More on this 426th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Cellular Chorale / The Assignment: Make music with the source audio from (and inspired by) a Patricia Wolf project — at:

https://disquiet.com/0426/

Thanks to Patricia Wolf for collaborating on this project.

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

More on Wolf’s Cellular Chorus at:

https://www.cellularchorus.com/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0426-cellular-chorale/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is a still from a video, provided by Patricia Wolf, of a Cellular Chorus event.

Disquiet Junto Project 0426: Cellular Chorale

Disquiet Junto Project 0541: 10BPM Techno
The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats.
Option 1: Record some 10BPM techno.

For this weeks project I chose option 1. 
I used Logic Pro (it goes all the way down to 5BPM), two instances of SonicVibes Microtonic, time stretched samples and various synth plugins. Trying to make something this slow was interesting, the space between things is more apparent and made the sound selection more important, the space needed "space". Its only 16 bars long but runs for just over 7 minutes.... It's quite the dirge, with a few moments that reminded me of a certain soundtrack.....

APOB - 10BPM (A Clockwork Lozenge) [disquiet0541]

My submission for
Disquiet Junto Project 0541: 10BPM Techno
The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats.
More on this 541st weekly Disquiet Junto project — 10BPM Techno (The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats) — at: https://disquiet.com/0541/
More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Sorry Its 12(disquiet0541)

More on this 541st weekly Disquiet Junto project — 10BPM Techno (The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats) — at: https://disquiet.com/0541/

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-0541-10bpm-techno/

Image used thanks to this license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grapevinesnail_01.jpg.

10BPMTECHNO - disquiet0541

A common trope among social media posts are videos with enticing clickbait titles, such as: “Homeless Person Sits Down At Piano, Then THIS Happened.” The reveal is that the figure at the public piano is actually a professional musician. These scenes typically take place at a shopping mall, where an impromptu audience is delighted by the player’s unexpected dexterity.

Franco Bifo Berardi reminds us that “The goal of the [analyst] is to give him/her the possibility to see other landscapes, and to change the focus, to open some new ways of imagination.” One might imagine the reaction at Carnegie Hall if a virtuoso flubbed a performance so badly that it bordered on an Andy Kaufman skit.

This is why Suss Müsik cannot fathom a dance club scenario in which techno music plays at 10BPM. It’s not impossible, however, for such an event to occur in a setting such as a shopping mall. And rather than a DJ playing electronic techno music, it might be a very strange string quartet attempting to fit their odd time signatures within that 10BPM timestamp. 

This is the approach Suss Müsik took with this week’s project. A series of four cyclical phrases were played on fake violin, fake cello, fake harp and fake dulcimer. A single strike of a mallet keeps time in 10BPM; meanwhile, the instruments are bowed and plucked in 1/64 and 1/128 to give a sense of movement. The constant repetition is perhaps a nod to techno’s reliance on looped beats. 

All of this happens in front of a bewildered audience of mall shoppers (courtesy of public domain audio), who would just as soon be left alone in the food court without this distraction. Then again, as Violet Trefusis once wrote, perhaps it’s true that “love thrives on indifference” and some appreciation would be detected. Maybe we’ll try it one day.

The piece is titled Trefusis. The image may or may not be a shopping center somewhere in the US. 

More on this 541st weekly Disquiet Junto project — 10BPM Techno (The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats) — at: https://disquiet.com/0541/

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-0541-10bpm-techno/

Trefusis [Disquiet0541]

Made on Christmas Day, 2020 as a demo for Portage Garage Sounds. Slowed to 10bpm on May 13, 2022 for Disquiet Junto.

PGS Trial 122520 "Ten BPM Techno" (disquiet0541)

10bpmtechno_ disquiet0541

I wrote this prior to the ‘slow fire’ tour of ’95. performed it nightly. I began recording a fully arranged version for ‘dead bees..’ but it was lost in a computer crash. yuka found this demo on cassette. it’s certainly of its time. as far as i can tell, i’d just completed the writing and recorded this(very)rough take for reference.

i do nothing (live demo) - david sylvian ©samadhisound

for piano, string orchestra, singing bowl, and bass drum.

One Page

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the late Milan Kundera describes how “the space [of memory] is an obstacle to progress.” Kundera also advises us that “the memory of revulsion is stronger than the memory of tenderness,” perhaps implying that the things we forget can be as beneficial to our mental state as what we choose to remember.

Sigmund Freud believed that we repress childhood memories in order to avoid facing the sexual impulses buried within our minds. The actual science isn’t quite that salacious. The boring truth is that children of a certain age simply haven’t developed the cognitive or linguistic skills necessary for recalling people, places, or events.

Ah, but something happens to children between the age of 18 to 24 months. That’s when toddlers are able to recognize themselves in the mirror, thus realizing that they exist as a “me” in a world populated by other “me’s.” From that point forward, the child is the protagonist of an autobiography yet to be written.

