Disquiet Junto Project 0679: Ice Age
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.

Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto communal music projects. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one step:

Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each January ever since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. By now, it qualifies as a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

Deadline: Monday, January 6, 2024, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

Details: disquiet.com/0679

Disquiet Junto Project 0679: Ice Age

This track makes use of sounds 'stolen' from an upcoming Paintbrush ASMR YouTube video ... Enjoy! ☺️

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/ ... As is often the case, please forgive my slightly loose interpretation of the brief ...!

more halF unusuaL

halF icepacK [disquiet0679]

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/

Disquiet Junto  | Ice Age - disquiet0679

Lupo Ice Prophet Disquiet0679

This is my submission for this week's Disquiet Junto Assignment.

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/

250102 [disquiet0679]

13th year of Disquiet Ice.  For 2025, I used the ice recording for #53 back in 2013.  I put 6 of them in Samplr on the iPad with various settings and coordinates.  Ran it through my effects rig:  "Green Tape" on the Echosystem, "Green Ghost" on the Empress Reverb, and either Mosaic or Tunnel on the Microcosm.  I can't remember.  Join my mailing list at https://www.markrushton.com

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/

Frozen Effervescence (disquiet0679)

All the sounds in this track are derived from original recordings of ice cubes in a glass.

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/

Ice Cubism (disquiet0679)

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/

I made a short recording of ice cubes I stirred with a spoon and loaded it into Samplr. To this I added a synth phrase that was meant to sound like rubbing glass. Then I got off track and ended up in a short rave - but finally found my way back to the original ice cubes.

Disquiet0679 - Eistanz

A response to Disquiet Junto prompt 0679, which was an invitation to record a glass with an ice cube and make something of it. 

I had several competing ideas for this week's response, but nothing that jumped out as The Idea. So I decided to start with the ice. I submerged a waterproof contact mic in about an inch of water in a drinking glass, then recorded the fall of ice cubes from a dispenser into the glass. I made multiple recordings to avoid having to loop samples in the piece. 

I noticed that due to the the ice machine's inner workings, the fall of the cubes from the dispenser felt like the cadence of walking through heavy snow and ice— then the idea was born. 

For those who are not Lovecraft fans, "At the Mountains of Madness" tells the story of Antarctic explorers who uncover the remains of an ancient alien civilization— with some horrifying remnants left behind. This became the inspiration. I built the song in multiple acts, following the intrepid seekers as they explore the ruins rising from the snow and ice, ending in a frantic and deadly encounter, and finally silence-- save for the howling wind and the strange, unearthly whistles and pipings echoing amongst the icy peaks.

Features synthesizers, synthetic instruments, ice samples, and field recordings from a shortwave radio. The blowing wind sample is from the BBC sound archive. Cover photo courtesy of NASA.

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/

At the Mountains of Madness (disquiet0679)

sound art for disquiet0679.

I have quite a few of my sound sculptures outside in my garden at the moment. Mostly to create space in my cramped studio, but also to let them get exposed to some weather. Letting nature in, to change them and the way they sound, collecting rain water and going rusty. On Thursday, Friday and Saturday the weather has been sub-zero in the mornings so the sculptures got frozen. I picked a few and took them into the studio to record.

The main body of the track is an idea from a sound installation I did in 2024 called The Trickle. It used an apparent running water sound that was created by playing coins embedded in wood with animal bones. This seemed to fit with the idea of the frozen landscape thawing as the sun came up.

I put some of the sculptures on top of a radiator to melt the ice a bit and then swirled the ice and rain water around inside a sculpture with a tin on it, like ice cubes in a drink.

The sculpture with golden flowers got played with animal bones, just like the coins.

All recorded with contact mics and no effects. A bit of EQing.

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/

golden flowers of the thawing dawn (disquiet0679)

Ice Forms (disquiet0679)

Disquiet Junto Project 0679: Ice Age
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.

With my Zoom H5 I recorded some Ice Cubes falling into and moving inside a salad bowl made of glass. I made a lot of efforts to get most out of the sound, for example I placed the bowl on a clotheshorse, so that it can swing more freely … but at the end I didn't use these sounds. I applied a lot of diverse stretching and reverb to get some pads and made a Pigments granular patch with some sounds I liked most. What I had planned didn't work and I made a lot of unusable detours. Now it's mostly an improvisation over some kind of instable repetitive structure, and I like it. All sound is based on the ice cube glass recordings; you may assume there are water noises, but it's really (stretched) ice, maybe sometimes with some surrounding meltwater.

The recordings can be found on my Freesound page
https://freesound.org/search/?q=krakenkraft&f=&s=Date+added+%28newest+first%29

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/
Discussion: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0679-ice-age/70238

ICEDESCENCE [disquiet0679]

split up a recording of ice in a glass into several parts - one part with rattling ice ended up frozen in a granular sampler's buffer, scrubbed through. two others triggered independently. layered in two other parts afterwards in ableton live - one just the ticking/sliding sound of the ice melting, with a lot of gain; the other layer is the glass being tapped.

--

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/


disquiet0679 - crystal grains

Too Much Ice (disquiet0679)

This is my 2nd time contributing to the Disquiet Junto "ice prompt" — the last time was 4 years ago! I recorded the sound of ice cubes tinkling in two different wine glasses, and one plastic cup for variation. This was a great excuse to learn how to use my new Liven Texture Lab, so I loaded some of the sounds into it jammed along with the raw recording. If you'd like to see the recording process "in action" I've posted a video on my Y0uTube channel at:
https://youtu.be/LHQvMk2mS-E
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More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/

Blunderspublik - Easy On The Ice [Disquiet0679]

and ice [disquiet0679]

I used the same recording I made in 2013. Multiple edited copies were stretched, pitch-changed, put through different types of reverb, reversed, cut-up and re-edited, all using Audacity effects and plugins. The Vocoder and Phaser got a look in too. 

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The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.

Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto communal music projects. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one step:

Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each January ever since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. By now, it qualifies as a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/


More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto /

Glaciator [disquiet0679]

Credit:

Ángel L. Martínez: ice cubes in a glass cup, electronics

More on the 679th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ice Age — The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it — at https://disquiet.com/0679/

Glass Perspective (disquiet0679)

An ice cube dropped into a glass - that is the starting point. Aside from the melancholic drone via a CS-80 emulation, all the sounds are derived from the original sample, with the processing being done via Arturia's Fragments and Motions plug ins. 

disquiet0679

Disquiet0679 2025 - 01 - 05 1008

A collage of recordings of melting ice. 

Recorded with a DIY hydrophone, through a Triton Audio BigAmp Piezo preamp, with a Tascam DR-100 MKIII digital recorder.



Untitled - disquiet0679

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.