Disquiet Junto Project 0696: Chain of Layers
The Assignment: Make music change by altering its layers.

This project is the first of three that are being done in by the Disquiet Junto in collaboration with the 2025 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 3 through 7. The festival topic this year is « Kette » — which translates, as the organization explains, to “Chain”: “Chains connect but they also bind. They create relationships but also restrictions. As a gift they look nice, feared when used in vice, and yet they can span bridges across fire and ice.” All three Junto projects will engage with the work of Svetlana Maraš, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 festival.

We are working again at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the seventh year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern.

Step 1: Record 10 to 15 layers of continuous sound.

Step 2: Create a piece of music in which you only change the relative presence of those individual layers from Step 1 over time. Some light effects and panning are certainly fine, but the majority of the impact should be how the prominence of the individual layers changes.

Deadline: Monday, May 5, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

Details: disquiet.com/0696

Disquiet Junto Project 0696: Chain of Layers

Phew! Thankfully this track didn't pass muster with the SoundCloud algorithm ... and so won't be recommended to potentially interested listeners ... Always a signal that something is probably worth a listen! 😁

See the accompanying video at https://youtu.be/wjrGJtwQnP0

This project is the first of three that are being done by the Disquiet Junto in collaboration with the 2025 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 3 through 7. The festival topic this year is « Kette » — which translates, as the organization explains, to “Chain”: “Chains connect but they also bind. They create relationships but also restrictions. As a gift they look nice, feared when used in vice, and yet they can span bridges across fire and ice.” All three Junto projects will engage with the work of Svetlana Maraš, who is the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 festival.

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/

visuals

halF layereD [disquiet0696]

Disquiet Junto 0696's assignment was to record 10 to 15 layers of continuous sound and create a piece of music only by altering their relative presence over time.

I immediately thought of the story of how the iconic 1975 10cc song "I'm Not In Love" was created. The backing vocals are lush and rich and unearthly. (If you don't know the song, just listen to the first 30 seconds or so to get the gist). The story is that the band recorded themselves each singing a long, sustained note until they had 48 notes on individual 12' tape loops. For the final recording, the tape loops were played simultaneously and mixed into harmonies live on the console, essentially turning the mixer into a musical instrument. 

With this technique as inspiration, I recorded 7 tracks of ebow guitar, each playing a different note in the A harmonic minor scale. Ebow can make dynamics difficult but I managed some good textures I think. I hand-mixed each of the tracks to come in and out in sequence, creating a rising step pattern.

Then I bounced the seven guitar tracks to a single track. This track was duplicated and pitch shifted to create 4 tracks spanning 4 octaves. This essentially multiplied my original 7 tracks by 4 to give me 28 guitars. I applied volume automation to create a primitive Shepard scale out of the result.

Aside from a couple of acousmatic accents and a low-fi kick drum, every sound is from the guitar.

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/

What Became of Grandfather? (disquiet0696)

13 Levels; my track for disquiet0696

Disquiet Junto Project 0696: Chain of Layers
The Assignment: Make music change by altering its layers.
Step 1: Record 10 to 15 layers of continuous sound.
Step 2: Create a piece of music in which you only change the relative presence of those individual layers from Step 1 over time. Some light effects and panning are certainly fine, but the majority of the impact should be how the prominence of the individual layers changes.
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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/

disquiet0696_13levels

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/

disquiet0696

sound art for disquiet0696.

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/

hendecad cascade (disquiet0696)

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

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/

250503 [disquiet0696]

Disquiet Junto 0698 is the second of three prompts aimed at creating an asynchronous trio.

This week, we had to select from one of last week's community submissions to add a second part. I was really moved by Torpid Scorpion's piece "First Third", featuring a gorgeous acoustic guitar. As soon as I heard it, I heard the complementary part. The trouble? I heard it on violin.

I've only been playing violin for 6 weeks, but I practiced this piece pretty hard and got a couple of good takes this morning. It's simple and understated, I don't think it's awful, and I'm calling it the best that I can do at this point.

There was some room sound on the guitar part, so I tried to match it with light reverb on my side of the song. I also applied a little bit of a reverb to both tracks to place the instruments in the same room.

I think this piece is spacious, sad, and lovely, and I can't wait to see how someone finishes it for next week.

Torpid Scorpion's starter track: https://soundcloud.com/torpidscorpion/disquiet0697-first-third

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

You're Not a Burden (with Torpid Scorpion) (disquiet0698)

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.

disquiet0705 - Lubadh

The track starts with a simple sentence of my simple approach to music, eventually layered, then granulated to the point where it took on a medieval vibe. Everything was done in Logic, using Arturia's "Fragments" to manipulate my voice. And panning, of course. Can't get enough of that. 

disquiet0707

Response to Disquiet Assignment: What rhythm do you hear in a barcode? The first :30 of the piece consists of the barcode: vocal sounds to represent each size of the lines, and one sounds for the biggest space - followed by improvisational vocal sounds repeats of the barcode. More on the 712th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Zebra Code — — at https://disquiet.com/0712/.



disquiet0712 Al Dente

Created for Disquiet Junto 0712 Zebra Code, created in response to a prompt to use a bar code as a rhythmic source.

l.ife (Disquiet Junto 0712)

This week's Disquiet Junto prompt was to create music based on any  barcode.