This wondrous, perhaps intimidating realization was the theme behind Suss Müsik’s Junto contribution: a sad but simple piano sequence played sparingly on the nature of realization. The chords represent wide-eyed glances into the vaguely familiar; the spaces question what it all might mean.

The piece is titled Kundera in honor of the author, who recently passed away in July 2023.

More on this 605th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Fifty Fifty (Compose a piece of music with as much silence as notes), at: https://disquiet.com/0605/

Thanks to Jason Richardson for having proposed this week’s project.
About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0605-fifty-fifty/

Kundera [Disquiet0605]

This was my contribution for Disquiet Junto Project 0605: Fifty Fifty

Here’s a copy of my post on the Disquiet Junto 0605 discussion thread:

This is ended up more like 60/40 sound to silence ratio or more. Had fun anyway trying to balance those two elements. This was created in Ableton Live using Slate+Ash Choreographs. Used Soundtoys Filterfreak2, Strymon BigSky and Minimal Audio Cluster Delay for effects.

Image is by Sumner Mahaffey on Unsplash.

More on this 605th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Fifty Fifty (Compose a piece of music with as much silence as notes), at: https://disquiet.com/0605/
Thanks to Jason Richardson for having proposed this week’s project.
About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/ 1
Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0605-fifty-fifty/

Sporadic Formations [disquiet0605]

More on this 426th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Cellular Chorale / The Assignment: Make music with the source audio from (and inspired by) a Patricia Wolf project — at:

https://disquiet.com/0426/

Thanks to Patricia Wolf for collaborating on this project.

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

More on Wolf’s Cellular Chorus at:

https://www.cellularchorus.com/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0426-cellular-chorale/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

disquiet0426

I didn’t expect the first experiment to sound any good, so I just laid all bar one of the samples out in sequence (in name order), adjusted its length to 21 minutes and cut it into 3 equal 7-minute tracks. These were laid over each other to play simultaneously. These were duplicated with slight reverb.

I took one short section, which sound a bit like part of a synth arpeggio, and made two longer sequences out of it. The second, towards the end, is downpitched and equalised to sound like an older synth.

The long Montezuma Oropendola clip was stretched to 7 minutes, then ruthlessly reverbed and put through Abstract Chamber to create a dreamy ambient background. This is the only track that sounds different to the source material.

Finally the last 30 seconds of the mix was duplicated, reversed, reverbed and appended to the mix, creating the quirky faded ending.

What amazed me was how logical, structured and ‘composed’ the result sounds. A tribute, I think, to Patricia’s choice and range of sounds.

All done in Audacity using basic effects and plugins.

----------------------------------------------

The Assignment: Make music with the source audio from (and inspired by) a Patricia Wolf project.

Step 1: This is a collaboration with Patricia Wolf, based on her Cellular Chorus. Check it out at:

http://cellularchorus.com 

Step 2: Download the 64 source tracks of the Cellular Chorus at:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/v0w2kl69ys9bzvx/AAC4Ydqg7KeGCuICxO6gIipEa?dl=0 

Step 3: Create a new piece of music using only the source audio. Use as many of the samples as you’d like, but don’t add other sounds, or process the samples to any extent more than slightly altering the individual material.

Background. Patricia Wolf has said of her original piece: “Cellular Chorus is a work of spatialized aleatoric music using smartphones to bring people physically closer to have an interactive and collective experience with light and sound. The piece is played by each user visiting Cellular Chorus on their smartphones. … The sounds I made are meant to harmonize. There is no right or wrong way to play them. The intention of this piece is to repurpose your smartphone for deep listening, creative experimentation, and to immerse groups of people in a sound and light environment with face to face interactions.”

More on this 426th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Cellular Chorale / The Assignment: Make music with the source audio from (and inspired by) a Patricia Wolf project — at:

https://disquiet.com/0426/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Cellular assembly [disquiet0426]

Disquiet0426 - Cellular Chorus

Patricia Wolf  3 samples 
release date : 28_02_2020
More on this 425th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Cellular Chorale / The Assignment: Make music with the source audio from (and inspired by) a Patricia Wolf project — at:

https://disquiet.com/0426/

Thanks to Patricia Wolf for collaborating on this project.

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

More on Wolf’s Cellular Chorus at:

https://www.cellularchorus.com/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0426-cellular-chorale/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion

Little Song (disquiet0426)

Another project for Disquiet Junto.

Based on samples from Patricia Wolf's Celluar Chorus - income ways this could be seen as a performance of that piece - although it does diverge a little from the original concept in not being played on mobile phones!

The original https://www.cellularchorus.com

Luminous disquiet0426

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.






Update: All my music is now Creative Commons licensed. This means if you want to use it in a video or an app then go for it. All I ask is that you credit me and link back here to my soundcloud (http://soundcloud.com/junklight). It would also be cool if you could let me know you've used it. 


I love listening to music. I love making music 

I love technology, but only as a means to an end when it comes to music making. 

I'm after music that has life not music that is perfectly constructed 

Here is my music 

Luminous disquiet0426

junklight

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