This piece was created from materials created by a recorded improvisation of @stellato-strings playing violin and me on the piano. It's this week's response to the @naviar-records weekly Haiku challenge:

Icarus
the pelican hovers
mid flight

We discovered Kimberly’s writings on Twitter. If you find the haiku we chose inspiring, make sure you explore her Twitter profile for more evocative poems.

“I am blessed to live by the sea. This informs a lot of my ‘ku. I also try to write honestly about my struggles with depression. Not sure how successful I am on that topic. It’s hard. The nature poems come easier. I began writing haiku about four years ago. I try to write daily, giving myself Sundays & holidays off. ‘Ku is a kind of discipline for me—much like a daily walk or yoga practice. Haiku quite simply saved my life.”

Seven days to make music in response to the assigned haiku: to participate visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/about/naviar-haiku

Deadline: 16th November 2022

haiku by Kimberly A. Horning https://twitter.com/everydaydeath12

the photograph was taken by me in Holborn this morning.

Icarus (Naviar 462)

I'm oh too familiar with nightmares, often wish for sweeter dreams. Glad to know more of the C69 chord then. I had great fun doing this with the Garageband Clavs, strings and Steinway. Apart from a couple of accidental notes I just just the notes of the chord, evoking the nightmare through pitch bend, flangers and phasers.

More on this 568th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Slumber Mill (The Assignment: Make music inspired by a key chord from sleep research) — at: https://disquiet.com/0568/

Thanks to Glitcher for proposing this project.

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-0568-slumber-mill/

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2, where “piano chord, sleep, vaporwave, green, pink” was the prompt.

nightmare into slumber (disquiet0568)

Uncannily I had been working on this piece this morning using the harmonics from piano chords I'd played and recorded a while back. I'm exploring and teaching myself how to compose usimg the editing and effects of the Logic Pro X multiverses. I'd been drawn to soft quiet sounds and was using delays and echoes to create subtle patterns that play off one another.

I was halfway through this and then @disquiet Marc sent this email prompt out saying this ...

"Step 1: The underlying idea is to produce music that, so to speak, listens to itself. This would be music that employs techniques to revisit itself — repurposes itself — as it proceeds. From reverb to echo to tape loops to granular synthesis to accessing a buffer, various techniques serve such a compositional and performance purpose. Consider a means to achieve this result."

... which was exaclty what I was doing anyway. I must be psychic.

More on this 611th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Music That Listens to Itself (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that repurposes itself as it proceeds), at: https://disquiet.com/0611/

Some of the music resulting from this project may be included in a September 29, 2023, event at the Berkeley Alembic in Berkeley, California: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/expanded-listening-music-that-listens-to-itself-tickets-712124101357

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-0611-music-that-listens-to-itself/

Music Itself Listens To (disquiet0611)

At SPILL Festival's Think Tank in February, 14 of us co-created an audio visual collage using the letters and poetry of Edward Fitzgerald (audio version here: https://soundcloud.com/leonclowes/something-of-a-queer-nature). This opened Jan Pulsford's Woodbridge Ambient Music Festival 2023 (https://woodbridgeambientmusicfestival.net/) on Friday.

Never one to let any scraps of sound materials go to waste (you should see the hoarding on my Google Drive), I took tiny fragments of sounds we recorded at SPILL (including the recorder playing by @kate-gallaher) and made this piece this week. I'm really rather pleased with it. Clever little thing, Logic Pro X. I call mine Larry: what do you call yours?

This is my response to this week's @naviar-records haiku challenge. Such an encouraging and kind community that Marcus puts a great deal of time and love into, and it really shows. I'm so grateful to have these weekly email prompts, listening back I'm so pleased with what I've taught myself and learned from others.

Here's the information about this week's @naviar-records haiku challenge:

summer sky…
rippling the silence
a watersnake

Janice Doppler spent her writing energy on grant proposals and curriculum development during her career as a teacher and school administrator. Retiring enabled her to develop her creative self—carving realistic birds from wood and nature journaling.

