Disquiet Junto Project 0552: The Radio in My Life
The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation.

This project is the second of three that are being done in collaboration with the 2022 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 7 through 11. The topic this year is “unvermittelt,” which is a little tricky to translate. Literally it’s “unmediated,” but it can also mean “sudden,” “abrupt,” or “immediate.”

We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the fourth year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects will be played and displayed throughout the festival.

Step 1: There’s a great moment in the recorded conversations of composers John Cage and Morton Feldman when they discuss a trip to the beach. Feldman isn’t pleased by the way transistor radios let music, and sound in general, appear in places it hadn’t previously. Cage jokes that having composed music that involves multiple radios, whenever he hears them he thinks, “[W]ell, they’re just playing my piece.” You can listen to it in the first 2.5 minutes of this excerpt:

https://youtu.be/chEvxoypyUo

Step 2: Think about Cage and Feldman’s conversation, in particular about the idea of what is and isn’t a sonic “intrusion” in our lives.

Step 3: Record a piece of music that reproduces or otherwise suggests the sympathetic (i.e., non-intrusive) commingling of radio and everyday sound.

. . .

More on this 552nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Radio in My Life (The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation) — at: https://disquiet.com/0552/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/

Disquiet Junto Project 0552: The Radio in My Life

for the disquiet junto //

processed sounds from freesound.org / based on an excerpt of a conversation between john cage and morton feldman

Transmission of Flesh and Blood

[disquiet0552] Transmission Of Flesh And Blood

the radio task is great
i went to the green with radio and guitar
made my own environment nice with playing guitar
then came the red radio

the red in the green(disquiet0552)

An electronic mix of various ingredients.

More on this 552nd weekly Disquiet Junto project – The Radio in My Life (The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation) – at: https://disquiet.com/0552/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/

https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern

https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co 2: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/

Shortwave Soup (disquiet0552)

More on this 552nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Radio in My Life (The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation) — at: https://disquiet.com/0552/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/

hard folia

halF radiO [disquiet0552]

Disquiet Junto Project 0552: The Radio in My Life
The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation.

This was fun. I thought about intrusions. Mostly it's the loud street in front of my window and kids running in the flat above mine and people shouting at Siri, Alexa and OKgoogle in the backyard.

I checked my field recordings and there it was: the f… church bells. A bad ambient track, repeated relentlessly every sunday, never changing, a transcendent single-track playlist … 

I threw the field recoding of the bells into deCoda, and it calculated Aminor and 84bpm. I started a track from scratch with these parameters and improvised some beats and pads. The idea was to have a peaceful ambient track … that could be disturbed by acoustic intrusion of the church bells. 

The track seemed finished when I read the algorithm again and listened to the Cage-Feldman-Talk. I liked the pure oddity of the first minutes, so I added some parts of the beginning, accepting that this will draw focus to the conversation, so I didn't care that you don't understand much. 

Next sunday at seven, they will play my track …

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Track image credit: Ancient church in Lunigiana (Tuscany, Italy) by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/rJo9jh9iORU

Talk samples credit: John Cage + Morton Feldman's Coffee-Sippin' ASMR Chat in a Room Full of Cigarette Smoke on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chEvxoypyUo

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More on this 552nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Radio in My Life (The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation) — at: https://disquiet.com/0552/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/

Kraken Bandcamp Junto

Intrusive Bells [disquiet0552]

[disquiet0552] Sandcastles In The Aether

During the early 1990s I studied Mathematics and Computer Science. The world wide web was still largely text-based and mostly empty. Today things are obviously different, though I still thoroughly enjoy art, design, cinema and music in all its forms. I have traveled all over the world for nearly two decades, visiting just over 140 countries. Japan is my favorite. All of this I attempt to incorporate into my music and art.

[disquiet0552] Sandcastles In The Aether

Fake Genius