for the disquiet junto //

samples layered and manipulated to welcome the spirit of the new lunar year

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More on this 578th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rabbit Spirit Ally (The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year), at: https://disquiet.com/0578/

Associated public-domain cover image by Johann Daniel Meyer (1748).

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-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

Modest Ardor (Rabbit in the Moon)

[disquiet0578] Modest Ardor (Rabbit in the Moon)

“You said a moment ago that everybody you look at seems to be a rabbit,” says the doctor to his patient in a cartoon by James Thurber. “Now just what do you mean by that, Mrs. Sprague?” Meanwhile, Mrs. Sprague recoils in horror at the vision of her therapist’s enlarged, leporine head. 

There is a rabbit who lives in the underbrush just behind Suss Müsik headquarters. We’ve named her/him Clover. Clover has grown to be fairly large and tends to regard humans with more curiosity than fear. Still, Clover can still easily escape from predators when compelled. Perhaps Mrs. Sprague could take a leaf from Clover’s book.

The rabbit is viewed in Chinese tradition as a calm, gentle yet crafty animal, whose energy emphasizes balance and intelligence. The phrase jiǎo tù sān kū (狡兔三窟) loosely translates as “a cunning rabbit has three burrows and more than one means of escape." With the arrival of the Lunar New Year, this is the approach Suss Müsik took with this week’s Junto.

The piece begins with a gentle piano arpeggio, broken into three fragments that randomly shift cadences like a tone poem. A fake fretless bass moves things along until a DIY synth glitches things up. Brief stabs of percussion interrupt the calm, gentle atmosphere, yet the overall feeling is one of balance and crafty intelligence (or whatever the Suss Müsik equivalent would be).

The piece is titled Jiǎo Tù Sān Kū. The image is based on an etching owned by The Welcome Collection, the use of which is covered under Public Domain Mark (PDM) terms and conditions: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0

More on this 578th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rabbit Spirit Ally (The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year), at: https://disquiet.com/0578/

Associated public-domain cover image by Johann Daniel Meyer (1748).

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-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

Jiǎo Tù Sān Kū [Disquiet0578]

More on this 578th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rabbit Spirit Ally (The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year), at: https://disquiet.com/0578/ 1

Associated public-domain cover image by Johann Daniel Meyer (1748).

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-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

Rabbit Spirit Ally

The Euclidean Chromaticon | Rabbit Spirit Ally - disquiet0578

No animals were harmed in the making of this track.

More on this 578th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rabbit Spirit Ally (The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year), at: https://disquiet.com/0578/

Associated public-domain cover image by Johann Daniel Meyer (1748).

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-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

Zodiac Starchild (disquiet0578)

I was born in the year of the fire horse so I started with a gallop rhythm, with which I created a drumkit and sidechained all the other tracks, whilst removing the drumkit from the recording. The main voices are the Neutron and CZ-1000, with a very simple electric bass riff. Then the usual distortions, gatings and reverbs were applied.
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More on this 578th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rabbit Spirit Ally (The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year), at: https://disquiet.com/0578/ 

Associated public-domain cover image by Johann Daniel Meyer (1748).

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-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

horse (disquiet0578)

My contribution to Disquiet Junto 578: Rabbit Spirit Ally.

All done on an Teenage Engineering OP-1 apart from some final compression by u-he Presswerk and reverb from Valhalla Room. Mostly played live but the drums were sequenced.

The genre is hip-hop, naturally.

I made this in bed recovering from a chest infection. Just wanted something fun to cheer me up. And it did! :)

The sample at the start is from this film on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/TheNastyRabbit1964.mp4

The main melody came to me when I was thinking of the rhythm of a rabbit's walk.

More on this 578th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rabbit Spirit Ally (The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year), at: https://disquiet.com/0578/

Associated public-domain cover image by Johann Daniel Meyer (1748).

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-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

disquiet0578 Oh Rabbit!

Vocal Samples courtesy of:

Tourdille [https://www.looperman.com/acapellas?page=1&mid=Tourdille&dir=d]
Fragile [ also at Looperman but the link seems to be dead now ]

More on this 579th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Memory Serves (The Assignment: Rerecord a piece of music), at: https://disquiet.com/0579/

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-0579-memory-serves/

Memory Serves

The Euclidean Chromaticon | Memory Serves - disquiet0579

A track I originally made in Summer 2020 with North American writer Francisco Cantú.  For the re-recording of this track I kept the lockdown themed Spoken word by Francisco but created a whole new backing music, much more stripped down then the old verion.
Very pleased with how this sounds.  
The original track can be heard on this album. 
https://audioobscura.bandcamp.com/album/love-in-the-time-of-the-anthropocene

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Disquiet Junto Project 0579: Memory Serves
The Assignment: Rerecord a piece of music.