Her heart was captured by haiku during a senior-center workshop that she attended on a whim. Her haiku and haibun have been widely published. She placed second in the Porad Haiku Award in 2021 and 2022. Her collection, Stardust, is available on Amazon. You can read samples of her work at The Poet Hub.

Seven days to make music in response to the assigned haiku: to participate visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/about/naviar-haiku

Deadline: 27th September 2023

Haiku by Janice Doppler https://poets.drifting-sands-haibun.org/first-name-starts-with-j/janice-doppler/

Picture by Jackson Hendry https://unsplash.com/photos/kKpTHqM2K-c

(In fitting with how I made this piece, I've taken fragments from the picture and haiku for the image and title.)

Summ Rippling (naviarhaiku507)

I took some of @kate-gallaher's recorder loops from yesterday to make this response to the @naviar-records weekly haiku. 

Here's the details about this week's challenge:

'Disappearing
snow on mountain peak
unfurls a rainbow'

Sôen Nakagawa was a key figure in the transmission of Zen Buddhism from Japan to the Western world. Author Sean Murphy, in his “One Bird, One Stone: 108 Contemporary Zen Stories”, tells us an interesting story about the Zen Buddhist master during his time in the U.S.:

“Soen loved to walk around New York City. He’d stare at the lighted skyscrapers, at their tops, he claimed he saw Buddha figures in the lights. “Look at the Buddha,” he’d point, “Shining Buddha!” He’d fill the sleeves of his robes with nuts and berries from Central Park or herbs growing in the sidewalk cracks, and add them to his bowl at the next meal. He loved the musical Fiddler on the Roof, and when asked a question about why some particular point of ceremony needed to be performed in a certain way, he might burst into song, responding “Tradition…!”

Seven days to make music in response to the assigned haiku: to participate visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/about/naviar-haiku
 

Deadline: 11th October 2023

A cut up of the Haiku poem by John Hinks is used for the title https://soundcloud.com/flownblue

excerpt of picture used here is from Joe Hu https://unsplash.com/photos/ZXaCeb7rwfE

Disappearing On Mountain (naviarhaiku509)

This week I have made a longer electronic piece in response to @naviar-records' Marco's haiku. 

Here's the info about this week's prompt:

'Endless echo
footsteps on an empty house
once full of life'

To participate visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/about/naviar-haiku

Deadline: 1st November 2023

'Endless' takes its titel from the 'Endless echo' haiku by Marco Sebastiano Alessi

The image I've used is part of a picture by Raya Mal https://unsplash.com/photos/closed-window-ggeI8TyPeZM

Endless (naviarhaiku512)

Using slowed down fragments of recordings of pedalled piano notes, @stellato-strings touching her violin with the bow, a creaking piano stool and ticking clock, I created this piece using loops and effects on Ableton Live.

It's my contribution to this week's @naviar-records haiku prompt.

The title 'along' is taken from this haiku poem by Takashi Matsumoto:

'Flowing along
changing its colors
a soap bubble.'

Takashi Matsumoto was a Japanese poet originally from Tokyo. Born into a family deeply interested in nō theater, he also devoted himself to it in his youth until 1921, when he came into contact with Hototogisu magazine and haiku poetry. Beginning the following year, Matsumoto became a student of Takahama Kyoshi. In 1946, he launched the magazine Fue 笛 ('The Flute').

The image is from a fraction of a picture by Rodion Kutsaiev.

For more information about @naviar-records and the weekly haiku challenges please visit: http://www.naviarrecords.com/about/naviar-haiku

Along (naviarhaiku533)

A few months back using a Zoom mic I recorded @kate-gallaher playing recorders in the nearby woods to her home. Many birds were around us singing. This piece, 'spoke no' takes a short rhythmic fragment that she improvised which I compressed slowed down on Logic. I used echo and reverb to build rhythm and dictate paste, and then created new pitches through Ableton, combining this with the layers already created on Logic. This is the first time I've use Logic and Ableton to work on one piece.

This piece is a response to this week's @naviar-records weekly haiku challenge. Here's the information about that:

they spoke no words
the visitor, the host
and the white chrysanthemum

For this week's challenge, I picked another poem by Ōshima.

