Even though afar
a feeling of coolness comes
from those mountain pines

Kagami Shikō was a Japanese poet, considered one of the ten outstanding disciples of Matsuo Bashō. He was in turn the master of the famous poetess Fukuda Chiyo-ni.

Originally from the present-day Gifu Prefecture, Kagami Shikō became a monk at Daichi-ji Temple, and in 1690 he became a pupil of Bashō, later accompanying him on some of his journeys and recording his last will in 1694.

After Basho's death, he kept travelling around Japan, writing several essays on haiku and collections of writings until his death in 1731.

 Haiku by Kagami Shikō

Picture by Nathan Dumlao

Feeling of coolness_Naviarhaiku575

This was my contribution for Disquiet Junto Project 0680: Reverse Resolution. The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year.

Here’s a copy of my post on the Disquiet Junto 0680 discussion thread on Lines:

I didn’t realize I had such a large collection of unfinished tracks and musical sketches from last year on my laptop. For this piece, I used a sequence I created last year when I was exploring the new plugin Tela by Fors.fm. I added additional tracks in Ableton Live using Madrona Labs Sumu and Slate+Ash Spectres.  

More on the 680th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Reverse Resolution — The Assignment: Finish something (musical) you started last year — at https://disquiet.com/0680

Gathering Stray Totems [disquiet0680]

Concertino for Vibraphone, Marimba, and Orchestra

Like A Prayer On A Branch (feat David Shapiro)

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)

naviarhaiku579 – Mount Asama
The event Bosun refers to is the eruption of Mount Asama in 1783, which instantly killed over 1,000 people. The toxic ash traveled 100 miles to Edo, making farmland useless and causing many more people to starve.

Reaktor Kodiak sequencer by Matthias Schaffner
Loops, Drones. Riff in crescendo of pianos and double bass.

Loops on Ashes (naviarhaiku579)

using 20 resonance tones I recorded on a toy piano and acoustic guitar, I've responded to this week's @naviar-haiku music challenge, of which you can find details about here: https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

quiescence!
touching not the blossoms,
temple bell's voice

Kawakami Fuhaku was a tea master and the founder of the Edosenke, a school of tea ceremony. He was also an accomplished haiku poet.

Haiku by Fuhaku

Extract of picture by Ming Han Low

bell's voice (naviarhaiku580)

This week’s Disquiet Junto challenged us to recreate the childhood game of pickup-sticks musically. I decided that I wanted this piece to be a little more literal and less literary than usual, although I had to add some dramatic touches.

To represent the game, I needed to answer a set of questions for myself:

1. What does a stick sound like? How is its color represented? How are multiple sticks of the same color differentiated?

A stick will be a tone. I decided to go with something called the Scriabin Correspondence to map the stick colors to musical tones. (Scriabin was a composer with synaesthesia, who made a color wheel from the circle of 5ths.) There are two shades for each note, so I just spaced them an octave apart.

2. What does a pile of sticks sound like? What does it sound like when it’s disturbed by a clumsy move?

The pile as a whole is represented by a two-handed piano chord comprised of all of the notes (sticks) that remain in the pile. When it’s disturbed, it reasserts itself with forceful crashes. When the pile is examined, it’s a sequence of overlapping color-coordinated notes.

3. What does it sound like when a stick is picked up? When it’s removed?

A little percussive 16th-note figure of the note representing the stick plays. If the stick was successfully removed, its note is removed from all future sound piles and sequences.

The game (song) ends when the last stick (note) is removed.

(I think the piece turned out to be angular and pokey and jangly enough to be the soundtrack for a pen-and-ink stop motion animation of a cute little stick guy having an adventure.)

More on the 685th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Pick-Me-Up — The Assignment: Treat a set of sounds like a game of pick up sticks — at https://disquiet.com/0685/

Stick Figure (disquiet0685)

Crumblige Flur_06

Plinery aftizi_01

here and there
upon scorched fields
wild violets

Arii Shokyu-Ni was a haiku poetess during the Edo period who began a wandering life after running away from her husband at 29 with the haiku poet Kohaku. Just like Matsuo Basho, "the Nun Shokyu" traveled to the Deep North of Japan.
 
Haiku by Arii Shokyu-Ni: https://wkdhaikutopics.blogspot.com/2007/03/shokyu-ni.html

To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

more halF unusuaL

halF scorcheD [naviarhaiku582]

Coraline Ada Ehmke creates original experiential music from NOSIGNAL Multimedia Lab in The Shambles, Chicago. The Hard Times described her music as "creepy, haunted, but also a little bit uplifting." Prolific.

Stick Figure (disquiet0685)

Coraline Ada Ehmke

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