Step 1: The goal of this project is to simply perform and record again something you’ve performed and recorded previously. Think about something you’d like to revisit.

Step 2: Now rerecord the piece of music you decided upon in Step 1.

Audio Obscura  - Three Sisters (with Francisco Cantú) [disquiet0579]

This is a recent rework of a previously shared track, 
https://soundcloud.com/daniel-diaz/silencio-first-demo-version

I reduced and simplified the arrangement and instrumentation, and I feel that this one's the good version for proper release (but I might be wrong), so it is my first 2023 single.


Shared on Feb/2nd/2023 for https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0579-memory-serves

This is the version I finally released,
https://open.spotify.com/track/0RG0q9pSfrl725mBlcLqjf?si=42df3429ed664047

Silencio (version 2) disquiet0579

Disquiet Junto Project 0579: Memory Serves
The Assignment: Rerecord a piece of music.

Step 1: The goal of this project is to simply perform and record again something you’ve performed and recorded previously. Think about something you’d like to revisit.

Step 2: Now rerecord the piece of music you decided upon in Step 1.

Track notes:

Something a bit different this week and certainly something I couldn't perform in SuperCollider! 

For as long as I've been seriously making music (25-ish years) I've written songs as part of that continuum. Sometimes the songwriting has become my primary activity and other times it's been consigned to the background. My 30s during the 2010's were pretty interesting in that regard. I'd started off not writing lyrics (let along performing) for quite sometime and then mid-decade songwriting and performing became my primary creative activity. That's where and when this song, "Queen Tide" first materialised. 

It's a song that's been hanging around for about 7 to 8 years now and I've never been able to settle on a structure that feels quite right. Initially, it fell square into a strummed acoustic folk idiom and I'd often perform it under my Garden Ruin moniker with my friend Tom accompanying on guitar. I've included a video of a live performance from back in 2017 that gives an indication of what it sounds like and how I've attempted to record it in the past.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO0kNIsKyro

For whatever reason - and about 12 versions later - it just hasn't happened. As this year began, I realised I hadn't worked on songs in quite some time and thought it might be time to revisit some older material and see if it motivated me to work on some newer material. I was up super-early this morning and upon seeing the Junto prompt this morning my thoughts drifted towards revisiting "Queen Tide" and approaching it a bit differently.

Turning my thoughts to a song like "Queen Tide" could have also been the byproduct of the bizarre climactic interlude that has interrupted an otherwise straightforward summer here in Adelaide, South Australia. For the past couple of days, wind gusts have been huge, a cold southerly whipping from the Antarctic has dumped rain and the skies have looked volatile and foreboding. It's pure climate change stuff. "Queen Tide" is about climate change as well and is written from the perspective of wandering around my hometown of Normanville on the Fleurieu Peninsula in the aftermath of a climactic catastrophe.

One of the things I've always liked about the song is the use of an Em sus9 (or Em+2) chord in the main verse. My partner Lauren has often referred to this as the 'Twin Peaks' song, since the melody and structure does echo the TP theme a little bit. It's always sounded fine on guitar, but this morning I thought I'd change it up and find a way to replicate it on piano. I've been listening to a lot of John Cale's work lately as well, so I thought I'd drop the key by a few increments and sing it a bit lower.

So that's how it started and I spent a few hours on it with a few overdubs that turned into several. That was what became the 'kitchensink' version, completely with an 'iPad pedal steel' in the bridge and two simultaneous sets of algorithmically programmed drums. I've spared you of the 'kitchensink' version and presented a more sensibly austere version with a bit of additional keyboard accompaniment, restrained guitar and backing vocals.

[Disquiet_Junto_0579] Queen Tide (redux)

"Composite things are like dreams. Fantasies. Bubbles. Thoughts. Like a dewdrop and a flash of lightning; A new dress and a burning tire; Grains of sand and sinking ships; The shadow of a statue and an entry in a diary; A brain tumor and an ice cream sundae. They are thus to be regarded."

[Æon Flux : Chronophasia]

[disquiet0578] Modest Ardor (Rabbit in the Moon)

Aethyr