Name: outside my window - disquiet700 by Arable Lands
Duration: 2 min 48 s
Description: Submission for 700th edition of Disquiet Junto

I love the layers and all the underlying movement. The distortion is genius. Great work!

Disquiet Junto Project 0698: Second Third
The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio.

There were many pieces I liked a lot from part 1 and I tried out a couple of combinations. 
I settled on the track by Samplair: https://soundcloud.com/user-248104983/disquiet0697. 

I combined this with a recording of some ‘extended technique’ zither. 
The extended technique being that the zither is excited using a fast rotating disc with a magnet attached to it. Depending on the frequency with which the magnet rotates (compared to the resonant frequencies of each string), it can force oscillations in one or more strings. The sound this produces is quite rich and complex with lots of movement.

Interestingly, the combination of these sounds, which can at times be quite harsh and distorted, with Samplair’s ‘nightmare carnival’ made for a track that I found… rather soothing.

More on the 698th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Second Third — The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio — at https://disquiet.com/0698/

Soothing nightmare carnival (disquiet0698) - with Samplair

Submission for 700th edition of Disquiet Junto

outside my window - disquiet700

This is my submission to this week's Disquiet Junto assignment.

More on the 700th weekly Disquiet Junto project, View Frame — The Assignment: Share a peek out your window and some sounds inspired by the view — at https://disquiet.com/0700/

250601 [disquiet0700]

used this photo from my window as a graphic score. the elements in this photo mapping to elements in the track.

most sounds in here come from a contact mic applied to the window itself, or the frame.

five lines [disquiet0700]

Disquiet Junto 0702 invited us to misuse our audio software in service of recording a piece of music. I reversed my process by naming the song before starting. I needed that for the cover art, which would literally inform the sound of the music.

I exported the cover as a bitmap image. I imported this into Audacity as raw data, ran it through a low-pass filter, and exported the result as a .wav file. To meet the misuse criteria, I loaded the resulting audio into an impulse response utility to use as the basis of a series of convolution reverbs. 

I then recorded the aux output of each of the four tracks of the song, each channel shaping the sound with an image-derived reverb.

Interestingly, there is no bass track. The B♭ bass tone that beats throughout the piece is a frequency artifact being generated by the bitmap. It's a fundamental tone hidden in the image data. Cool, right?

More on the 702nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Applications — The Assignment: Make music by misusing a piece of music software — at https://disquiet.com/0702/

Misused Menace (disquiet0702)

More on the 702nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Applications — The Assignment: Make music by misusing a piece of music software — at https://disquiet.com/0702/

Mangled Metronome (disquiet0702)

After going years without participating in a Disquiet Junto, I saw the prompt this week and leapt at the chance to participate. I have several unfinished tracks floating around and this was one where I tried a new technique with, but fleshing out an arrangement around that technique was eluding me, so I took my piano part and treated it differently. I arrived in a different place than I thought I would and enjoyed the outcome so decided to bounce it.

light from the courtyard - disquiet0703

Recorded, edited, mixed & mastered on 11 Sep 2025 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa, USA.

Synth, samples, effects

Photography/Art - Jim Lemanowicz, 21 Oct 2020, Manhattan, NYC, USA

Music & art © 2020, 2025 Jim Lemanowicz

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This original version of “How Monotonous, Herr Pencil” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0715: Err Apparent. The Assignment: Make a mistake on purpose. Build something from it.

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

More on the 715th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Err Apparent — The Assignment: Make a mistake on purpose. Build something from it — at https://disquiet.com/0715/

How Monotonous, Herr Pencil (disquiet0715)

Disquiet Junto's 715th prompt was simple: record yourself making a mistake on purpose, and emphasize the error through repetition. 

Long-time readers will know that I favor narrative in my pieces, so I created a little vignette: we listen in on a frustrated pianist in a parlor, as she tries to improvise on a piano with a bad E4. (The piece was improvised, but it was refined over a couple of takes.) 

Features synthetic piano, organic vocal, and ambient field recording.

More on the 715th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Err Apparent — The Assignment: Make a mistake on purpose. Build something from it — at https://disquiet.com/0715/.

Improv in A minor (on a piano with a sticky key) (disquiet0715)

My take on this was to use glitches or extraneous sounds that crop up in field recordings. These are usually edited out but here I extracted some from a couple of recordings and joined them to form a continuous sequence. After extending this sequence and adding a touch of reverb and delay I combined it with an evolving electronic drone.

More on the 715th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Err Apparent — The Assignment: Make a mistake on purpose. Build something from it — at https://disquiet.com/0715/.

Field Glitches (disquiet0715)

disquiet0715 - mistake

Tape-based explorations in sound. Get your AI trash out of here.

outside my window - disquiet700

Arable Lands

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