Five Sixteen PM, The Sun Low in the Sky

Six Thirty Seven PM, A Deer by the Window as Spring Begins

A solo piano arrangement of the 1968 Wayne Shorter song from the second great quintet Miles Davis period.

Nefertiti

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0496-isolation-room/

With my dear friends Ricky and Stephanie, we have a ongoing trio project called “NerdBait” (soundcloud @nerdbaitband). We’ve recorded music for a variety of events that Ricky has participated in and produced in Scotland and although we’ve been a bit dormant recently, the band is definitely still together! 

Anyway, In 2015, Ricky had an extended bit in “SkyGround’, a collaborative performance retelling the fictional story of a 1970s female Scottish astronaut. As well as an ambient / spoken word soundtrack for his piece and the some interstitial music, we wrote the opening and closing theme for the show. I always loved that opening theme (linked in the soundcloud comment for this track) - Ricky’s words, my melody and Stephanie’s soulful performance of it, even with the noisy recording i clumsily captured - stuck with me. But I never quite loved the classic rock style music accompanying it. While it fit the theme of the show, it seemed incomplete somehow.

So, after a quick text chain sharing this week’s wonderful disquiet prompt, we had a chat about me taking that vocal line and lyric and having me re-contextualize it with a sound closer to where I am today.  I grabbed 2 of my 3 favorite tools - Surge and Valhalla Delay - and got working last night. 

The result is in a way a remix and re-imagining of our collaboration. I hope you enjoy “Reshoot the Moon (disquiet 496)

[Original Track: https://soundcloud.com/nerdbaitband/opening-song-from-apollo-21]

Reshoot The Moon (disquiet0496)

New Years Eve, 2021. 

I hope to write more in 2022. Here's a starting place.

Starting Place, New Years Eve

This week’s prompt: A John Cage chord (E5 A#4 E4 D#4 Db3 C3) meant to be as slow as possible, in a 3 minute loopable drone, for potential inclusion in a music fest. 

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0554-cage-chord/57579/32?u=baconpaul

The chord is strange. Sort of a Cm7b9 with a wrong note voiced in a blatantly hostile fashion. And the idea took me to a place which is not appropriate for a music festival, or looping, or droning, or maybe even human consumption. I’m not sure. This one may be bad. For the first time in a while I’m really not sure whether to hit the upload or the trashcan.

But it calls on a lot of sounds i’ve been experimenting with around synthesis and feedback, instability, and random structure.  And all the voices (voices? sure I’ll go with voices) here have those characteristics. And what the heck. The communities are friendly so toss it out there. 

Mechanics: A stack of 6 or so Surge XT instances in Logic with a lot of patching, a lot of automation, and a bit of compression on the back.

Feedback on Cage's Chord (disquiet0554)

What is slow? This week we were invited to combine Gabber (which I learned is basically early 90s electronic hard dance music) with Ambient (which I knew was not). And Gabber is fast and Ambient is slow.

But what if it wasn't? I have a few bits of favorite music where I'm not sure if they are fast or slow. And so I sort of leaned into that idea here. With a result which, if I had developed it for 19 minutes, may have become hypnotic, but that's kinda anti-social for the disquiet, so here's a 2:30 version.

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0556-gabber-ambient/

What Is Slow? (disquiet0556)

The entirety of the DSP (effects, oscillators, filters, wave shapers, etc...) are done with the new surge xt in rack modules. (Of course, sequencing, mixing and so on are provided by other modules in the rack environment.)

Surge in Rack Teaser Demo Track

Before I release a synth I kinda have the habit of bring it into logic and run it through its paces. This is my test track for six sines a day or so before we plan to tag it 1.0. All sounds including drums are from the synth. Valhalla delay and reverb and logic pro compression mastering tools and eqs are downstream of the synth in a couple of ways but all sounds originate from six sines.

Six Sines Test Track

Scot Songs

Cairstiona

Phiuthrag 'S A Phiuthar (Little Sister)

Young Bonnie Lassie

The Moon Shined On My Bed Last Night

Disquiet 0420: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0420-luna-tick/28536

A busy weekend ahead meant I decided to spend Friday morning experimenting with music inspired by the phases of the moon. I thought of a few things when I read the prompt. The one I committed to, somewhat obviously, revolved around phases of the moon form a pyramid of light intensity over the month, so do the same with sound over 2 minutes.

And we are getting ready to ship Surge 1.6.5 - probably early Feb - with lots of cool new stuff. As we get close to the finish line on the release I like to use my dev version to make music to find accidental bugs, so lots of surge here. Notably the pulsing guitar sound is my electric guitar into stock logic distortion pedal run into an S&H modulated set of filters mixed with a sin blip. The other instruments are all Surge or Pianotec also. 

To say that the idea to push the guitar through a synth’s S&H modulated filter was original would also be missing another moon related part of the week. Along with I bet a lot of the rest of you, I watched a lot of ARP 2600 retrospectives. That guitar-into-filter trick just invites Keith Moon to enter my track around 0:55. But he doesn’t, of course. (Also: How is it that the disquiet junto has me thinking about classic rock so much! Odd!)

And so, with that as a background, I hope you enjoy “Pyramids, Lunar (disquet0420)”

Pyramids, Lunar (disquet0420)

Disquiet 0422: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0422-chapter-cascade/28907

The challenge, to make very short collections of noises, in a relatively prescribed A/B pattern, immediately clicked in my head with an idea. I would write 3 very short pieces of music, two a pattern and one a loop. Then I would “play” the loop with the patterns radically sped up being each note of the loop. 

So some constraints. For the fastest rendition of the patterns to work, they could not have repeating notes. So one pattern is a sort of opposing pair of melodies and another is three rising chords. The loop has one repeated theme of 7 notes and another of 5, so the item ends up 140 “notes” long.

