The fourth and, according to rumor, final album from the postpunk ensemble Sudre's Violin.

Figure Six

They say that home is where the heart is. Sometimes, late at night, the sound of it beating can keep you awake.

Disquiet Junto 0661 invited us to devise a drone made from the sounds of consumer electronics and appliances around our homes. "It's Just an Old House Settling" is composed entirely from the dulcet tones of an air purifier, a DVD player, a dehumidifier, a ringing cell phone, a clothes dryer, a computer booting up, and an air fryer.

More about Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/0661

It's Just An Old House Settling (disquiet0661)

For Disquiet Junto 0675, "Arc of the Drone", we were invited to record a drone piece that began and ended simply but had a complex middle.

For this one I brought in the whole NOSIGNAL Multimedia Lab orchestra. The main drone is from a tortured Nave wavetable, and the motion pads are courtesy of an Alchemy synth. There are also a few layers of vocal samples, some field recordings, shortwave radio, and two layers of ebow guitar. I think people should be able to dance to drones so I put a simple "grimy 909" kick at the bottom of the stack to keep things moving.

The title of the piece refers to the poem "The Devil of Pope Fig Island" by 17th century fabulist Jean de la Fontaine. The cover image is from an 1896 illustration by Charles Eisen, depicting the climactic scene in which an inhabitant of the bedeviled island chases Lucifer off for good by flashing her vulva at him.

Best enjoyed with headphones.

More about Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/0675

The Devil of Pope Fig Island (disquiet0675)

RIP David Lynch.

Disquiet Junto 0681 directed us to compose a sonic scene from a thriller, a walk or run to remember. If you're familiar with my work you know that I love a good narrative piece, and recently the Junto has encouraged a bit of sound design, so I felt well-prepared.

I wanted to avoid the trope of a woman being followed late at night, and instead went with the trope of the hitchhiker who may not be all that she seems to be. I spent a lot of time on stereo orchestration so please use headphones when listening.

Instrumentation was simple: a custom pad called "Shipwreck Organ" provided the pedal tone, with a lonely live guitar following along with minimal and mournful notes. 

There were a lot of samples used in this piece. The cars passing along the highway were hidden deep in Apple's Final Cut Pro library folder. The sound of single car approaching, idling, car door slamming, and pulling away is a composite of samples from Pixabay and field recordings. The BBC archive provided the car crash sample. The night sounds were from a field recording made in rural Virginia. The crunch of gravel underfoot took a bit of foley work: a recording of a potato mashing into a bowl of granola and manipulated a bit in Logic. The under-the-breath singing and humming of the hitchhiker was a live vocal performance recorded in studio and processed.

More on the 681st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Drama Course — The Assignment: Record a piece of music to transform a walk or a run into something theatrical — at https://disquiet.com/0681/

The Hitchhiker (disquiet0681)

Disquiet Junto prompt 0683 instructed us to make a piece of music that is half in space and half not in space.

Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and when the first radio transmission crossed the Atlantic it was said that distance had been abolished. Without distance, there's no space. So half of the song is a story that takes place on a radio, and is about a radio, and was performed in part on a radio, removed from place and space.

There are no synthesizers or synthetic samples in this piece. Instrumentation was a heavily processed guitar played with ebow, a Schechter Damien 7-string guitar, shortwave radio, shoebox cassette recorder, and field recordings. The radio noises and vocal parts are removed from space through a custom convolution reverb I created using a spike of low-frequency AM noise as an impulse response, essentially placing the sounds in the ionosphere.

The story I tell in the song is true.

More on the 683rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Space Shot — The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant — at https://disquiet.com/0683/

Soft, Driven, Slow, and Mad (disquiet0683)

This week’s Disquiet Junto prompt got me thinking about the somatic vs autonomic nervous systems, and how performing music can be a dance between muscle memory and intellect, instinct and intention. In reflecting on how I could explore this tension intentionally, I set out to record a minimal number of tracks, each of which had combination of attributes that were either ignored, made without decision, or deliberate.

The tone synths are custom patches designed on Logic’s physical modeling synth, Sculpture. I largely ignored pitch and concentrated on shaping and manipulating long-held notes with combinations of mod wheel, pitch wheel, and aftertouch performances.

The bass was recorded live with my Lakland. I selected a single note played at octaves, so I was able to hold the same fingering all the way through (which hurt) and not think about it (except it hurt). I paid closest attention to the way I plucked the strings, aiming for consistent intonation.

The piano part was fun, using a tinkly detuned patch I call “Gasoline Piano”. I downplayed rhythm and paid close attention to the selection of just the right notes for the broken melody.

