Disquiet Junto Project 0725: Rack It

The Assignment: Change the “focus” of a track as it plays.

Step 1: There is a concept in photography and filmmaking called “rack focus,” which can be understood as the process of altering depth of field so as to draw attention to one or another element.

Step 2: Record a track in which you apply the concept of “rack focus” to sound.

Approach: You might, for example, take a preexisting track for which you already have the various layers separated, and then at any given moment, put all but one through a low-pass filter. That’s just a suggestion.

Deadline: Monday, November 24, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

Details: disquiet.com/0725

Disquiet Junto Project 0725: Rack It

Disquiet 0710 invited us to revisit a recent piece of music we’d made, and change it up so that one element becomes louder and busier.

I went back to the ebow drone that I made for 0696 Chain of Layers as my source material. The original version had this very low-key “bump, bum-bump” kick drum as its sole rhythmic component, so that seemed like a good candidate for getting loud and busy.

I added 8 overlapping drum parts that come and go, creating a unique (and busy) percussive pattern every 4 bars. The guitar drones are waaaaay in the background now as the drum machine does its thing, until the end when they make a noisy return.

This was a fun prompt— it was nice to get into programming drums and just stay in that mode all day.

More on the 710th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Let’s Get Loud — The Assignment: Make a piece of your own music louder/busier — at https://disquiet.com/0710/.

Nontrivial Pursuit (disquiet0710)

"And that's how I returned drone music to its rightful place in the discotheque."

Disquiet Junto 714 dared me to take a song I'd made before and create a remix from someone else's perspective. I had the idea to start with a lovely drone I did when I first got the vintage rackmount Yamaha TX-802. I didn't have any particular remix artist in mind for this, just more or less gave myself permission to play and explore and try to transform a monotonal piece into something you can dance to. 

In addition to the Yamaha, this piece features the rich bass of a Moog Minitaur and the irresistible bump of a Roland TR-08 drum machine.

More on the 714th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Remix Yourself — The Assignment: Rework your own music as if someone else had — at disquiet.com/0714/.

Drone in F (Club Mix) (disquiet0714)

disquiet0715 - mistake

sound art for disquiet0720.

More on the 720th weekly Disquiet Junto project, One from Two — The Assignment: Combine a pair of your recent tracks — at https://disquiet.com/0720/.

dyad (disquiet0720)

A slow, laid-back funk groove with jazzy sax, clavinet, deep fender jazz bass, and abstract synth textures.
Smooth, atmospheric, and slightly cinematic — the kind of track that lives between a modal jam and a chill-out or lounge beat.

Performed by DD - clavinet, electric bass, abstract synth, drum program.
With Miguel Yanover - Tenor saxophone

For this @disquiet challenge:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0720-one-from-two/

Golpe de Suerte - disquiet0720

I found two tracks, each named by the default naming protocol of my recorder. So one file was poetically name "240315_001" and the other, even more evocatively, "241212_0001." The first is a sparse piece using just the wing pinger, with almost as much space as sound. The second is equally restrained, but darker and more properly ambient. I can't recall how I created that track or what instruments were used. The two tracks seem to complement one another with each filling in the empty spaces of the other. Minimal effects were added in Logic - mainly just some reverb with motion algorithms. For fun, I asked Chat GPT to use the two numbers to create a title and image for the track and among the suggestions was "Voltage Bloom," which seems rather fitting. 

disquiet720

Disquiet Junto prompt 0720 asked us to take two separate works in progress and realize that they work better together. 

My WIP drawer is pretty full but I couldn't easily find two pieces that wanted to talk to one another. Finally I took several recent piano sketches and dumped all of their MIDI performance data into a single project in Logic. I tend to record left and right hand parts separately to facilitate revoicing, so I had a good collection of chunks to play with. I started stacking, rearranging, muting, soloing, and transposing different combinations of parts until I found a pair that sounded interesting. I ended up doing very minimal editing to stitch them together, and the two parts are not even in the same key, but I think that the tension and dissonance work somehow. 

Finally I wrapped the whole thing in a little pastiche of two friends sitting at a piano having fun gluing the pieces of a song together. 

More on the 720th weekly Disquiet Junto project, One from Two — The Assignment: Combine a pair of your recent tracks — at https://disquiet.com/0720/

Dancers on Pins (disquiet0720)

This was my contribution for Disquiet Junto Project 0720: One from Two. The Assignment: Combine a pair of your recent tracks.