Ōshima Ryōta was a Japanese poet of the Edo period. Some sources say he was a disciple of Yosa Buson, while others say his master was Hattori Ransetsu. He's mostly remembered for his essay “Bashō ku kai” 芭蕉句解 ('Study of Bashō's haiku') published in 1759, a magnum opus of his studies and literary theories on Matsuo Bashō's work.

Haiku by Ōshima Ryōta
Picture by Ioann-Mark Kuznietsov

Submission deadline: 28th August 2024

spoke no (naviarhaiku555)

Empirical Evidence of the Existence of Angels

This is my response to this week's @naviar-records haiku challenge, which you can find more information on here: https://www.naviarrecords.com/naviarhaiku579-mount-asama/.

The haiku this week is by Yosa Buson:

Mount Asama
amidst its fumes and ash
fresh young leaves!

The image used is a portion of a picture by Wyxina Tresse.

fresh (naviarhaiku579)

This is my response to this week's @naviar-records haiku challenge:

"plunging my hand
into the lake...
billowing clouds"

Among the four great masters of Japanese haiku, Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) was the most prolific: during his lifetime he wrote over 20,000 haiku, hundreds of tanka, and several haibun.

Haiku by Kobayashi Issa
Extract of picture by Atsushi Tsubokura

Submission deadline: 26th February 2025

To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

billowing (naviarhaiku581)

Thinking about the differences between the “behavioral” and the “physiological” music making activites as instructed in this week's @disquiet project (see more on the 687th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Applied Science — The Assignment: Record a piece of music that includes physiological and behavioral techniques — at https://disquiet.com/0687/) I made an instinctual first take riff on the 70s modular synth in Alchemy on Logic Pro, in response to the synth's rhythm, then layered this pattern in tracks knowing it would phase and create new rhythms inbetween.

The Appliance Of Science (disquiet0687)

I'm preparing a soundtrack to my residency shows at Volcano Theatre in Swansea this week and my response to the current @disquiet project might well be the transition music. Using samples of room ambience to bookend a series of looped pad chords, these fade in and out, overlapping.

More on the 696th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Chain of Layers — The Assignment: Make music change by altering its layers — at https://disquiet.com/0696/

Chain of Layers (disquiet0696)

This is my response to this week's @naviar-records haiku music challenge. Here's the details about that:

"cloud and mist alike
rendered unnoticeable –
bright moon tonight!"

Inawashiro Kensai (1452-1510) was a Japanese poet of the Muromachi period. He was a student of the famous renga poet Shinkei.
Haiku by: Inawashiro Kensai

Extract of picture by: Branimir Balogović

To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

bright moon (naviarhaiku593)

For this week's @disquiet Junto Project I'm not quite sure why the Logic Pro Wurlitzer pattern came out so doleful in response to the view from my bedroom window. I'm happy in my home, though I am moving fairly soon, so maybe that's why. I was pretty pleased with the first and third contributions I made to the recent trio projects, so with this I combined a simple tonal part with part of the recorder improvisation by @kate-gallaher in the woods. In the background are the birds and an airplane, similar to the urban sounds I have hear at dawn (though far fewer birds).

Happy 700th @disquiet ! Thank you for making these happen Marc Weidenbaum.

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

View Frame (disquiet0700)

This is my response to this week's @naviar-records haiku challenge. Here's the details about that: 

"Under the twilight sky
light shimmering on the pond -
swallows in autumn"

Dakotsu Iida trained under Takahama Kyoshi, and was chief editor of the poetry journal Unmo until his death. His son Ryuta Iida, a famous haiku poet himself, took over as the editor of Unmo after his father’s death.

Haiku by Ida Dakotsu

Extract taken from a picture by tommao wang
 

Submission deadline: 4th June 2025
 
To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

autumn (naviarhaiku595)

I had the honour of being commissioned to create a sonic piece out of the recent Manifesto Press launch at the Marx Memorial Library of their stunning new book: Hans Hess 'Art and Ideology'.
Thank you Ben Lunn for the introduction :)
Here is the result...

