As an open water swimmer, I encounter randomness on a daily basis when I compare the tide & currents chart to the actual experience of swimming in the San Francisco Bay.

When I went for a swim on Saturday morning around 9:30AM, the current chart showed that slack was at 9:42 and max flood of 1.9 knots at 12:54. The information on the chart allows me to plan my course (e.g. head out before the flood tide becomes too strong and ride it back on my return) and prepare me psychologically. But the chart never holds the full picture. Us swimmers always collect information from those who just came back from the water and ask, “Is it coming in?” “Is it going out?” “How strong is the flood?” etc.

Then, you get in the water. And no matter what was on the chart and whatever other bay creatures said, your experience is always unique. So, that’s my daily randomness made into this piece.

I used the numbers from the chart and the letter F for flood to sketch out my melody, starting on the pitch F as 1, the starting point. Then, I set 9x 1 beat counts, 4x 2 beat counts, and 2x 3 beat counts moving 2, 5, and 4 half-steps. I set my starting bmp at 80 by dividing 190 (1.9F) by 2. I also recorded the sound of the water and swimmers’ conversations.

The piece starts with information gathering from the chart (melody & counterpoint) and a comment, “it’s moving pretty good,” meaning that the flood current is strong. The drum comes from the rhythm of the words, “it’s moving pretty good.” The swimmer’s words, “funny,” “obviously,” and “certainly” demonstrate his thought process as he takes in the information on the strong flood he’s about to face. There was a fog horn in the background of this recording. So I exaggerated that on the strings.

The final 1/3 of the piece is swimmer heading out, “Have a good swim!” “We’ll keep an eye out for that orange hat.” And the sound material develops into the swimmer’s own experience, remnants of information from the chart and all transformed into something familiar but different as you swim.

Disquiet Junto Project 0550: Abrupt Probability

More on this 550th weekly Disquiet Junto project – Abrupt Probability (The Assignment: Make music based on a chance graphic score) – at: https://disquiet.com/0550/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/ 1

https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern 1

https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern

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-0550-abrupt-probability/

Take a chance on fear (disquiet0550)

the radio task is great
i went to the green with radio and guitar
made my own environment nice with playing guitar
then came the red radio

the red in the green(disquiet0552)

More on this 552nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Radio in My Life (The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation) — at: https://disquiet.com/0552/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern

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-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/

hard folia

halF radiO [disquiet0552]

Disquiet Junto Project 0552: The Radio in My Life
The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation.

This was fun. I thought about intrusions. Mostly it's the loud street in front of my window and kids running in the flat above mine and people shouting at Siri, Alexa and OKgoogle in the backyard.

I checked my field recordings and there it was: the f… church bells. A bad ambient track, repeated relentlessly every sunday, never changing, a transcendent single-track playlist … 

I threw the field recoding of the bells into deCoda, and it calculated Aminor and 84bpm. I started a track from scratch with these parameters and improvised some beats and pads. The idea was to have a peaceful ambient track … that could be disturbed by acoustic intrusion of the church bells. 

The track seemed finished when I read the algorithm again and listened to the Cage-Feldman-Talk. I liked the pure oddity of the first minutes, so I added some parts of the beginning, accepting that this will draw focus to the conversation, so I didn't care that you don't understand much. 

Next sunday at seven, they will play my track …

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Track image credit: Ancient church in Lunigiana (Tuscany, Italy) by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/rJo9jh9iORU

Talk samples credit: John Cage + Morton Feldman's Coffee-Sippin' ASMR Chat in a Room Full of Cigarette Smoke on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chEvxoypyUo

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More on this 552nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Radio in My Life (The Assignment: Record music in response to a John Cage and Morton Feldman conversation) — at: https://disquiet.com/0552/

Thanks to Tobias Reber and Musikfestival Bern for collaboration on this project. More on the festival at:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.instagram.com/musikfestival_bern
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern

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-0552-the-radio-in-my-life/

Kraken Bandcamp Junto

Intrusive Bells [disquiet0552]

Radios. transistors, primitive people, rock'n'roll, intrusions, transitional points, noise of the environment.....
Anthropology and sociology of the contemporary musician in the 60s and 70s.
Unaware actors and protagonists of the last moments of the 20th century avant-garde. 
Before the collapse and the genetic mutation of the listener and the user of the daily / contemporary culture.

INTRUSIONS [disquiet0552]

[disquiet0552] Sandcastles In The Aether

An electronic sequence, sounds created in Pure Data.

More on this 553rd weekly Disquiet Junto project – Break That Cycle (The Assignment: Record in a steady tempo but break it on occasion) – at: https://disquiet.com/0553/ 1

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-0553-break-that-cycle/

The image shows a detail of a mural painted by the artist Pablo “Raíz” Ruiz Arroyo at the record store Noise in San Francisco.

Rhythmic Breaks (disquiet0553)

This started as a generative modular patch run with a varying clock. The results were kinda wallpapery and the tempo shifts not that obvious, I needed something with a steady pulse to give context and contrast. I dug out an old drumloop from a project from 10 years ago which I abandoned cuz I wasn’t happy with the rigidity of the beat. I had the file playing while adjusting the tempo of the modular track. This led to a warbly tape like effect that reminded me of badly wound cassettes where the b-side would faintly bleed through



More on this 553rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Break That Cycle (The Assignment: Record in a steady tempo but break it on occasion) — at: https://disquiet.com/0553/

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-0553-break-that-cycle/

The image shows a detail of a mural painted by the artist Pablo “Raíz” Ruiz Arroyo at the record store Noise in San Francisco.

Temporal Distortion (disquiet0553)

In this week's assignment, we were asked to abruptly change the tempo of a song. I hadn't read the instructions carefully enough and so the tempo changes throughout this one.

More on this 553rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Break That Cycle (The Assignment: Record in a steady tempo but break it on occasion) — at: https://disquiet.com/0553/

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-0553-break-that-cycle/

tempo [disquiet0553]

Disquiet Junto Project 0564: Octave Lept
The Assignment: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music.

I used a track on which I was already working on and added automatic tools to randomly add or substract up to two octaves to all tracks. The probability was chosen so that the octave jumps should go unnoticed.

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Track cover based on image from Dall-E2 prompting "Sudden jumps, not too hefty, edward hopper". This tool is so much fun!

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More on this 564th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Octave Lept (The Assignment: Work an octave leap — or more than one — into a piece of music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0564/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0564-octave-lept/

Krakenkraft-Disquiet

Sudden Jumps, Not Too Hefty [disquiet0564]

featuring globebwoy 
produced , mixed and mastered by globebwoy

INTRUSIONS [disquiet0552]

Ostacoli Sonori

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