Disquiet Junto Project 0541: 10BPM Techno
The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats.

There are two ways to do this project.

Option 1: Record some 10BPM techno.

Option 2: Record what you imagine it would sound like to attend a club event of 10BPM techno, including crowd noise.

. . .

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 16, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. 

. . .

Details: disquiet.com/0541

Disquiet Junto Project 0541: 10BPM Techno

These are some songs that don't fit into one thing, hope you enjoy

The Moment

finite

This is a sonification composed and turned into something musical, with the help of scientist Mark Temple’s musician friends.

Molecular Music Album

Coronavirus Spike Protein Musification

10BPM Techno - Anders lays down a heavy, 10 BPM drum track, and BatU layers a warm Arp Pad synth arpeggio track, accompanied by delicious Galactic Layers on  a journey to their Black Hole Vacation

Disquiet0541 - Black Hole Vacation

For the Disquiet Junto this week, I chose the option to "Record what you imagine it would sound like to attend a club event of 10BPM techno, including crowd noise."

I wrote a sequence at a normal-ish techno tempo, then slowed down the master tempo in my DAW to 10bpm. Techno typically evolves slowly, in blocks of 16 or so bars, and while I didn't quite stick to that, I thought it wouldn't feel really like it was 10bpm if I messed with the structure. So I decided to focus my efforts on making it sound at least a bit like being in a club.

I used convolution to feed the whole mix through a night club's PA,  using these free impulse responses. http://www.balancemastering.com/blog/free-funktion-one-impulse-responses-ir-irs-convolution/

I mixed the music with a couple of crowd / bar noise recordings from freesound.
https://freesound.org/people/Pfannkuchn/sounds/457606/
https://freesound.org/people/Tomlija/sounds/100904/

I faded the thing in and out, to give a bit more of a feeling of just a captured recording of a club night. I don't think the result is convincing, but it was fun to do.

More on this 541st weekly Disquiet Junto project — 10BPM Techno (The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats) — at: https://disquiet.com/0541/

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-0541-10bpm-techno/

Image used thanks to this license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grapevinesnail_01.jpg.

Jet Jaguar - Slow Night [disquiet0541]

A common trope among social media posts are videos with enticing clickbait titles, such as: “Homeless Person Sits Down At Piano, Then THIS Happened.” The reveal is that the figure at the public piano is actually a professional musician. These scenes typically take place at a shopping mall, where an impromptu audience is delighted by the player’s unexpected dexterity.

Franco Bifo Berardi reminds us that “The goal of the [analyst] is to give him/her the possibility to see other landscapes, and to change the focus, to open some new ways of imagination.” One might imagine the reaction at Carnegie Hall if a virtuoso flubbed a performance so badly that it bordered on an Andy Kaufman skit.

This is why Suss Müsik cannot fathom a dance club scenario in which techno music plays at 10BPM. It’s not impossible, however, for such an event to occur in a setting such as a shopping mall. And rather than a DJ playing electronic techno music, it might be a very strange string quartet attempting to fit their odd time signatures within that 10BPM timestamp. 

This is the approach Suss Müsik took with this week’s project. A series of four cyclical phrases were played on fake violin, fake cello, fake harp and fake dulcimer. A single strike of a mallet keeps time in 10BPM; meanwhile, the instruments are bowed and plucked in 1/64 and 1/128 to give a sense of movement. The constant repetition is perhaps a nod to techno’s reliance on looped beats. 

All of this happens in front of a bewildered audience of mall shoppers (courtesy of public domain audio), who would just as soon be left alone in the food court without this distraction. Then again, as Violet Trefusis once wrote, perhaps it’s true that “love thrives on indifference” and some appreciation would be detected. Maybe we’ll try it one day.

The piece is titled Trefusis. The image may or may not be a shopping center somewhere in the US. 

More on this 541st weekly Disquiet Junto project — 10BPM Techno (The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats) — at: https://disquiet.com/0541/

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-0541-10bpm-techno/

Trefusis [Disquiet0541]

Made on Christmas Day, 2020 as a demo for Portage Garage Sounds. Slowed to 10bpm on May 13, 2022 for Disquiet Junto.

PGS Trial 122520 "Ten BPM Techno" (disquiet0541)

Disquiet Junto Project 0541: 10BPM Techno
The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats.

When I saw the mail for Disquiet Junto Project 0541, I also saw a mail from Samplescience, announcing free 303 Loops. As I am no techno musician, I thought of being lazy and just used some of these 303 loops to play around. Strechted from 120 to 10 bpm within reaper they became very melodious and ambientic. I added some percussion and a kickdrum to fullfill what I think are minimum genre conventions (there was a "riser" sound which I left out). This may not be techno at all, but I like the bleeping 303s and the resulting track very much. A nice project!

