My Disquiet Contributions 2014

More on this 109th Disquiet Junto project (“Insert musical objects into an urban soundscape.”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/01/30/disquiet0109-cragheadsketch/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Image from Warren Craghead’s website:

http://craghead.com

Disquiet Junto Project 0109: Craghead Sketch

not much to say, found a suitable middle eastern percussion set, a synth sound and added a couple of effects. 

More on this 108th Disquiet Junto project (“Create a soundscape for the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra.”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/01/23/disquiet0108-freebassel/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

More on the campaign to free Bassel at

http://freebassel.org/


Palmyra Palmyra [disquiet0108-freebassel]

Sounds added were mostly what came to hand, except for the foghorn. Included are a bass-heavy delay, F# on an Absynth patch, foghorn, snippet from https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/wanna-be-startin-something-megamix-extended and a bit of http://shinobicuts.bandcamp.com/track/aeolus-salute-dan-shoebridge-remix

More on this 109th Disquiet Junto project (“Insert musical objects into an urban soundscape.”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/01/30/disquiet0109-cragheadsketch/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

New York Post-it [disquiet0109-cragheadsketch]

I imagine I had a bit of an advantage with this weeks project...I actually listened to Warrens track when it was posted on SC...not much of an advantage but still....anyway I went for a walk, thinking about how I could go about it, and decided to try using my own recordings of music found in public spaces e.g. street musicians. Some of them worked, as you'll hear in my track, some didn't, so I left them out and found other sounds instead.
All the sounds I used are my own field recordings, that I found to be "musical" and fit the purpose. Following is a list of what and when
... 
0:02 Pheasant (From behind my house)
0:10 Tin foil (From the Emil Nolde museum in Germany)
0:25 Music box (Playing a found score from behind my house)
0:50 Stream (From a hill side not far from where I live)
1:22 Horn quintet on a break (From the Venice Biennale fall 2013) 
1:34 Marimba band (Flensburg, Germany)
1:53 Electro magnetic radiation recorded with a coil pickup (Carpark i Aarhus, Denmark)
2:09 Deep rumble from a wire mast at a transformer station (Not far from my house
2:36 Street band (Recorded in Venice Nov 2013)
3:10 Lark (Used this one once before, sorry - from behind my house)
3:28 Church bell (Recorded in Aarhus, Denmark)



Disquiet Junto Project 0109: Craghead Sketch
For this week’s project, we’ll insert musical objects into an urban soundscape.
The steps are as follows:

Step 1: Download the field recording of a walk through New York City at this URL: https://soundcloud.com/craghead/sound-of-walking-to-the

Step 2: Listen to the track and note moments when space allows for the insertion of a musical object. Try to locate at least one space every 30 or 45 seconds.

Step 3: In each of those spots, layer in a unique musical object (e.g., a tone, a riff, a beat, some combination thereof). Each musical object should be self-contained (i.e., not overlap with each other).

Background: The project is derived from the drawings of the very talented illustrator Warren Craghead, himself a Junto member and participant. Among Craghead’s artistic practice is the act of leaving Post-its and other small drawings in public places. This project is an attempt to find a musical equivalent of his art. Examples of Craghead’s work can be seen in this recent post: http://disquiet.com/2014/01/17/gestural-sound-gestural-drawing/
And on his own website: http://craghead.com
Deadline: Monday, February 3, 2014, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be 3:36 in length — same as the source material.
Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, 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.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0109-cragheadsketch” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:
More on this 109th Disquiet Junto project (“Insert musical objects into an urban soundscape.”) at: http://disquiet.com/2014/01/30/disquiet0109-cragheadsketch/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/?p=16588
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Image from Warren Craghead’s website
http://craghead.com


“disquiet0109-cragheadsketch” urbanswap

This Junto was a stretch for me as I’ve never needed to use an entire recording in real time for creating a track. I spent the first 12 hours familiarizing myself with the field recording. The car horns immediately jumped out at me and I wanted to create a horn section response to their notes. For the first placed sound, car horns at the 41 second mark, I pitched my Synthesis Technology E350 to the same pitch as the car horns in the original recording and then processed that via my Make Noise QMMG running in quad with the left two channels functioning as a cascaded low pass gate and voltage controlled amplifier. The signal then went out from there to the right side of the QMMG where it was run through cascaded low pass filter and high pass filter. I than ran that into my Make Noise Phonogene to sample the sound. I had used my Make Noise Pressure Points and Brains to trigger the E350 initially, and once I had the sample in Phonogene, I used them to play the sample. The sample was further processed to a synced Make Noise Echophon for downward pitch shifting (with a feedback loop processed by my Pittsburgh Modular Filter in LPF mode). Then out from there to a Thonk/Music Thing Spring reverb. The second horns at the 1:23 mark followed the same essential setup except I glitched the E350 a bit and added further grit by over driving the resonance of the QMMG’s filters. I toned the grit down a bit in the PM LPF with a more aggressive clamping of the dynamic range. Additionally, I pitch shifted the source sound upward this time in the Echophon. For the third and final horn part, I sampled the actual car horn in the field recording at the 2:00 mark. I then granulized the sample into a looping wash with Phonogene and fed that into the PM LPF with no resonance. Starting with the LPF completely closed, I slowly opened the filter until it was fully open at 3:32 at which point I slammed it shut. The last portion I worked with revolved around the people discussing not working towards the very end of the recording. This reminded me of lyric from "Because I Got It Like That” by the Jungle Brothers (an NYC hip-hop crew) about working. I typed up the lyrics in the Notes app on my Mac, and then rendered the Alex speech reading to a sound file in iTunes which I then sampled into my Phonogene and pitched down. By splicing the sample into small segments, I was able to isolate the synthetic breath between the sentences which I layered briefly over the sounds of footsteps in the original recording. I let that run right up to the portion where the work discussion hits at the end and then let my sample construction play in full to close the piece.

