Disquiet Junto Project 0717: Generation Gambit

Disquiet Junto's 715th prompt was simple: record yourself making a mistake on purpose, and emphasize the error through repetition. 

Long-time readers will know that I favor narrative in my pieces, so I created a little vignette: we listen in on a frustrated pianist in a parlor, as she tries to improvise on a piano with a bad E4. (The piece was improvised, but it was refined over a couple of takes.) 

Features synthetic piano, organic vocal, and ambient field recording.

More on the 715th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Err Apparent — The Assignment: Make a mistake on purpose. Build something from it — at https://disquiet.com/0715/.

Improv in A minor (on a piano with a sticky key) (disquiet0715)

PILZE

Enjoy this with the visuals on the halF unusuaL YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/wkS2xkqAu-Y ... 

We recently unearthed a VERY rare set of tin cylinders with some of the creations from my unusually great uncle - dated 1910! I've taken the opportunity to riff on top of his proto-EDM - with sounds WAY ahead of their time! No way would they have found an audience in his lifetime ... Let's try again 😜

Family legend has it that my Great Uncle Crackleton P. Valve was not so much born as assembled! His crib rattled with loose copper coils, his lullabies were hummed through wax cylinders, and his first word was said to be a faint but distinctly glitchy “bzzzzzt” ...

By the turn of the last century, when most men were proud to own a sturdy hat, Uncle Crackleton was already soldering strange contraptions in the garden shed, where every evening the glow of red-hot valves spilled out into the hedgerows. He refused to play the piano “like a commoner,” preferring instead to hammer phonograph needles against tin cylinders until they shrieked, warbled, and sang with a peculiar beauty only he seemed to understand.

The neighbours swore they could hear his experiments late at night: a ghostly stutter of sound, like church bells melting, or a brass band tumbling downstairs. He called it Music of the Future, although others called it a dreadful racket.

It’s said he once built a mechanical echo chamber out of two bathtubs, a bicycle pump, and a dozen mismatched radio valves. When he cranked it up, it produced a looping hiccup that terrified the vicar's cats and made their milk curdle. Even so, he declared it his masterpiece.

Though none of his recordings were thought to have survived, until now (most cylinders were repurposed as makeshift candle holders), family lore insists that without him, modern glitch music would not exist. Every time a record skips, a tape warbles, or a speaker crackles, somewhere, faintly, Uncle Crackleton P. Valve is smiling.

More on the 717th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Generation Gambit — The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary — at https://disquiet.com/0717/

visuals (YouTube)

halF 1910 [disquiet0717]

Recorded, edited, mixed & mastered on 25 Sep 2025 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa, USA.

Synths, effects

Photography/Art - Jim Lemanowicz, 30 Oct 2015, Central Park, Manhattan, NYC, USA

Music & art © 2015, 2025 Jim Lemanowicz

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This original version of “You Dance Like A Paranoid Old Goat” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0717: Generation Gambit. The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary.

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

More on the 717th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Generation Gambit — The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary — at https://disquiet.com/0717/.

Discussion - https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0717-generation-gambit

Patreon & Soundcloud - blisterpop
YouTube - Jimmy Lem
TikTok - jimmlem
Bluesky - jimmylem.bsky.social

You Dance Like A Paranoid Old Goat  (disquiet0717)

Ancient or ancestral dance rhythms emerging from the mists of time and combined with a modern drone. Or is it an ancient drone with modern rhythms?

More on the 717th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Generation Gambit — The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary — at https://disquiet.com/0717/.





Ancient and Modern (disquiet0717)

This week's Disquiet Junto, number 0717, invited us to collaborate with an ancestor. I recalled my kinship with a certain pioneering electronic musician, my reclusive great aunt Carly Wendos. (Her catalog is strangely absent from most streaming services, but she was something of a sensation in classical music.)

The piece is a favorite of hers, an interpretation of Beethoven's Piano Trio #5 in D Major, Op. 70 No.1, the so-called "Ghost Movement". Aunt Carly rocks the Moogs while I supply the string section via live electric violin.