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Credits

303 Samples
https://www.samplescience.info/2022/05/abstract-303.html

Track image based on
https://unsplash.com/photos/m41k1lTzjVM

Party crowd ambience mostly
https://freesound.org/people/deleted_user_2104797/sounds/346683/

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More on this 541st weekly Disquiet Junto project — 10BPM Techno (The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats) — at: https://disquiet.com/0541/

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-0541-10bpm-techno/

disquiet sampler album

10bpm Techno [disquiet0541]

the concept for this work is to take two abstract rhythmic sections both panned hard left & right each with their own rhythm and tones but together, when combined creating something "other"

sounds are effected drumracks in ableton on the left with field recordings of me bashing stuff in the garden on the right

Some randomized autopan is applied to give the pieces movement in the mix

More on this 549th weekly Disquiet Junto project – Sidelines (The Assignment: Get intentional with stereo) – at: https://disquiet.com/0549/ 1

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-0549-sidelines/

July 7th [disquiet0549]

This track was inspired by the Disquiet Junto Project 0554 (details see below): Create a drone based on the currently played accord of the piece “Organ²/ASLSP” by John Cage, being performed in Halberstadt.
I composed the drone mainly with choir and strings, singing and playing the 6 notes of the chord throughout the track. All sounds were treated extensivly with different varying effects. But I also wanted the original sounds to shine through.

In the follow-up track https://soundcloud.com/rabmusiclab/un-drone-se-desintegre this drone looses its drone-quality and disintegrates in its clearly recognizable sound-elements.

More on this 554th weekly Disquiet Junto project – Cage Chord (The Assignment: Riff on a chord by John Cage) – at: https://disquiet.com/0554/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern

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 1: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0554-cage-chord/

Un Drone Eclectique (Disquiet0554)

Disquiet Junto Project 0555: A Simple Timer
The Assignment: Simplify by a factor of 5.

I tried different DAWs and Synths to get a nice sound and ended with Live, Stepic and Aalto (Beat Edition). The track consists of 5 tracks, all tracks are automated with 5/10/15 step sequences. Aalto does not offer triangle, but I used sine, square and saw. Some tracks change their wave form by modulation and/or automation. I allowed all 5 sequencers only to select from 5 notes (plus octaves), from which one note had to be random. The drums are very deep squarewaves with very short decays, which made noise (looking at the exported waveform this may have been a betrayal to the assignment). No effects or filters have been used but some EQ on the drums, modulated and automated panning in general and some mastering at the end. The lenght is 555 seconds (5m55s felt wrong). I think I failed on 'minimalism', on the other hand it's 9+ minutes with only five sequences which do not bore me, so I think it passes as minimal ambient. As always, it was a fun challenge!

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Track cover based on SVG pinout of 555 timer chip by Inductiveload, Public Domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:555_Pinout.svg

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More on this 555th weekly Disquiet Junto project — A Simple Timer (The Assignment: Simplify by a factor of 5) — at: https://disquiet.com/0555/

Thanks to Anatol Locker for having proposed this project.

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-0555-a-simple-timer/

album.link

555TRIG2TH8 [disquiet0555]

For me the image suggest stains on a table cloth, sweaty wine glasses and bottles...
I started recording a beautiful plastic bottle I had around, then added some simple drums (I can't drum more that 2 things at once, so here it's bass drum and hi hat)
The added some wine glasses (rubbed) and chamber crystal bowls (hit w/mallets) , some of my favourite samples.
The bass it's a freebie I recently found and wanted to test, just plain 808 bass sound in one octave. very nice (808 BM4 Lite)

for this project:

"Disquiet Junto Project 0557: Condensation Is a Form of Change
The Assignment: Interpret a graphic score that depicts four phases.

A combined play on a Brian Eno phrase and a John Cage visual motif is pretty much foundational Disquiet Junto territory. This week, interpret this image as a graphic score..."

Created by dd in Paris during the morning of Friday September 2nd 2022.

Bottles And Glasses (disquiet0557)

Podcast Editor Kharl Reynado (MPP ’23) spoke with Amy Antioho, the widow of Peter Antioho, an Army Officer who passed away after exposure to burn pits during his military service, and their VA benefits attorney, Cindy Johnson, Deputy Director of the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center (CVLC), about what the PACT Act is and what it means for veterans and their families. Amy walks listeners through her nearly year-long experience applying for initial disability benefits for Peter after he was diagnosed with brain cancer. After multiple denials and stacks of VA forms and medical papers, she reached out to Cindy at the CVLC for help. Cindy discusses the challenges veterans can face when they submit a VA disability benefit claim and the features in the PACT Act that hope to ease those burdens for veterans exposed to toxics during their military service.

The Uphill Battle for VA Benefits and How the PACT Act Hopes to Help

Westchester Eye on the Radio 07 24 23

Song Of Thanks

If I Had You

My 33 1/3 series book about the Aphex Twin album <i>Selected Ambient Works Volume II</i> was published in 2014. The book was one of the top 5 bestselling titles for the calendar year, and in 2015 was ranked by Pitchfork as one of the "33 best" of the 100-plus books in the 33 1/3 series. It has subsequently been translated into Japanese (2019) and Spanish (2018)

Since 2012 I have moderated the Disquiet Junto group, which began on SoundCloud. More at disquiet.com/junto. 

I've written for Nature, Pitchfork, The Wire, Down Beat, Boing Boing, NewMusicBox, Red Bull Music Academy, Art Practical, the website of The Atlantic, and many other publications. 

I've exhibited sound art at galleries in Los Angeles (Crewest), Manhattan (apex art), and Dubai (DUTAC), and I had a audio-visual installation at the San Jose Museum of Art as part of its 45th anniversary.

And since 1996 I've run the website Disquiet.com about the intersection of sound, art, and technology.

Disquiet0541 - Black Hole Vacation

Bobo Lavorgna

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