Disquiet Junto Project 0723: Do the Collapse

The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly.

Step 1: Part of what makes “Happy Birthday to You” an interesting song to listen to occurs when it is sung in a public place, meaning that people sing along who actually don’t know the name of the person whose birthday is being celebrated. The song gets to the moment when the person’s name is inserted, and then the sense of ensemble entirely falls apart. People mumble, or wait, or actually know the name and sing it, but no matter — because subsets of singers proceed to sing the final “happy birthday to you” starting at different points.

Step 2: Consider the way “Happy Birthday to You” has a tendency to fall apart, as described in Step 1.

Step 3: Write a piece of music informed by your thoughts that resulted from Step 2 — a piece of music that is designed to fall apart somehow. And consider repeating the motif a few times, so it falls apart repeatedly.

Deadline: Monday, November 10, 2025, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

Details: disquiet.com/0723

Disquiet Junto Project 0723: Do the Collapse

This track was created for the Naviar Haiku group.
616
https://www.naviarrecords.com/naviarhaiku616-whenever-we-meet/

2025-10-23

whenever we meet (Naviarhaiku 616)

Marco Lucchi : piano, synthesizers and tape

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found sounds
https://freesound.org/people/felix.blume/sounds/779909/

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for the current Naviar Haiku challenge
https://www.naviarrecords.com/naviarhaiku616-whenever-we-meet/

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逢ふときはいつも雨なる青胡桃
au toki wa itsumo ame naru aogurumi

Tanaka Hiroaki

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piove sempre
quando ci incontriamo –
noci verdi

Traduzioni dal giapponese di Luca Cenisi

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whenever we meet
it’s raining
green walnuts

It's raining [Naviar Haiku # 616]

First there was a common funky beat for 2 minutes or so. Then there was a bass played during those 2 minutes in a complete improv mood. Then a nylon guitar came breaking time. Then a steel guitar came bending time. Then some djembes, shakers and seeds came defying the beat and eliminating it.

In the spirit of mixing traditional instruments with free jazz approach, a simple though "we are lost in time" emerges.



Lost in time

Shih-Lin Hung: L’atlas n°3 “L'intrus” (2025)
Composition acousmatique d'après la partition graphique de Ju-An Hsieh

Composition acousmatique : Shih-Lin Hung (洪世霖)
Partition graphique: Ju-An Hsieh（謝茹安）

L’atlas n°3 “L'intrus” （2025）

A reworking for this track in my archive originally created in autumn 2024, after a few versions in the last year i  find it fits well with the context of Haiku Music Challenge Naviarhaiku 617



an autumn nightfall
the skeleton of a huge fish
drawn back by the sea.

by: Saitō Sanki



Saitō Sanki (1900 – 1962) was a dentist who discovered his passion for haiku poetry in his mid-thirties, when his colleagues at the hospital in Soto Kanda convinced him to write a haiku for a collection. Later, he became one of the most important exponents of wartime haiku: he was imprisoned in 1940 during the government’s World War II persecution of controversial artists, and was officially forbidden to write until the end of the war.

haiku by Saitō Sanki

Picture by John Jason

more info here: https://www.naviarrecords.com/

an autumn nightfall (Naviarhaiku#617)

31Oct25
https://naviarlab.tumblr.com/post/798740753932337152/naviarhaiku617-an-autumn-nightfall
😀

the skeleton of a huge fish [naviarhaiku617]

Another snippet from Caligo Paean -

Caligo Paean is a 1 hour long sound piece installed on river front property in the town of Franklin, Tasmania as part of the exhibition "When The Fog Clears". It formed part of the Ten Days on The Island Festival March 2025.
The work was installed in several locations across the property including a stack of subs under an old bus, in the main exhibition space and in an abandoned shed some 40 metres from the main area . The speakers were 'tuned' quite differently depending on their location and the sound was not delay corrected with the result of each mini-installation merging with each other in odd sonic ways - kind of calling the listener from one spot to another. The the work features field recordings, percussion, piano, bass guitar and Intonarumori as well as this special one off choir : )

Caligo is the Ancient goddess of Chaos. Born of the fog she controls the darkness, dwells in the void and is as old as the primordial matter that created the universe. This work is a tribute to the goddess as she continues to influence our lives and, in the case of this installation, the site and concept informing the show.

