Another evening out at the symphony, another excellent orchestral tune-up. I love how this sort of pre-concert moment can itself function like a composition, the murmuring crowd serving as an ersatz chorus.

Drop In, Tune Up, All Out

# Disquiet0711

Interlude 1 is my first sketch for an interlude within a ≈ 40 minute piece about the cosmos. It seems like maybe the piece is too thick, but I want to get it out and move on and come back to revisit it after I get all the other pieces in place.

I used Sound Particles to create a few background textures and then decided to improvise a synth bass sound, and then a synth flute, and a brief plucked string sound, all from the Roli Equator software synth. 

I added some delay chaos to the recordings with plug-ins from Valhalla, GRM, and some Tai Chi reverb.

Then in Pro Tools I cut and moved the separately improvised tracks into a composition that tries to capture the vibe while I was performing. 

All the tracks were recorded and mixed in 7.0.2 for this piece. For SoundCloud and your listening convenience I converted the surround sound piece to binuaral with APL Virtuoso. I always have trouble with binaural. It doesn't accurately convey the full spatial quality of the immersive mix as it is supposed to do.

More on the 711th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Show & Tell & -- The Assignment: Share some recent music; get and give feedback -- at https://disquiet.com/0711/ 

Interlude 1 - Binaural disquiet0711

Disquiet Junto Project 0711: Show & Tell &
The Assignment: Share some recent music; get and give feedback

Step 1: Choose a track/composition you’re working on. Share the recording on the Lines forum on the llllllll.co discussion thread at:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0711-show-tell
Step 2: When posting the track, mention that you’re looking for feedback, describe what you’ve been up to on the track, and if applicable specify some aspects of the recording you might want input on.

More on the 711th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Show & Tell & — The Assignment: Share some recent music; get and give feedback — at https://disquiet.com/0711/.



time and motion [disquiet0711]

Disquiet Junto Project 0711: Show & Tell &
The Assignment: Share some recent music; get and give feedback

Just a song I've been writing off and on for the last few months.  I wanted it to be all one rough take but ended up fixing some parts that were a little too rough.  Hopefully it can stand on it's own without overdubs, as has been my goal for my compositions the last few years.

More on the 711th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Show & Tell & — The Assignment: Share some recent music; get and give feedback — at https://disquiet.com/0711/.

Praenomina (disquiet0711)

More on the 711th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Show & Tell & — The Assignment: Share some recent music; get and give feedback — at https://disquiet.com/0711/.
https://beatbattle.org/threads/stbb-963-whats-the-weather.1638/

Local Radar Love (disquiet0711) (STBB#963)

More on the 711th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Show & Tell & — The Assignment: Share some recent music; get and give feedback — at https://disquiet.com/0711/.

Annelid Sprat [disquiet0711]

[disquiet0711] Click music 18082025

This was created as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0711. 
More on the 711th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Show & Tell  — The Assignment: Share some recent music; get and give feedback — at https://disquiet.com/0711/.

thing to come [disquiet0711]

Disquiet Junto 0712 invited us to interpret a barcode as a rhythm.

The first barcode patent was issued in 1952, but they didn't look like the ones we usually see now: they were bullseye-shaped. Today's linear barcodes use what is called "many-width symbology", meaning that the vertical lines ("modules") in the barcode are different widths, from 1 to 4. The lines are printed vertically instead of horizontally so that if the ink smeared during printing, the code would still be legible and no information would be lost. 

Barcodes almost failed in the retail space, because no one wanted to be the first to invest the money to adopt them when they were unproven. They were a lot  more popular more quickly in the railroad business, where by the early 1960s optical scanners could read the color-coded barcodes on train cars as they rolled past at full speed.

The barcode I chose as source material for the prompt was from a tape dispenser that I bought to help my daughter pack to leave home. This piece is probably an aural photograph of the feelings I'm having right now, but that's neither here nor there. Where was I?

Instead of reading the barcode as if it were visually measuring out beats, I decided to decode the modules and transcribe the widths. This turned into the sequence 2 1 3 2 1 4 4 1 / 2 1 2 3 1 1 1 3 / 3 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 / 1 1, which I incorporated into this piece in several ways.

First, the percussion pattern is built by breaking the sequence into chunks of four numbers. These four numbers indicate the beat position of a series of drum kit components on a 16-step grid. So 2-1-3-2, the first sequence, means the kick drum hits on the 2nd, 1st, 3rd, and 2nd beats of the four divisions of the pattern. Next would be the snare, then the tom, and finally the hihat with 1-1-1-3. The sequence also determines the note length and note number of the "melodic" sequence. 

Finally, I translated the sequence into steps in a custom arpeggiator, with the width of the modules transposed into the vertical axis of the beats in the pattern. There are two arpeggiated synth tracks, running at different rates, played on the Logic ES2 and Alchemy software synths. A triggered vocal sample rhythmically reflects the numeric sequence. The rest of the synth parts came from the Roland boutique Studio Electronics SE-02, a reissue of the "Moog-adjacent" SE-01 analog monosynth of 1982.

There's a lot going on in this piece, but there's a lot going on over here, too. The sound that a single mom makes in her empty nest. Snapshot of a moment in time at 90bpm.

More on the 712th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Zebra Code — The Assignment: What rhythm do you hear in a bar code? — at https://disquiet.com/0712/.

The Passage (disquiet0712)

Beats generated from barcode, other modular synth and piano.

Bar Beats  disquiet0712

A short electronic noise track inspired by a barcode, sounds created using Audacity with databending, delay, reverb, etc.

More on the 712th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Zebra Code — The Assignment: What rhythm do you hear in a bar code? — at https://disquiet.com/0712/.

Barcode Blend (disquiet0712)

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.