Manifesto Press sonic commission - Hans Hess - Art and Ideology book launch

This is my response to this week's @naviar-records haiku challenge. Here's the information about that:

"slightly faint
yet clear
the milky way"

Toshio Kiyosaki (1922-1999) was a Japanese haiku poet and scholar of Japanese literature. He published a biography of Kyoshi Takahama in 1966 and co-authored Kyoshi Monogatari, another study on the renowned haiku poet, in 1979.

The Milky Way (amanogawa, or "Heavenly River" in Japanese) is a kigo for Autumn, mainly because that's when the galaxy is most visible in Japan.

Haiku by Toshio Kiyosaki

Extract of picture by Yong Chuan Tan
 

Submission deadline: 20th August 2025
To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

faint (naviarhaiku606)

This is my response to this week's @naviar-records haiku challenge. Here's the information about that:

"young grasses -
not yet bent
in any direction"

Kaga no Chiyo-jo (1703–1775) was a haiku poet discovered by Kagami Shiko at a very young age. She became a Buddhist nun at 52 and wrote around 1,900 haiku in her lifetime. A highlight of her poetry career was presenting haiku to a Korean delegation in 1763, one of the first cultural exchanges of this kind.

Haiku by Kaga no Chiyo

Extract of picture by Kateryna Viderska

 
Submission deadline: 3rd September 2025
To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

direction (naviarhaiku608)

This is my response to this week's @naviar-records haiku challenge. Here's the information about that:

"revealing in the dark
the sadness of things
a fisherman's torch"
 
Tagami Kikusha (1753-1826) was a Japanese multi-disciplinary artist and Buddhist nun, mostly known as a poet, painter, calligrapher, and tea practitioner.

Haiku by Tagami Kikusha

Extract of a picture by Michael Shannon

Submission deadline: 10th September 2025
To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

revealing (naviarhaiku609)

Admittedly, the extract from the still belies the line in this week's @naviar-records haiku poem challenge. The actual line is "half-asleep eyes", but we'll go with what's in the image. This week I've been collaging splice sounds and playing them live in Ableton, then drastically re-editing. I wanted to mix up how I'm making music. Break habits and form new.

The information about this week's challenge is here:

"half-asleep eyes
open to a dreamlike world
of blossoms"

Natsume Seibi (1749-1816) was the son of a wealthy Edo rice broker and was acquainted with a number of other famous poets, including Oshima Ryota and Kobayashi Issa. In addition to his poetry, Seibi left behind a number of fine examples of haikai prose. 

Haiku by Natsume Seibi

Extract of a picture by Pascal Bullan

Notes from the Penguin Book of Haiku:

nebuki me o / hirakeba hana no / ukiyo kana

Ukiyo, the floating world of pleasure, specifically referred to the pleasure quarters with its various beautiful women (hana, literally ‘blossoms’) as well as to popular theatre and street spectacles.

 

Submission deadline: 24th September 2025
To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

Half-Asleep Eye (naviarhaiku611)

Landing on what has been code named the 'Red' Planet, the cautionary exploration takes plae in an abandoned unidentified technological facilty in the middle of a desert of this newly identified planet. Here is a short audio extract of what the stealth drone recorded during that search.

This piece is in response to this week's @disquiet project. More on the 718th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Planet Jam It — The Assignment: Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization — at https://disquiet.com/0718/.

Red Planet (disquiet0718)

This is my response to this week's @naviar-records haiku challenge. Here's more information about that:

"Star above the peak -
a silk worm-breeding village
silently asleep"
 
Mizuhara Shuoshi was a 20th century Japanese poet. Shuoshi rebelled against the principles of emotional detachment in haiku, which he thought limited his ability to emotionally express himself through poetry: he started a magazine called Staggerbush which focused on a more romantic, lyrical type of haiku.

haiku by Mizuhara Shuoshi

extract of picture by Sebastian Scheuer

Submission deadline: 8th October 2025
To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

Silently (naviarhaiku613)

I've been wanting to remix this track for a while - it's in preparation for my forthcoming debut album - it was originally made in response to @naviar-records 527th haiku challenge which: https://soundcloud.com/naviar-records/sets/haiku-527

A Shiver

This text and audio piece was commissioned by ImpulseLDN for their October 2025 exhibition "Chemtrail: This is Killing Us" at 15 Bateman Streer, Soho, London. 