As is my habit these days, all of the parts were recorded live, first takes only, no looping, and little to no editing.

I have to confess that this piece represents my second attempt at this week’s prompt. I spent the better part of a day with another idea, and as intriguing as it was, I simply could not make it work. It was hard to let go, but finally I listened to my intuition, set it aside for another day, and returned to the prompt with a fresh mind.

More on the 687th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Applied Science — The Assignment: Record a piece of music that includes physiological and behavioral techniques — at https://disquiet.com/0687/

The Hand with a Mind of Its Own (disquiet0687)

The 688th Disquiet Junto prompt invited us to consider a common road sign and interpret it as a musical instruction. There's a sign in the alley behind my house that reads

SLOW 
CHILDREN
AT PLAY

So, my response. The instrumentation is simple, just four layers: my favorite grumbly piano, a juicy analog synth bass, an eerie motion pad, and a custom feedback patch on the Sculpture physical modeling synth. The percussion is a hand clap performance that I recorded for the piece. But I am most proud of the vocals: they are not synthetic, they are not samples, they are an organic vocal performance that has been heavily processed.

I really enjoyed doing the research for this piece, digging into the origin of children's rhyming, clapping, and jumprope games. 

I learned that Miss Mary Mack was a performer in a Black-owned circus and tent show that toured the American South in the 1880s. I discovered the "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay" connection between Lizzie Borden and The Cat Came Back: the Lizzie Borden rhyme was often sung to the tune of "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay", a popular vaudeville song; and according to one variation of the cat chant, the seemingly indestructible cat is finally done in when he hears an organ grinder playing "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay" and drops flat dead.

Fair warning, I went full-on creepy for this one.

More on the 688th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Sign Up — The Assignment: Interpret a routine public sign as a musical instruction — at https://disquiet.com/0688/

The Slow Children at Play (disquiet0688)

The Puzzle Box Waltz (Live from Club Dumas)

Disquiet 0692 called for us to record the sound of fire and use it as a percussion layer in a composition.

I broke out my trusty stereo field recorder and captured the sounds of match strikes, a lighter, a gas stove, a gas furnace, and a wooden-wicked candle. I did minimal sonic processing on the samples, mainly touches of distortion here and there. All of the samples except the candle were loaded into a custom sampler set up and programmed as a drum kit. The drum pattern is supported by a full-length recording of the candle, processed rhythmically with a combination of a highly sensitive noise gate, beat breakers, step FX, delay, and quantization.

The percussion is the center of the piece, but there's also some vintage analog synth goodness in the background. All of the synth parts were played and manipulated on a Moog Minitaur, my current favorite desktop analog synth.

More on the 692nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Combust a Move — The Assignment: Make music using fire for the rhythm track — at https://disquiet.com/0692/

Candle Magick (disquiet0692)

Degenerate Geometries

Byzantine Valentine

The Road That Takes You to the Stars

Lost and Wanted

Why Can't You Fly?

The Puzzle Box Waltz

Disquiet Junto's 693rd prompt instructed us to sort a well-known melody by note and duration. I chose "Claire de Lune" as my source material.

I don't read sheet music and my father didn't raise me to do math on paper, so I wrote a Ruby script that processes a .mid file and sorts according to various pieces of MIDI data, including note number, note name, and time between note on and off events. You can see the source at https://gist.github.com/CoralineAda/3f559279caa892a46fa2ee26fc62b339

I processed the MIDI file a few different times with different sorting criteria, then laid out the variations (including a random sort) in what I hope is an interesting progression. 

In terms of instrumentation, I used a Yamaha digital piano for the lead and a Korg M3R for the pads and accents.

More on the 693rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Melody Sorted — The Assignment: Reorganize a familiar song note by note — at https://disquiet.com/0693/

The Lunar Sort (Variations on Claire de Lune) (disquiet0693)

Conceptual, feminist, noisy, terrifying. You probably don't want to listen to it. It could be the exit music for a Dario Argento remake of The Shining.

Disquiet Junto prompt 0694 suggested taking a song that is in 4/4 and adding a beat per measure (5/4).  I knew right off the bat that I wanted to do a glitchy sample thing, so I went diving into the Internet Archive for popular music from before 1926. I came across a really nicely cleaned up 1919 recording of Irving Berlin’s “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” sung by John Steel.

The rest just came out like that and it seemed right. It feels like a response to the notion that pretty girls have to be melodic, because we can be noisy and no less pretty for it. So I channeled some punk feminist energy and created a lot of chaos. But I swear, it’s 5/4 under there.