I used the barcode from a bottle of banana-flavored Soylent, which was my breakfast throughout the month of August (long story):
1 0 0 2 8 9 7 0 1 2

 I took inspiration from the “will it riff” videos by treating the bar code as notes, but I don’t really play much guitar or use tab, so instead I treated the numbers as whole steps away from a given note (middle C, to make it easier) (so I guess I treated it as guitar tab if your guitar had only one string and that string was tuned to middle C).

So, I took the first digit, 1, to mean one half step away from C, giving me C#/Db. I took 0 to mean back to C, etc. (for the 20th-century music theory fans, basically set theory with very long sets)

This gave me the pitch sequence Db C C D Ab A G C Db D, which, broken down into three- or four-note segments, provides the opening bassline.

Then I tried a variation on my approach, deciding that this time the numbers would give me half steps down from C, which provides the first melody: B C C Bb E Eb F C B Bb

I really like working with atonal lines like this and trying to make them feel catchy and accessible. It’s easier with music that permits lots of repetition (because repetition legitimizes! repetition legitimizes! repetition legitimizes!)

For the beat, I tried to create something that was a cross between Daisuke Tanabe’s “for the twin” and Copycatt’s “Dunque”.  I think I tend towards boombap beats, so I have a ways to go towards developing my Tanabe-inspired glitch palette.

For the other aspects of production, the bassline is a lot of Beatsurfing’s Random (which I rarely get a chance to use) doubled with a normal bass and a very quiet wah-wah bass guitar. The synth lead is note from Arturia’s Pigments fed into Sonic Bloom’s Synplant for glitchy variations. I have an envelope follower on the snare triggering Synplant’s “overall weirdness” parameter, so the synth sound has a little flutter of weirdness every time the snare hits.
* * * * *
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/

BANANA SOYLENT (disquiet0712)

"And that's how I returned drone music to its rightful place in the discotheque."

Disquiet Junto 714 dared me to take a song I'd made before and create a remix from someone else's perspective. I had the idea to start with a lovely drone I did when I first got the vintage rackmount Yamaha TX-802. I didn't have any particular remix artist in mind for this, just more or less gave myself permission to play and explore and try to transform a monotonal piece into something you can dance to. 

In addition to the Yamaha, this piece features the rich bass of a Moog Minitaur and the irresistible bump of a Roland TR-08 drum machine.

More on the 714th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Remix Yourself — The Assignment: Rework your own music as if someone else had — at disquiet.com/0714/.

Drone in F (Club Mix) (disquiet0714)

I’ve been exploring the drone possibilities of the ronroco. Although it’s a high-pitched instrument with picked strings that produce short, percussive transients, it can be layered and softly strummed to create a surprisingly sustained sound.

In this piece, I combine those textures with my own bowed upright bass and generous layers of long reverbs,trying to create an all acoustic, atmospheric soundscape.

photo by 67street. art

Created and shared for
Disquiet Junto Project 0716: Dense Fog Advisory
@disquiet

Dense Fog Night Drone - disquiet0716

This assignment fitted with the track I was working on at the time, a single-take improv on a recent Naviar Haiku Challenge track. I simply added some reverb to mask a couple of misjudged moments and a “space” version courtesy of Abstract Chamber. I enhanced the fade-in and fade-out which were a bit faint.

The title is from Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn”

“I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life."

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There is just one step this week. You’re now recording music under the name Dense Fog Advisory. Record a new track, appropriate to your name.

More on the 716th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Dense Fog Advisory — The Assignment: That’s your band’s name; now record something — at https://disquiet.com/0716/


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

All of the fog that ever was [disquiet0716]

Track created for Disquiet(0716) Challenge.  Inspired by phrase Dense Fog Advisory. I imagined a band called "Dense Fog Advisory", performing an extreme ambient piece called Dense Frog Advisory.

On Keys: Froggy Frank
On Bass: Bull Frog Frank
On Percussion: Frogman Frank

This track started out as an ambient piece and took a turn.  The composition approach primarily used improvision.

More on the 716th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Dense Fog Advisory — The Assignment: That’s your band’s name; now record something — at https://disquiet.com/0716/.

Dense Frog Advisory-Disquiet(0716)

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.

Other sounds at http://ccmixter.org/people/softmartin
and on YT a synthesizer version of IN C
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx-5G1dvy3o

The Rigs involved cooperation with various musicians; in particular
Melanie Creighton ( steamengines & synthesizers)
Manuel Mario Celeste ( vcls, viola, gtr, synthesizers)
Mortimer Craddup ( bass, drums)
Carlos de Rimini : Drums, drum programming

disquiet0696_13levels

martinsea

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