Official press release below for The Fog Clears

Every day, the mists of the Huon Valley perform a seductive dance, gently obscuring and revealing contours of the fertile land and waters. Situated in The Watershed Franklin, When The Fog Clears features six artists from lutruwita / Tasmania exploring the region’s iconic mists through a variety of mediums including installation, sculpture, illustration, sound, and video.

Developed exclusively for Franklin, this exhibit extends from the waterfront itself into the chambers, kilns, and rafters of the shed, inviting visitors to consider fog as an atmosphere that can cloak us in unexpected ways.

Caligo Paean (Isolation and Wonder)

My submission for the Naviar Haiku Challenge #617,
More on Naviar Haiku: https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

Autumn Nightfall by the Sea - naviarhaiku617

This track was created for the Naviar Haiku group.
618
https://www.naviarrecords.com/naviarhaiku618-the-harp-player/

2025-11-06

the harp player (Naviarhaiku 618)

The brief for this week’s Disquiet Junto challenge noted how the singing of ‘Happy Birthday’ often falls apart around the name stage … This idea of musical collapse immediately made me think of Anglican church services, when the organ - along with those who are confident of the hymn being sung - sometimes falls into desperately trying to pull everyone along, never far from falling apart. In this piece, a recording I made of a service I attended a while back (which has its own backstory) becomes the material for electronic mangling and rhythmic snipping for my take on the idea of repeated collapse. It’s VERY far from being in the same league, but parts of the result remind me a little of Jonathan Harvey’s extraordinary Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980) - one of my all-time favourite electroacoustic masterpieces ... 


More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/.

more halF unusuaL

halF collapsE [disquiet0723]

Everyone Is Real, Joe

I took part in a group vocal and movement improvisation at the weekend and from the recording of that I built this piece in Ableton Live. There was 11 of us and we had our eyes closed, so the improvisation - as fits with the @disquiet project this week - would align and then go wayward. I've tried to bring that out more in this rearrangement.

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/.

Do The Collapse (disquiet0723)

Disquiet Junto 0723 suggested making a piece of music that structurally falls apart.

I've been spending time with my Make Noise 0-Coast semi-modular synth lately, watching tutorial videos, exploring different patch configurations, and recording everything "just in case" as I always do with analog gear. 

So for this week's response I challenged myself to center the 0-Coast.  Although I had intended to start with a drone patch, a happy mistake led me to a heavy brass-like sound, which I connected to the random step function for pitch. Add lots of reverb, and we have hell's own horn section. The 0-Coast also eventually gave it the drone I had in mind at the start. This was the only synth used in the piece. No MIDI was involved, as the patches were completely self-playing.

The pizzicato was recorded live, 4 tracks, on my electric violin, which my violin instructor is going to be over the moon about. The vocal, featuring Yeats's "The Second Coming", was captured on a shoebox cassette recorder. There's a little digital piano sprinkled in as well.

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/

The Center Cannot Hold (disquiet0723)

A quasi-serialist electronic sequence interrupted at intervals with short clips from another track played in reverse. The basic sounds were created using Pure Data.

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/.

Hiccups (disquiet0723)

i used multiple instances of sting in ableton to trigger fairly standard repetitive loops, fed into driftmaker to create variable flux over time, also a load of randomised panning techniques. I guess its always teetering on collapse before at various intervals it totally does. in retrospect maybe more constant erosion rather than sudden collapse.

More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/.

mirror tactics [disquiet0723]

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.

Abstract Sound Structures, Musique Concrète & Live Electronics.
Experimental abstract animation videos.
It is my aim to create and/or edit my tracks & videos using free or open-source software only.
Influences include: J.S. Bach, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Giacinto Scelsi, Mauricio Kagel, Conlon Nancarrow, Christian Wolff, Harry Partch, Luc Ferrari, Morton Feldman, Cornelius Cardew, Bernard Parmegiani, Ana-Maria Avram, David Tudor, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Renaissance Polyphony.
All my work is published under a Creative Commons licence & can be freely downloaded (as wav) or remixed.

Hiccups (disquiet0723)

ray_cobley

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