More on the 694th weekly Disquiet Junto project, 5/4ify — The Assignment: Add a beat to a pre-existing piece of music — at https://disquiet.com/0694/

Like a Melody (disquiet0694)

Her favorite concert, the year before the accident. The details, a little blurrier with each retelling. The t-shirt, a little thinner with each cycle through the machines. The memories, slowly transforming into lint.

Disquiet 0695 invited us to take a piece of our own music and put it through a metaphorical dryer. What would be cast off, and what would remain?

I decided to start with "Mise-en-scene", the piece that I made back in September for prompt #0665: a glitchy, minimalist homage to Achim Szepanski. The original track featured a Møffenzeef Mødular Stargazer drone synth performance over complex 5/4 rhythmic patterns voiced with drum machine samples. 

To put the piece through the dryer, I decided to underlay a more regular and machine-like rhythm (an 8-bar 4/4 percussion part) and make the song get thinner over time. The 4/4 under 5/4 made for some interesting polyrhythms. I thinned out the song by slowly converging the cutoff frequencies of low- and hi-pass filters applied to all of the original tracks. By the end, nothing is left but the 4/4 rhythm of the machine winding down.

More on the 695th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Disquiet Junto Project 0695: Clean After Each Use — The Assignment: Put a piece of music through the dryer — at https://disquiet.com/0695/

Dry Your Eyes (disquiet0695)

Disquiet Junto 0696's assignment was to record 10 to 15 layers of continuous sound and create a piece of music only by altering their relative presence over time.

I immediately thought of the story of how the iconic 1975 10cc song "I'm Not In Love" was created. The backing vocals are lush and rich and unearthly. (If you don't know the song, just listen to the first 30 seconds or so to get the gist). The story is that the band recorded themselves each singing a long, sustained note until they had 48 notes on individual 12' tape loops. For the final recording, the tape loops were played simultaneously and mixed into harmonies live on the console, essentially turning the mixer into a musical instrument. 

With this technique as inspiration, I recorded 7 tracks of ebow guitar, each playing a different note in the A harmonic minor scale. Ebow can make dynamics difficult but I managed some good textures I think. I hand-mixed each of the tracks to come in and out in sequence, creating a rising step pattern.

Then I bounced the seven guitar tracks to a single track. This track was duplicated and pitch shifted to create 4 tracks spanning 4 octaves. This essentially multiplied my original 7 tracks by 4 to give me 28 guitars. I applied volume automation to create a primitive Shepard scale out of the result.

Aside from a couple of acousmatic accents and a low-fi kick drum, every sound is from the guitar.

More on the 696th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Layers — The Assignment: Make music change by altering its layers — at https://disquiet.com/0696/

What Became of Grandfather? (disquiet0696)

Disquiet Junto 0697 is the first in a series of three, where each successive prompt's response is a contribution to a trio created via asynchronous collaboration.

To get this one going, I decided to contribute a bass/arp layer. I recorded three tracks on a keyboard controller and played back the notes on a tabletop Moog Minitaur bass synth while sculpting the sound in realtime. I love the Minitaur’s monophonic analog sound so much, and it’s a joy to perform on.

There is minimal processing on the tracks (light sculpted distortion and chorus) and no reverb. It’s also in mono so easy to pan left in the next prompt! If anyone wants stems, please let me know.

The piece is in C minor at 80bpm. I tried to provide a foundation while leaving plenty of room for other people, hopefully I struck that balance. I can’t wait to hear what you do with it!

More on the 697th weekly Disquiet Junto project, First Third — The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio — at https://disquiet.com/0697/

The Minotaur's Lament (disquiet0697)

Disquiet Junto 0698 is the second of three prompts aimed at creating an asynchronous trio.

This week, we had to select from one of last week's community submissions to add a second part. I was really moved by Torpid Scorpion's piece "First Third", featuring a gorgeous acoustic guitar. As soon as I heard it, I heard the complementary part. The trouble? I heard it on violin.

I've only been playing violin for 6 weeks, but I practiced this piece pretty hard and got a couple of good takes this morning. It's simple and understated, I don't think it's awful, and I'm calling it the best that I can do at this point.

There was some room sound on the guitar part, so I tried to match it with light reverb on my side of the song. I also applied a little bit of a reverb to both tracks to place the instruments in the same room.

I think this piece is spacious, sad, and lovely, and I can't wait to see how someone finishes it for next week.

Torpid Scorpion's starter track: https://soundcloud.com/torpidscorpion/disquiet0697-first-third

More on the 698th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Second Third — The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio — at https://disquiet.com/0698/

You're Not a Burden (with Torpid Scorpion) (disquiet0698)

A continuation of the ping-pong collaboration with @daniel-diaz. I wanted to lean into the new wave vibe, so I wrote this little electric guitar part and added it to the mix.