More on this 109th Disquiet Junto project (“Insert musical objects into an urban soundscape.”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/01/30/disquiet0109-cragheadsketch/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/


Image from Warren Craghead’s website:
http://craghead.com


Video

3M in Plain Si(gh)t(e) : disquiet0109-cragheadsketch (Native Double-Tongue Horns for Days Mix)

Disquiet Junto Project 0109: Craghead Sketch

Planning/Composing/Recording

- One of my favorite things to do in New York is walk, so this project is near and dear to my heart.
- My inspiration for this piece was a time when I was in NY on a business trip. We saw Oz Noy with Will Lee and Anton Fig at the Bitter End. Then hung out at a jazz bar a couple doors down. After that we walked from the Village to Time Square, and eventually walked back down to the financial district. A good hike.
- I didn't want my contribution to take away from the great sounds of the recording. It really captured the organized chaos that is NYC. So, I went with a simple, cool (hopefully) blues/jazz bass and chord progression to provide the background vibe of the city.
- Recorded and mixed down on Auria.

More on this 109th Disquiet Junto project (“Insert musical objects into an urban soundscape.”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/01/30/disquiet0109-cragheadsketch/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Image from Warren Craghead’s website:
http://craghead.com

NYC Walking Blues [disquiet0109-craghead sketch]

an even quicker than usual carrying out of this junto… currently staying,and not sleeping much!, at the Reykjavík Visual Music · Punto y Raya Festival
I took the approach of taking the last 5 seconds of sound before each break i chose in the sound walk and then creating something out of this few seconds of sound to re insert back into the sound walk, at around the 1min mark I deliberately left the nice relatively quiet relaxing break 


More on this 109th Disquiet Junto project (“Insert musical objects into an urban soundscape.”) at:



http://disquiet.com/2014/01/30/disquiet0109-cragheadsketch/


More on the Disquiet Junto at:



http://disquiet.com/?p=16588


Join the Disquiet Junto at:



http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/


Image from Warren Craghead’s website:



http://craghead.com



MovieWalk_disquiet0109-cragheadsketch

decided to jot down a certain amount of places over the track where I wanted to place my sounds. After doing that I processed a theremin-ish synth sound, adding distortion, compression and delay. More on this 109th Disquiet Junto project (“Insert musical objects into an urban soundscape.”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/01/30/disquiet0109-cragheadsketch/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

eerie feet [disquiet0109-cragheadsketch]

Spanish text was taken from here: http://www.clarin.com/opinion/precios-cuide-Cadorna_0_1081691921.html - a political satirist view of Argentina. 

used Apple's text to speech functionality and recorded the audio. Added a synth+bass+beat track to accompany the audio. 

More on this 110th Disquiet Junto project (“Celebrate the 100th birthday of that old cut-up, William S. Burroughs”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/02/06/disquiet0110-wsb100/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/



Kadorna [disquiet0110-wsb100]

Thanks to a Creative Commons license, this track contains elements of music by Juan Manuel Castrillo (“Horizontales,” from the album by that name on the netlabel Impulsive Habitat), J. Surak (“Improvisation for Prepared Autoharp,” from the album If You Smell Gas on the netlabel Zeromoon), and Maddame Cell (“Auto Tempo 1,” from the album Autotempo on the netlabel Xylem).

More on this 111th Disquiet Junto project (“Rework work from Impulsive Habitat, Xylem, Zeromoon (via actsofsilence.com)”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/02/13/disquiet0111-actsofcommons/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

The source audio for this track is available for free download from these netlabel websites:

http://impulsivehabitat.com/releases/ihab084.htm

http://museumofmicrocassetteart.bandcamp.com/album/moma086-if-you-smell-gas

http://xylemrecords.bandcamp.com/album/autotempo

The audio was sourced from reviews posted originally at the excellent website actsofsilence.com, which is run by David Nemeth.

Pataphysics [disquiet0111-actsofcommons]

A drummer and a thief

25 years of drumming experience, interested in on-line projects to collaborate.
Percussion, electronic drum programming, acoustic drums.

eerie feet [disquiet0109-cragheadsketch]

Carlos R