Here’s a copy of my post on the Disquiet Junto 0720 discussion thread on Lines:

I have a collection of audio odds and ends stored on my laptop. The files are comprised of field recordings, instrument recordings, unfinished modular synth and Ableton Live noodlings.  I took two of the more recent experimental sketches that were created in Ableton Live and combined them the best I could, adjusting the pitch as needed. I added an additional track that has heavily processed sliced bits from one of the recordings to try to create more depth to the piece. 

More on the 720th weekly Disquiet Junto project, One from Two — The Assignment: Combine a pair of your recent tracks — at https://disquiet.com/0720/.

Fickle Diptych [disquiet0720]

Submission for Disquiet Junto #0720 - a combination of two cassette recordings from September 2023.

Crowded Ether (disquiet0720)

Having a play with the ppooll software, using one of my own samples (also recorded in ppooll in a previous session) and messing around with it. An awesome piece of (free!) software I'd highly recommend for anyone into sound experimentation. More details at https://ppooll.klingt.org/

Inspired by Oval, Jan Jelinek and other 90s trailblazers of the "glitch" genre.
Played in ppooll, then slight refinements after the performance, including fuzz guitars added on softly in the background.


More on the 724th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Work It — The Assignment: The year’s almost over. Do that thing you’ve been meaning to do — at https://disquiet.com/0724/.

sstart.act.lop {disquiet0724}

An electronic sequence created using Pure Data with additional reverb and delay to produce two  levels, one with prominent sharp sounds and the other a fuzzy background with the impression of increased distance.

More on the 725th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rack It — The Assignment: Change the “focus” of a track as it plays — at https://disquiet.com/0725/.

Sharp and Fuzzy (disquiet0725)

sound art for disquiet0725.

More on the 725th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rack It — The Assignment: Change the “focus” of a track as it plays — at https://disquiet.com/0725/.

dandelion (disquiet0725)

I was having some fun with the "Booga" plug in from Hainbach and Audio Thing and figured that it would serve as a good vehicle for this week's assignment. I created six rhythmic tracks, which took turns being brought entirely to the forefront. With each such instance I inserted a short line from a film. The result is not quite right, but I ran out of time. But it was a fun project.

More on the 725th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rack It — The Assignment: Change the “focus” of a track as it plays — at https://disquiet.com/0725/.

disquiet0725

Based on the true story of how I got my first synth, which was a Roland Juno, and my first gig, which was an epic disaster.

This week's Disquiet Junto prompt asked us to imagine the sonic equivalent of "rack focus", a film camera technique in which focus shifts between the foreground and background of a long single shot. For example, there might be a close shot of our brave heroine with the indistinct blob of a highrise behind her, but then her face blurs and the background comes into focus, and we see a dark figure looking down at her from a high window across the street.

This piece started out in a notebook. I drew a stack of three vertical planes, labeled "near", "mid", and "far". I assigned instruments to each of the three planes, with drums in the foreground, synths in the middle distance, and my vocals in the background. A two-stage reverb chain applied to the instruments in each layer simulated the three distances sonically within a shared modeled space. When I wanted to bring the vocals into "focus" for emphasis, I abruptly dropped the gain on the instrument tracks and applied a Haas Effect technique to snap the spoken track to the fore in space. (A 35ms delay between stereo channels does the trick.)

Gear consisted of the Moog Minitaur analog bass synthesizer, TR-08 drum machine, and the pièce de résistance, a Roland JU-06-- the tabletop boutique reissue of my selfsame old Juno synth. 

I had a blast making this piece and I hope you enjoy it.

More on the 725th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rack It — The Assignment: Change the “focus” of a track as it plays — at https://disquiet.com/0725/.

Back on the Rack (disquiet0725)

This track was created for the disquiet0725 challenge. Production started with locating a bass line I recorded some time ago from the Typhon synth. Tracks were added using the Proclethya VST synthesizer, and a piano loop serves as the sound ramping up, and overtaking the arrangement. The movement over time as well as my predisposition for all things time travel inspired the title.

More on the 725th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rack It — The Assignment: Change the “focus” of a track as it plays — at https://disquiet.com/0725/.

a time bridge crossed-disquiet0725

cat.rack (disquiet0725)

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.

cat.rack (disquiet0725)

Dawn Falls

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