The original track: https://soundcloud.com/coralineada/the-minotaurs-lament

Daniel Diaz bringing the bass and drums: https://soundcloud.com/daniel-diaz/minotaurs-run

The Minos Constellation (Coraline Ada Ehmke and Daniel Diaz)

The final addition to complete the annual Disquiet Junto asynchronous trio. This contribution builds on the original keyboards of Aaron Hofman and Andreas Kitzmann's addition of a gritty drone with a performance on ebow guitar and simulated Leslie cabinet.

Part 1: https://soundcloud.com/aaronhofman/part-i
Part 2: https://soundcloud.com/andreas-kitzmann-27370936/disquiet0698

More on the 699th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Third Third — The Assignment: Record the final third of a trio — at https://disquiet.com/0699/

The Apparition That Asked Me to Dance

A response to Disquiet Junto prompt 0700, and based on a true story. From the window in my pantry I can see into my neighbor's back yard, where they have their hen house. Sometimes things happen. 

Unedited field recording, vintage Korg M3R. and reverb.

When I went outside this morning with my field recorder, one of the hens got agitated and started complaining loudly and repeatedly. She continued for almost exactly three and a half minutes, then stopped just as suddenly as she had started. The song is 3:43 minutes long.

Poses the age-old question, "Can Coraline make a serious song around a chicken sample?" What do you think?

More on the 700th weekly Disquiet Junto project, View Frame — The Assignment: Share the view and some sounds inspired by the view — at https://disquiet.com/0700/

The Discovery of a Fox (disquiet0700)

Prompt 701 of the Disquiet Junto had us break a piece of music into segments and fill the gaps with something new,

My contribution is an interpretation of Scelsi's "Quattro Pezzi su una nota sola", its four pieces interrupted by narrative interstitials. Features ebow on slide steel, piano, and organic vocals. The script was adapted from https://www.allmusic.com/composition/mc0002378353.

More on the 701st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Gap Ear — The Assignment: Break apart a piece of music and fill the resulting spaces — at https://disquiet.com/0701/

Scelsi's Piano (disquiet0701)

Disquiet Junto 0702 invited us to misuse our audio software in service of recording a piece of music. I reversed my process by naming the song before starting. I needed that for the cover art, which would literally inform the sound of the music.

I exported the cover as a bitmap image. I imported this into Audacity as raw data, ran it through a low-pass filter, and exported the result as a .wav file. To meet the misuse criteria, I loaded the resulting audio into an impulse response utility to use as the basis of a series of convolution reverbs. 

I then recorded the aux output of each of the four tracks of the song, each channel shaping the sound with an image-derived reverb.

Interestingly, there is no bass track. The B♭ bass tone that beats throughout the piece is a frequency artifact being generated by the bitmap. It's a fundamental tone hidden in the image data. Cool, right?

More on the 702nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Applications — The Assignment: Make music by misusing a piece of music software — at https://disquiet.com/0702/

Misused Menace (disquiet0702)

This week's Disquiet Junto prompt challenged us to revisit something musical—a piece of software, an idea, a technique—that we couldn't get to work in the past, and to dedicate time to improving it, capturing the result in music.

I decided to go with my Sequential Prophet-6 analog synth. I had inherited it from an ex who moved out of the country, and for complicated reasons just never really connected with it as an instrument. Intellectually, I knew that it was a fantastic synth, but I didn't know how to make it mine, if that makes sense. I couldn't speak through it. What's worse, the last time I had fired it up, it exhibited a rare but not unknown bug where every sixth note would be extremely loud, rendering it unplayable.

But today I decided to try again, to give it a second chance. I set aside time to just play around with it, experimenting with patches and tweaking parameters. I realized that the volume bug wasn't happening, the synth was being cooperative. Eventually I landed on a set of ideas that I think work well together. Most importantly, I feel like I can hear my voice in this piece, through an instrument that I couldn't do that with before. I'm even playing the lead synth like I do an ebow guitar. 

What a great prompt and a great experience.

--

More on the 703rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, That’s How You Got Killed Before — The Assignment: Revisit something that you just couldn’t get to work last time — at https://disquiet.com/0703/

I Don't Trust This Prophet (disquiet0703)

Disquiet Junto 0704 introduced me to a piece of multimedia art called "Super Mario Clouds," an installation by artist Cory Arcangel consisting of a hacked N64 console playing a version of Super Mario Brothers that had been stripped down to a silent loop of pixelated clouds drifting by in a blue sky. Our assignment was to record a piece of music to accompany it.

