Disquiet Junto Project 0723: Do the Collapse

The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly.

Step 1: Part of what makes “Happy Birthday to You” an interesting song to listen to occurs when it is sung in a public place, meaning that people sing along who actually don’t know the name of the person whose birthday is being celebrated. The song gets to the moment when the person’s name is inserted, and then the sense of ensemble entirely falls apart. People mumble, or wait, or actually know the name and sing it, but no matter — because subsets of singers proceed to sing the final “happy birthday to you” starting at different points.

Step 2: Consider the way “Happy Birthday to You” has a tendency to fall apart, as described in Step 1.

Step 3: Write a piece of music informed by your thoughts that resulted from Step 2 — a piece of music that is designed to fall apart somehow. And consider repeating the motif a few times, so it falls apart repeatedly.

Deadline: Monday, November 10, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

Details: disquiet.com/0723

Disquiet Junto Project 0723: Do the Collapse

The brief for this week’s Disquiet Junto challenge noted how the singing of ‘Happy Birthday’ often falls apart around the name stage … This idea of musical collapse immediately made me think of Anglican church services, when the organ - along with those who are confident of the hymn being sung - sometimes falls into desperately trying to pull everyone along, never far from falling apart. In this piece, a recording I made of a service I attended a while back (which has its own backstory) becomes the material for electronic mangling and rhythmic snipping for my take on the idea of repeated collapse. It’s VERY far from being in the same league, but parts of the result remind me a little of Jonathan Harvey’s extraordinary Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980) - one of my all-time favourite electroacoustic masterpieces ... 


More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/.

more halF unusuaL

halF collapsE [disquiet0723]

I took part in a group vocal and movement improvisation at the weekend and from the recording of that I built this piece in Ableton Live. There was 11 of us and we had our eyes closed, so the improvisation - as fits with the @disquiet project this week - would align and then go wayward. I've tried to bring that out more in this rearrangement.

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/.

Do The Collapse (disquiet0723)

Disquiet Junto 0723 suggested making a piece of music that structurally falls apart.

I've been spending time with my Make Noise 0-Coast semi-modular synth lately, watching tutorial videos, exploring different patch configurations, and recording everything "just in case" as I always do with analog gear. 

So for this week's response I challenged myself to center the 0-Coast.  Although I had intended to start with a drone patch, a happy mistake led me to a heavy brass-like sound, which I connected to the random step function for pitch. Add lots of reverb, and we have hell's own horn section. The 0-Coast also eventually gave it the drone I had in mind at the start. This was the only synth used in the piece. No MIDI was involved, as the patches were completely self-playing.

The pizzicato was recorded live, 4 tracks, on my electric violin, which my violin instructor is going to be over the moon about. The vocal, featuring Yeats's "The Second Coming", was captured on a shoebox cassette recorder. There's a little digital piano sprinkled in as well.

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/

The Center Cannot Hold (disquiet0723)

A quasi-serialist electronic sequence interrupted at intervals with short clips from another track played in reverse. The basic sounds were created using Pure Data.

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/.

Hiccups (disquiet0723)

i used multiple instances of sting in ableton to trigger fairly standard repetitive loops, fed into driftmaker to create variable flux over time, also a load of randomised panning techniques. I guess its always teetering on collapse before at various intervals it totally does. in retrospect maybe more constant erosion rather than sudden collapse.

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/.

mirror tactics [disquiet0723]

Made in response to disquiet 0723 which was basically a prompt to think about how music could collapse. This piece doesn't so much collapse but it does dissemble and disassemble. No AI was used in the sound generating though there is plenty of artificial brass and strings.

list.en (disquiet0723)

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/.

Corona4(disquiet0723)

I imagined a couple of musicians, all given the same score, but who decided to not listen to each other and instead interpret things at their own pace. Hence we have one player with a sequence warbling happily along, until the groove is lost and then found, a drummer who can never get past hitting just a few pieces of his kit at random, a noodling pianist who is forever lost in his ambient haze, some dude who just discovered granular synthesis and an unnamed character who wandered in off the street with a Synthi who has no desire to listen to anyone. This is what I imagined, in any case. The track itself was created using just one midi sequence, sent to different instruments with a few effects here and there, mainly panning and reverb. 

disquiet0723

The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly.

Step 1: Part of what makes “Happy Birthday to You” an interesting song to listen to occurs when it is sung in a public place, meaning that people sing along who actually don’t know the name of the person whose birthday is being celebrated. The song gets to the moment when the person’s name is inserted, and then the sense of ensemble entirely falls apart. People mumble, or wait, or actually know the name and sing it, but no matter — because subsets of singers proceed to sing the final “happy birthday to you” starting at different points.

Step 2: Consider the way “Happy Birthday to You” has a tendency to fall apart, as described in Step 1.

Step 3: Write a piece of music informed by your thoughts that resulted from Step 2 — a piece of music that is designed to fall apart somehow. And consider repeating the motif a few times, so it falls apart repeatedly.

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/.

broken down [disquiet0723]

[disquiet0723] gran

A march in two parts that falls into chaos in the B part only to recover. Created in the box with Surge XT VST synth.

I saw this as a march for everyday things or a national anthem for a nonexistent country.

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/

March for Everyday Things

March for Everyday Things-Disquiet0723

Mechanical beat with a klangerous breakdown
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More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/

klang (disquiet0723)

This track was inspired by this week's Disquiet Junto project: creating a track that falls apart. Intrigued by some of the new features introduced with Cubase 15, I let the new female AI voice sing about the different ways human beings can fall. The track doesn't actually fall apart musically, but it does become somewhat confused after the lyrics state that one can also fall - in love.

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/

Sometimes I feel like Falling (Disquiet0723)

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.