"Nine Lines" recalls three real life chemsex scenarios I took part in. The audio builds and merges the text pulling from the monotony and thrill of charged sexual encounters, reflecting on the compulsion and addiction inherent in the experiences.

Nine Lines

This began as live playing using preset sounds on Garageband. I then took each individual track and gave them new timbres through Ableton Live effects. I slowed the tempo down by half to give room to the new textures created by the effects. I followed the instructions of this week's @disquiet project almost to the letter, with a slight moving of a couple of parts at the finalising stage. 

More on the 719th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Riding on the Metronome — The Assignment: Play with and against a steady beat — at https://disquiet.com/0719/.

Metronome Ride (disquiet0719)

dragonfly (naviarhaiku614)

This was fun to do. Taking this week's @disquiet project of combining two works-in-progress, I have two strands of music I'm composing, to which I dedicate 10-20 minutes most days demoing impromptu ideas on Garageband. One has the broad title of "Disco for Post Punk Elderlies" and the other is  category is I'm writing a series of simple piano miniatures, the latter being usually no longer than just over two minutes.

Here I had two demo ideas that were from the same day and were very rough and unsatisfactory. The idea of combining them felt a novel way to take them into a different place. Although the "Disco" track was already at the slow pace (tempo being 66bpm) you hear here (it is dance music for post punk elderlies like myself after all...), I looped the initial tracks in Logic, changed the pitches of some of the bass and organ tracks and quantized all the tracks to git them together more coherently, and brush off the unconvincing dissonant sounds. The piano miniature was transformed by the Soft Metals preset and light touch delay was added to the 808 drum pattern.

This piece certainly isn't 'complete' in the sense of if I was to develop this further, but I really like how blending this mismatch creeated something very different from the original intentions of the seperate parts. Greater than the sum of, etc..

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/.

One from Two (disquiet0720)

This is my response to this weeks @naviar-records haiku challenge.

More information on this week's project here:

"whenever we meet
it’s raining
green walnuts"

Tanaka Hiroaki (1959–2004) was a Japanese poet from Osaka. A student of Hatano Sōha, he published many of his works in the journal Ao 青 (“Blue”), of which he became editor in 1979. In 2000, he founded his own journal, Yū ゆう.

Haiku by Tanaka Hiroaki (Italian)

Extract of picture by Kevin Wang

Submission deadline: 29th October 2025
To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

we meet (naviarhaiku616)

This is my keyboard miniature response to this week's @naviar-records haiku challenge. Here's more information about that:

"an autumn nightfall
the skeleton of a huge fish
drawn back by the sea."

Saitō Sanki (1900 – 1962) was a dentist who discovered his passion for haiku poetry in his mid-thirties, when his colleagues at the hospital in Soto Kanda convinced him to write a haiku for a collection. Later, he became one of the most important exponents of wartime haiku: he was imprisoned in 1940 during the government’s World War II persecution of controversial artists, and was officially forbidden to write until the end of the war.

haiku by Saitō Sanki

image extract from a picture by John Jason

Submission deadline: 5th November 2025
To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

the skeleton (naviarhaiku617)

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)

This is my contribution to this week's @naviar-records haiku challenge. Here's the information about that:

"the harp player
moves under cover
market day

kjmunro cultivates poetry on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation & the Ta'an Kwäch'än Council in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada. She founded & facilitates ‘solstice haiku', a monthly haiku discussion group in Whitehorse, & manages a weekly blog feature for The Haiku Foundation called Haiku Dialogue. She is the recipient of the 2023 Borealis Prize – The Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution, her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, & her debut poetry collection is contractions (Red Moon Press, 2019).

haiku by kjmunro

extract of picture by Indira Tjokorda

Submission deadline: 12th November 2025
To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

Leon Clowes

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