In all seriousness, this one is dedicated to my trans elder Wendy Carlos. Thank you for making a way for us. 

(Cover photo is a shot of her studio circa 1968.)

More on the 717th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Generation Gambit — The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary — at https://disquiet.com/0717/.

Ghost Movement (with Carly Wendos) (disquiet0717)

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

More on the 717th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Generation Gambit — The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary — at https://disquiet.com/0717/.

Fujara [disquiet0717]

This composition is an imagined duet with a prehistoric ancestor, combining an emotional synthesizer track with an old mythological lithophone performance.
Inspired by this week's Disquiet Junto project, I first created the shamanic performance using a virtual stone xylophone. I then added the synthesizer parts to bring these ancient vibes into the present day.

More on the 717th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Generation Gambit — The Assignment: Layer two eras of recordings, one of them imaginary — at https://disquiet.com/0717/.

Le Message en Pierre (Disquiet0717)

Full synth pastiche built around real NASA mission recordings.
Recorded and finished in one day (Thu, Oct 2).
Retro-futuristic, spacey, and playful — first contact imagined through electronics.

Cover photo: Venice, CA, ~20 years ago.


for this challenge:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0718-planet-jam-it/

alien says: (disquiet0718)

sound art for disquiet0718.

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/.

artificial planet (disquiet0718)

While the far-flung Asarian homeworld is the first inhabited system that we've discovered, this is not our first time encountering the intelligent cloud beings of Asar. We've learned that Asarian explorers visited our earth thousands of years ago, touching down somewhere in the Nile river valley. When the gas giants finally departed, the Pharaoh whose hospitality they had enjoyed bestowed two gifts on her alien visitors. The first was a scroll with plans they could use to build their own pyramids back home. But the most remarkable gift was a papyrus describing a peculiar set of frequencies that, when resonated in certain sequences, could reveal spiritual and mathematical truths. We believe the audio captured by our surface drone may be a sacred performance of this ancient harmonic "spell".

This one was a lot of fun to put together! It gave me a great excuse to experiment with microtonal composition, and learn how to configure custom tunings in Logic. I chose the Maqam scale, a traditional scale in Arabic music believed to have originated in ancient Egypt. The scale consists of two "half-flats": in this case, A, B half-flat, C, D, E half-flat, F, G, and A. The main melodic line is typical for the scale, arcing from root to  octave and then descending again. The percussion was inspired by reading about Wahda w-Nuss rhythms. 

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/.

The Asar Sequence (disquiet0718)

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)

Disquiet Junto Project 0718: Planet Jam It. The Assignment: Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization.

This recording was made in 2126 as part of Krakenkraft Interstellar Inc.'s ARP (Audio Reconnaissance Program), and its significance is only now being fully understood. We are most probably hearing the dream singers of Yith, a mentally time-traveling civilization. Unfortunately, despite intensive AI efforts, the drone's engine noise could not be removed, for which they have apologized repeatedly. Unfortunately, we do not know what happened before and after radio contact was lost... 

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Drone sound credit: andreauomogatto https://freesound.org/people/andreauomogatto/sounds/545315/

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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/.

Discussion https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0718-planet-jam-it/73184/16

disquiet25

Rare Recording Of The Dream Singers Of Yith [disquiet0718]

inner atlas

Just Like You Imagined (Orchestra)

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.

RabMusicLab produces instrumental music of various genres from classical to electronic without shying away from excursions into pop or experimental music. The tracks are published for the pleasure, entertainment and inspiration of every listener.

RabMusicLab loves to participate in the Disquiet Junto Projects of https://soundcloud.com/disquiet to fuel his creativity . All tracks that have "disquiet" in the title were created as response to these projects. Further informations can be found in the respective track-information,

All images used are photographs by RabMusicLab, unless otherwise indicated in the track-informations.

Le Message en Pierre (Disquiet0717)

RabMusicLab

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