Disquiet Junto Project 0565: Musical Folly
The Assignment: Make a piece of music inspired by this architectural concept.

Step 1: Consider the concept of a folly in architecture. The Oxford English Dictionary has defined a folly as “A costly ornamental building with no practical purpose, especially a tower or mock-Gothic ruin built in a large garden or park.” Look at other definitions.

Step 2: Consider how the idea of a folly might be transposed, so to speak, to music.

Step 3: Make a piece of music inspired by the thoughts that arose in Step 2.

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “architectural folly on British estate in disrepair, photograph.”

. . .

More on this 565th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Musical Folly (The Assignment: Make a piece of music inspired by this architectural concept) — at: https://disquiet.com/0565/

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-0565-musical-folly/

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “architectural folly on British estate in disrepair, photograph.”

Disquiet Junto Project 0565: Musical Folly

Short and sickly sweet, the response to this week's Disquiet Junto (0565).

On sight of the prompt I was immediately drawn to a series of miniatures that I improvised and played around with using the editing on Audacity for when I did a residency during 2021's lockdown at Round Chapel in Hackney, London, UK (https://www.mixcloud.com/leonclowes/the-avant-garden-drop-in-centre-round-chapel-st-augustines-tower/).

With the 8th miniature, it has always reminded me of a being seasick on a fairground round that's slowing down. As a double folly I thought I'd try and 'tidy up' the background hiss, but using my DIY production skills have also introduced that distinctive noise of compression, like a radio played in the background. So in keeping with the prompt, I've kept that in.

More on this 565th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Musical Folly (The Assignment: Make a piece of music inspired by this architectural concept) — at: https://disquiet.com/0565/

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-0565-musical-folly/

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “architectural folly on British estate in disrepair, photograph.”

Leon Miniature 8 (disquiet 0565)

More on this 565th weekly Disquiet Junto project – Musical Folly (The Assignment: Make a piece of music inspired by this architectural concept) – at: https://disquiet.com/0565/

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-0565-musical-folly/

Richard Preston's House (disquiet0565)

My Yamaha upright piano, taken with 3 microphones in a great sounding room.
Overdubbed vibes and synths.
Friday October 28th, during the morning, Paris France.

the cover photo is mine (a ceiling in an old apartment in Buenos Aires).


https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0565-musical-folly

Totalmente Ornamental (disquiet0565)

Enhanced recording of improvised percussion.

More on this 565th weekly Disquiet Junto project – Musical Folly (The Assignment: Make a piece of music inspired by this architectural concept) – at: https://disquiet.com/0565/

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-0565-musical-folly/

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “architectural folly on British estate in disrepair, photograph.”

Bagatelle Bash (disquiet0565)

for the disquiet junto //

an arrangement of an arrangement of pachelbel's canon in d major, inspired by the architectural concept of a folly

Folly in D Major

[disquiet0565] Folly in D Major

[disquiet0565] Atlantis

This track was created for the Naviar Haiku group.
612
https://www.naviarrecords.com/naviarhaiku612-faring-over-the-lake/

2025-09-25

faring over the lake (Naviarhaiku 612)

26Sep25
https://naviarlab.tumblr.com/post/795574358626140160/naviarhaiku612-faring-over-the-lake
😊

an autumn butterfly [naviarhaiku612]

Today's little Easel exploration delving into the custom program card patch and panning experiments. Video of this here: https://youtu.be/eikH6PEiP-I

easel improv 92625

Personal dark ambient approach to "Wonderful World", original L. Armstrong 1967 (remixed and extended version of an older VSS track). Electric guitar, percussion, effect pedals, voice, unsynchronized loops, two tube amps and a lot of time manipulation. Field recording: electromagnetic waves made audible with Soma Ether. All sounds, voice, mixing and production: Velvet Something Superdark. Image: inside a shop-window in Berlin Neukölln (photo VSS).
Please listen to part 2 as well: https://soundcloud.com/velvetsomethingsuperdark/wonderful-wasted-world-part-2

Wonderful Wasted World, Part 1

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)

A combination of two unpublished electronic sequences I have recently been working on, sounds form various sources.

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/.

Two into One Will Go (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/.

Twinkle (disquiet0720)

Gothic Souls

snake mosaic

Never started never ended

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.

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.

[disquiet0565] Atlantis

Fake Genius

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