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

There are two ways to do this project.

Option 1: Record some 10BPM techno.

Option 2: Record what you imagine it would sound like to attend a club event of 10BPM techno, including crowd noise.

. . .

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 16, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. 

. . .

Details: disquiet.com/0541

Disquiet Junto Project 0541: 10BPM Techno

10BPM Techno - Anders lays down a heavy, 10 BPM drum track, and BatU layers a warm Arp Pad synth arpeggio track, accompanied by delicious Galactic Layers on  a journey to their Black Hole Vacation

Disquiet0541 - Black Hole Vacation

For the Disquiet Junto this week, I chose the option to "Record what you imagine it would sound like to attend a club event of 10BPM techno, including crowd noise."

I wrote a sequence at a normal-ish techno tempo, then slowed down the master tempo in my DAW to 10bpm. Techno typically evolves slowly, in blocks of 16 or so bars, and while I didn't quite stick to that, I thought it wouldn't feel really like it was 10bpm if I messed with the structure. So I decided to focus my efforts on making it sound at least a bit like being in a club.

I used convolution to feed the whole mix through a night club's PA,  using these free impulse responses. http://www.balancemastering.com/blog/free-funktion-one-impulse-responses-ir-irs-convolution/

I mixed the music with a couple of crowd / bar noise recordings from freesound.
https://freesound.org/people/Pfannkuchn/sounds/457606/
https://freesound.org/people/Tomlija/sounds/100904/

I faded the thing in and out, to give a bit more of a feeling of just a captured recording of a club night. I don't think the result is convincing, but it was fun to do.

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.

Jet Jaguar - Slow Night [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)

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

When I saw the mail for Disquiet Junto Project 0541, I also saw a mail from Samplescience, announcing free 303 Loops. As I am no techno musician, I thought of being lazy and just used some of these 303 loops to play around. Strechted from 120 to 10 bpm within reaper they became very melodious and ambientic. I added some percussion and a kickdrum to fullfill what I think are minimum genre conventions (there was a "riser" sound which I left out). This may not be techno at all, but I like the bleeping 303s and the resulting track very much. A nice project!

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Credits

303 Samples
https://www.samplescience.info/2022/05/abstract-303.html

Track image based on
https://unsplash.com/photos/m41k1lTzjVM

Party crowd ambience mostly
https://freesound.org/people/deleted_user_2104797/sounds/346683/

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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/

10BPMTECHNO - disquiet0541

Losanch