Designed to loop endlessly and seamlessly, in case you want to drift off to sleep with 8-bit clouds. Room mic, organic vocal, four tracks of synthesizers (three analog and a sampled clav), stereo delay and speaker simulator (convolution reverb).

You can read about Super Mario Clouds on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Clouds

More on the 704th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Right on Cumulus — The Assignment: Compose 8-bit music inspired by a Cory Arcangel / Super Mario video — at https://disquiet.com/0704/

The Cloud Gate Loop (disquiet0704)

This week's Disquiet Junto prompt asked us to use the first line of a favorite book as the inspiration for a piece of music. I selected David Byrne's "How Music Works", with the opening sentence "I had an extremely slow-dawning insight about creation."

I'm traveling this week, so away from my outboard gear, but I did bring along a mini keyboard and headphones so that I could still participate this week! Features several layers of software synths (mainly Alchemy) and a field recording made from the 3rd floor balcony of the flat we're renting while we're here.

I tried to keep this sparse (for me at least), following the idea of the "slow-dawning insight", while still capturing the chaos of the creative act. It's probably still unsettling, but I just can't help that.

More on the 705th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Book Start — The Assignment: Let the beginning of a book help you begin a new piece of music — at https://disquiet.com/0705/. This week’s project was proposed by Neil Stringfellow.


A Slow Dawning Insight About Creation (disquiet0705)

Disquiet 0706 instructed us to employ the acoustics of our own-- or someone else's-- bathroom. Okay.

A few years ago, my team at work organized a retreat, and one of our activities was delivering "lightning talks", short 5-minute presentations on a topic of our choosing, and preferably not work-related. Something that you could nerd out about, share your passion for. That sort of thing.

I decided to do a presentation on convolution reverb, whose magical hackable properties I was just beginning to discover. Creating a convolution reverb patch involves first recording an impulse response, which is basically a loud clacking noise recorded in a space, and using that as an input to an algorithm that recreates the shape of the space the sound was recorded in. Boom, you can now place any sound in that space, virtually. (It's also possible to use a sine wave generator, but I prefer a clacker.)

To illustrate what it sounded like, I went to an extreme and made an impulse response recording in my shower. Then I piped a Radiohead song through it, to simulate what it would sound like if Thom, Jonny, Colin, Ed, and Philip all managed to cram into my tub and perform a song or two.

This time around, I wanted to do something a little more analog. I bounced the vocal track and the percussion track to individual audio files and played them back one at a time through a smart speaker in the bathroom, captured by my field recorder. I mixed the resulting audio back into the project in Logic. I did end up making a custom convolution reverb as well, because I wanted to use it for some creative mixing.

Music-wise, this is an ostinato electric piano, a bitcrushed bass, and 5 tracks of acousmatics over a frenetic kick-and-hi-hat 5/4 pattern. The vocals are sampled from a stem splitter applied to something appropriate to the title of the song. The overall feel that I was going for was a Thom Yorke in 2014 sort of sound. 

This was a fun prompt!

More on the 706th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Tile One On — The Assignment: Make the most of your bathroom — at https://disquiet.com/0706/.

That Time Thom Yorke Took a Shower at My Place (disquiet0706)

The instructions for Disquiet Junto 0707 were simple: write a sentence about your creative process, record yourself reading it, and make a composition consisting solely of that recording. My piece is made from field recording treated with EQ, compression, reverb, delay, and just a hint of chromaglow.

More on the 707th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Practice — The Assignment: Make music from how you make music — at https://disquiet.com/0707/.

Solve et Coagula (disquiet0707)

"Oh no, another vocal prompt" was my first reaction to Disquiet Junto # 0709: Vocal Chords. Nonetheless, I committed myself to doing something cool despite being constrained to my least favorite instrument.

I quickly recorded a high repeating A -> E in time to a metronome. I then routed the audio out to my Roland VT-4 Voice Transformer, a fun little desktop device that I picked up a while back. I proceeded to record 7 additional tracks with the original vocal being processed 7 different ways. I mixed and blended and faded the resulting layers in and out to create a narrative texture. At the crescendo of this piece, there are 33 simultaneous voices harmonizing.

My technical inspiration came from 10cc's "Not In Love," which was performed live on a mixing board with 16 tape loops of the singer holding long "aaaaaaahhhhh"'s in various pitches. Godley and Creme are divine.

More on the 708th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Vocal Chords — The Assignment: Do something with layers of the sound of your voice. — at https://disquiet.com/0708/.

Use Your Inside Voice (disquiet0708)

I create original experiential music from NOSIGNAL Multimedia Lab in Chicago. The Hard Times described my music as "creepy, haunted, but also a little bit uplifting." Prolific.

Coraline Ada Ehmke

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks