Used this week's Disquiet Junto project as the perfect excuse to take my new-to-me Akai reel-to-reel for a spin.  Needs a few tweaks, but ultimately, it's in great shape and I'm excited to dig in further! The audio is based around a recording of wind chimes presented to the project by Chris Kallmyer, transferred to 1/4" tape, then used to excite a small cadre of Eurorack modules: Rings, E520 Hyperion, Clouds, and Magneto.

Disquiet 485 - Strange Weather

I've been working on this track for months, off and on.  I did one mix, sent it to a friend who gave me a bunch of notes and...then I never touched it again.  This week's composition prompt pushed me to open up the file again, tweak and re-master it.  But after all this time, it still doesn't have a name.

Sketch 4 (Disquiet 0488)

"write a piece of music in 29/16"

Entirely on the Digitakt II, single take, performed live :)

disquiet0664 - MotherBeat

As my opening night gift to the team on Center Stage's The White Snake in Baltimore, I made a fun remix of the opening preshow announcement.

The White Snake - Preshow Remix

I realised during an evening walk that Aphex Twin's "Avril 14th" could fit perfectly with Erik Satie's "Gymnopedie #1" for this week's Disquiet Junto #363.  It worked far better than I could have imagined.

4 instances of Kontakt's The Giant piano, one each for L and R hands of Satie and Aphex.  No added notes that aren't in the original scores and all music is, I think, in the order that it appears in the two original pieces.

Satie: Gymnopedie #14 (Avril) [disquiet0363]

Using @vrmrmojo's recording for last week's Disquiet Junto, I sat on my couch, facing my desk, with an open winow to my left, and recorded the sound of Global Headset playing from my monitors.  About 3/4 of the way through, I get up and go look in the fridge.

I used Roland CS-10EM binaural microphone/earbuds into a Zoom H6.

Disquiet 0437 - Global Binaural (with @vgmrmojo)

Imagine first contact contextualised and mediated by technology.

This track imagines a world far away, picking up the very first television broadcast (a nod to SETI's founder who was the inspiration for movie Contact).  The broadcast is degraded and mixed with the background noise of the universe: electromagnetic radiation bombarding the signal on its many-lightyear-journey out into the universe.

The sampled broadcast is from the NBC/RCA broadcast on July 7, 1936.  All other sounds were recorded in my apartment using a Crank Sturgeon electomagnetic transducer pickup microphone, the CroMagnet.  The sounds come from a rechargeable battery PSU, a computer monitor, a handheld shaver, and anything else around me that made fun noises in the form of electromagnetic radiation

[Disquiet 0453] Transmission Received

Little Objects

My entry for the CitiesAndMemory.com 2020 Dante's Inferno project.

3rd circle, the Gluttonous.

Through my research, I learned that the souls of the Third Circle, guarded by Cerberus, were punished by laying in a freezing-cold slush for eternity, pelted by icy rain.  I'd always heard that Cerberus was a three-headed dog, but apparently in Dante's Inferno, Cerberus is a worm-monster.  I used elements of weather - cold winds, icy rain, some hail - and low tones to create a base atmosphere, then layering on multiple layers of recordings of people gurgling, choking, calling out for help (the recordings are of myself and two of my friends), and finally doing some creature creation for Cerberus, with rough heavy breathing, a few elongated screams, and some scrapes and slithers for the body movement.  The piece is an atmospheric one, a duration - it doesn't have an arc, there is no "ending" for these souls trapped for all eternity.

Third Circle - The Gluttonous

How do you deal with shifting time in a musical context?  How do you deal with shifting time in real life?

Voice, effects, and Moog Subharmonicon.  Features sections of text from "In Search of Schrödinger's Cat" by John Gribbin.

Arrow Of Time

I grew up on the Haverford College campus and made this piece during an extended stay with my parents during lockdown in 2020.  I walked around the campus, collecting field recordings on a Zoom H6 with a Zoom X/Y capsule, a Rode NTG3B shotgun mic, and a Crank Sturgeon Cro Magnet electromagnetic transducer.  I made sure to capture places on the campus that had memories and meaning behind them.

Along the lines of Hildegard Westercamp, I wrote and recorded a voiceover about my memories growing up on the campus and how my experience of the campus has shifted over the years.

In the first half, there is occasionally some music heard in the background.  I recorded myself using a percussion mallet to strike various signs on the campus - speed limits, stop signs, building signs. I then used the recordings, chopped and edited, to create drones and synth textures.

All sounds in this recording were recorded on the Haverford College campus in early December 2020

Haverford College Soundwalk

(they/them) LA/NY-based artist, composer, and technologist.

Hawthorn

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