Ahmed & me, drumming on Wingie2, Neutron in the back...

Relaxxans

Based on tracks from lazenbee and leon clowes

[disquiet0699] smoothing - with lazenbee and leon clowes

https://www.facebook.com/reel/725956899936192

First meet

"Run here, my towhead grandchillen, and let this geezer dandle you upon his knee." - Lester Bangs

Recorded, edited, mixed & mastered on 04 & 05 Jul 2025 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa, USA. 

Synths, effects

The first sentence in Lester Bangs' posthumous collection "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" is also the first sentence in the essay with the same title. While ostensibly a record review of the Count Five, it's more accurately a work of fiction. Since the early '90s, I haven't read many complete books beyond instructional ones—instead, I graze for inspiration and create my own works. So I pulled out a Kindle app, scrolled until I found a past favorite and here I am.

What I tried to do is capture all sorts of miscommunication—be it literally Lester imagining himself a grandfather (something I don't believe he ever became), or the way he writes in a slang he probably did not speak, in character. Or my own generation (X) trying to figure out the noise of the generation prior ("who cares about Woodstock when there was Love, garage punks, Pet Sounds and the VU?" was my way of thinking at approximately 20). Or how some of this has not aged well since Lester wrote it, and I know he, being of some conscience and allowing himself revisions and growth might approach it differently now. In the same book, read “The White Noise Supremacists” to experience him struggling with it an emerging skinhead culture. Then, perhaps, how people younger or otherwise different than myself would react to this writer.

The title is an obvious nod at Lester’s character's stolen vernacular and also a reference to an anonymous woman long ago who left a message on an answering machine of my co-improviser where the outgoing message was a snippet of some improv we’d done. She left a message that it was “ugly music.” 

The synths I used here are; Cherry Audio's ARP 2600 & Minimoog emulations; Arturia's DX7; Korg's M1; and the Puremagnetik Klome through a Moogerfooger filter and other things for the textural, almost percussive stuff.

Photography/Art - Jim Lemanowicz, 31 Jan 2015, Marjorie Post Park, Massapequa, NY, USA

Music & art © 2015, 2025 Jim Lemanowicz

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This original version of “You Some Ugly Child” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0705: Book Start. The Assignment: Let the beginning of a book help you begin a new piece of music.

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

More on the 705th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Book Start — The Assignment: Let the beginning of a book help you begin a new piece of music — at https://disquiet.com/0705/. This week’s project was proposed by Neil Stringfellow.

You Some Ugly Child (disquiet0705)

You are the light now (naviarhaiku601)

An electronic composition, sounds created using Pure Data.

Mountain Path at Sunrise (naviarhaiku602)

City lights fell, but they made a nice sound on the way down.

🔗 Listen & support:
Spotify · Bandcamp · YouTube · more → linktr.ee/amb1Matt3r

🎧 Music for:
sleep · deep focus · meditation · inner drift · slow time · space dreaming

📎 Tags:
#ambient #drone #granular #spacemusic #sleepmusic #darkambient #soundscape

Neonfall

Quelenis is a musical journey through a moment of choice. At the heart of the piece lies a crossroads: one path is endless and mechanical, silent yet inevitable, embodying reason and structure. The other is a human, shadowed path—unpredictable, raw, and filled with emotion and desire.

True to Olttaoff’s signature exploration of duality in sound, Quelenis weaves IDM’s intricate beats along the path of the infinite, while the improvisational spirit of Jazz illuminates the dark, human side. The intertwining of these sonic worlds creates a labyrinth that challenges the listener, pulling them between logic and instinct, certainty and chaos.

In a world of diverging paths, which will you choose? Quelenis offers an immersive experience of choice and the depths of sound itself.

Quelenis

First track from the third- and final- Hierophlex album, Falling Hail, out now on Bandcamp: https://hierophlex.bandcamp.com/album/falling-hail-album

Post-Pastoral

Disquiet Junto 0712 invited us to interpret a barcode as a rhythm.

The first barcode patent was issued in 1952, but they didn't look like the ones we usually see now: they were bullseye-shaped. Today's linear barcodes use what is called "many-width symbology", meaning that the vertical lines ("modules") in the barcode are different widths, from 1 to 4. The lines are printed vertically instead of horizontally so that if the ink smeared during printing, the code would still be legible and no information would be lost. 

Barcodes almost failed in the retail space, because no one wanted to be the first to invest the money to adopt them when they were unproven. They were a lot  more popular more quickly in the railroad business, where by the early 1960s optical scanners could read the color-coded barcodes on train cars as they rolled past at full speed.

The barcode I chose as source material for the prompt was from a tape dispenser that I bought to help my daughter pack to leave home. This piece is probably an aural photograph of the feelings I'm having right now, but that's neither here nor there. Where was I?

Instead of reading the barcode as if it were visually measuring out beats, I decided to decode the modules and transcribe the widths. This turned into the sequence 2 1 3 2 1 4 4 1 / 2 1 2 3 1 1 1 3 / 3 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 / 1 1, which I incorporated into this piece in several ways.

First, the percussion pattern is built by breaking the sequence into chunks of four numbers. These four numbers indicate the beat position of a series of drum kit components on a 16-step grid. So 2-1-3-2, the first sequence, means the kick drum hits on the 2nd, 1st, 3rd, and 2nd beats of the four divisions of the pattern. Next would be the snare, then the tom, and finally the hihat with 1-1-1-3. The sequence also determines the note length and note number of the "melodic" sequence. 

Finally, I translated the sequence into steps in a custom arpeggiator, with the width of the modules transposed into the vertical axis of the beats in the pattern. There are two arpeggiated synth tracks, running at different rates, played on the Logic ES2 and Alchemy software synths. A triggered vocal sample rhythmically reflects the numeric sequence. The rest of the synth parts came from the Roland boutique Studio Electronics SE-02, a reissue of the "Moog-adjacent" SE-01 analog monosynth of 1982.

There's a lot going on in this piece, but there's a lot going on over here, too. The sound that a single mom makes in her empty nest. Snapshot of a moment in time at 90bpm.

More on the 712th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Zebra Code — The Assignment: What rhythm do you hear in a bar code? — at https://disquiet.com/0712/.

The Passage (disquiet0712)

music video > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjTocP5Mzl4

"Best Friends" (crackpanther remix)

Lots of selfmade, mostly bedroom- or cellarproduced tracks here, different styles because of different moods and music tools, often selfmade instruments, allways experimenting and in search of sounds and soundmaking stuff, harmonic or non-harmonic....and all free to listen and to download ...and if you want to use one of my tracks or try a collab, just ask, do it and tell me about it... all in terms of Creative Commons...
I have to make music every free minute, allways full of it, and, about time, I have a lot of toys to do this ... these tracks are my kind of relaxing and i will do it till the end of my time...
I hope, you like, what I do....You may find a lot, but no autotune and no AI, I swear...
You cannot OWN music, you only can MAKE it.... (something, Neneh Cherry said)... and so I do...
I never learned an instrument, I am an analphabet in music theory, but that's not important: 
I AM an instrument and there's always music inside me.... and I go on...
SC is my diary: The diary of my steps into the world of music since 2012....
if you want to know something about that: you're welcome!
One of my tracks is especially made for you... 
Try the playlists ; )
Remember:  I DON'T WANT TO BUY SC-PLAYS:  I'll block EVERY try and all those trendscout-robots!! If you like my stuff, listen to it, feel it and tell it to your friends, that's enough.....

Relaxxans

Lovvarion