created a synth oriented song that resembled the work of Vangelis. Portions of the arrangement were promising, but I was dissatisfied with some of the programmed percussion, so I largely tabled it. This prompt encouraged me to dust off the song and try a different approach to the percussion. I opted to emulate the work of Tom Waits, particularly his Swordfishtrombones era, by incorporating metallic percussion and mallet work. I originally attempted to program some marimbas, but the lower frequencies were muddied in the mix, so I instead played a mini balafon and transposed it up an octave so that it would easily cut through the mix.

The metallic instruments came from both found sounds (like a plate weight), conventional instruments (cowbells), and unusual contraptions (satellite drums and a reco-reco and created by Pete Engelhart).