And then I had to execute it.  About half the disquiets have me writing some custom code, and I did so here, writing some python to take a performed version of each theme as midi, and radically speed it up. And once I was in code, I could do things, like speed it up a bit less as time went on; and offset the themes at the start and phase them towards not being offset at the end; and some other tricks. It’s all on my GitHub if you want. 

And then take the midi files into Logic, set up some Pianotec and some reverbs and delays and stuff, and voila.

In some ways I really like this, and I think it was super successful, especially as I let it open up. But in other ways it sounds exactly like the sort of mechanical formal toneless music that makes people not like “modern” music. I hope you enjoy listening and making your own decision, and I’m glad to share “3 Ideas; 5040 Notes (disquiet 0422)”

3 Ideas; 5040 Notes (disquiet 0422)

Disquiet 0423: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0423-hold-noise

Luckily, here in modernity, our zooms, our hangouts, our skypes, and our facetimes have chosen to do away with the tradition of hold music. But iproviders of yore made a choice to foist music upon us, and in my experience seemed to pick either a (presumably low license cost) uninspired recording of some baroque music or a bit of music somewhere between smooth jazz and bad fusion. And in the spirit of the second, I approached this week’s prompt.

But also, this week we shipped Surge 1.6.5. If you are a Surge user you should totally upgrade. Loads of new stuff, all detailed in the changelog. One of the big changes is we now have a complete SCL/KBM tuning implementation. I spent quite a bit of time writing and testing this with the rest of the surge team, but I hadn’t used it to make music in anger. So I chose an 18 note even division of the octave scale and went for it. I picked this scale because it makes diminished arpeggios on a standard keyboard equivalent to a whole tone scale. And what is more smooth jazz/bad fusion than a whole tone scale? But all those other notes are hanging out there too… The bit uses the Logic Pro built in drum samples and three virtual instruments with a solid retuning implementation (Surge, dexed and Pianotec).  

And of course, our intrepid hold-music musicians, getting more adventurous as the call goes on, moving further from their whole tone roots, meet the fate of all hold music. If you listen to the end, you’ll find out what that is, if you can make it that far. If you can, I hope you enjoy listening to “The 3:30 is Running a Few Minutes Late (disquiet0423)”

The 3:30 is Running a Few Minutes Late (disquiet0423)

Disquiet 0425: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0425-crop-score/29584

Finally, scientists unpacked the signal in Crop Circles, and amazingly they found encoded audio. The sounds were released Feb 21, 2076. Is it noise? It it speech? Is it an alarm? No-one knows, but the entire world is listening, rapt, to the strange and mysterious sound - a thrum and an unsettled whistle - trying to understand what it is that we have received. In the bar at the teleportation station which we last visited in disquiet0414, the night band sits silent, trying with everyone else to garner a glimpse of meaning. And then the pianist realizes the sound is an invitation to cooperate, a lead from a song that we have to write together across space and time. That some alien, deep in the past, was looking to sit in on the session and make music, and sent us that message as a pile of compressed wheat fields. So turn to the keys - pluck out a hint of a sympathetic melody. As the rest of the group joins in, the bar looks on, thinking:  “No. No, that’s probably not what the signal means. But let’s listen and order another cocktail anyway.”

This week is my 11th disquiet. As I’ve done with several others, I wrote some code and some music. This time I used python to extract 2 dimensional signals from the wikipedia image, turned slices of those signals into one dimensional signals, turned those one dimensional signals into midi cc, and pulled about 2 minutes of lots of midi control into Logic. I made a feedback-y Surge patch controlled by the CC, and then played along on piano. Nicely, as I was playing, I realized I was returning to the sound palette of disquiet0414, and so I wrote the above little micro-story in my head. And voila.

With that, I hope you enjoy “Space Sits In on The Last Number (disquiet0425)”

Space Sits In on The Last Number (disquiet0425)

Disquiet 0428: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0428-urban-moss/30154

I’ve never met Marc. Almost swung by that bar in Dumbo 2 weeks ago but had another thing. But this week he took a picture of a pole and asked us to think about concerts of the past in this turbulent time. And wished us well. And I wish him well also.

Less surprisingly, I’ve also never met Thelonius Monk. In 1959, Wikipedia tells us, he recorded his third solo album “Thelonius Alone in San Francisco” at Fugazi Hall on October 21 and 22, live. 

But without an audience.

And recently I’ve been spending time with “Ruby, My Dear”, the second track from the record. It’s a fun item. This week with a friend and I just sort of ended up holding onto the chords to really let the voicings become part of my vocabulary. 

Those ideas all collided at once this afternoon. And while the resulting reflection on the first 8 bars of Monk’s piece really are pretty far away from the disquiet style and intent, I still thought I would share what I recorded anyway. So, with a hope that you and yours are safe, I hope you enjoy “A Reflection on Ruby (disquiet0428)”.

A Reflection on Ruby (disquiet0428)

Week one was dascott:

https://soundcloud.com/dascott/guitar-fiction-disquiet0429

Week two was freddyblues-1 adding a pad

https://soundcloud.com/freddyblues-1/ambient-algorithms-disquiet430

and I added percussion and piano and a counter theme and some reverb

Three Thirds with Fred Busche and Douglas Scott (disquiet0431)

A semi-improvised reflection on Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" and Lennon/McCartney's "Blackbird", which I developed in early 2021.

Flight Music

Four guitars, Two valhalla delays, and a surge.

Eight Forty Five PM, With The Ice Re-Freezing

Multi-this-that-and-the-other including composer; 1/3 of @NerdBaitBand / www.nerdbaitband.com

baconpaul

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