This track was recorded with the following instructions in mind:

"Consider the time you heard quiet music and didn't know where it came from, only to realize you’d left your MP3 player running in your pocket. Record a short piece of music with that as the intended purpose. That is, imagine a world not too far in the future when people regularly have a quiet music, a personal score, surrounding them, just as one might wear perfume or cologne."

I wanted to create a sound that would suggest a haze of noise that follows a person when disoriented. In this case, I looped together a series of viola drones, adding a tape saturation effect and reverb in Ableton Live to make the sound cloudier and heavier.

More on this 150th Disquiet Junto project — “Record a subtle personal mobile score” — at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/11/13/disquiet0150-sonicperfume/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

Photo associated with this project by Ben Crowder and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/B5gLF

Follow - disquiet0150-sonicperfume

Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?

Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards. They are pieces of music whose relative brevity -- all are between one and three minutes in length -- is designed to correlate with the economical, ephemeral nature of an Instagram photo.

To me, the most memorable pieces of music evoke vivid images -- and vice versa. When analyzing the Instagram photo I was assigned -- created by Martin Møller Jensen of Atlastop -- a few chords immediately came to mind, as did a particular style of music. The image is predominantly dark, but with high contrast, specks of brightness and a hazy sense of motion. To duplicate those effects, I layered overdriven Fender strat samples beneath reverb-treated synths for the backbone of the track. To add depth, I recorded a collection of everyday sounds with a Sony PCM-D50 recorder and filtered them, adjusting their speed, pitch and saturation. The result is a track that I think serves as a capable companion to the image I was assigned.

For complete details on the Instagr/am/bient project -- created by Marc Weidenbaum of Disquiet.com -- click below:
disquiet.com/2011/12/28/instagrambient-25-sonic-postcards/

Black Eyes

Recorded Jan. 6, 2012, for Disquiet-Junto:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto

http://disquiet.com/

http://tomvourtsis.bandcamp.com/

A Rest From Shadows [disquiet0001-ice]

This track was created as part of the Disquiet Junto project and uses nothing more than the following two samples, selected by Disquiet's Marc Weidenbaum:

Fog horn sample by Schaarsen: http://www.freesound.org/people/schaarsen/sounds/69663/
Train whistle sample by Ecodios: http://www.freesound.org/people/ecodios/sounds/119963/

Various levels of delay, feedback, reverb and saturation helped manipulate the samples, which are a few seconds in length each. My goal was to set a mood consistent with a scene of a locomotive passing a nearby steamboat at dawn, with the final few seconds of low-level noise representing the calm once the two have passed.

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto

http://www.disquiet.com/

http://tomvourtsis.bandcamp.com/

A Match Made in Transit [disquiet0002-duet]

It was a pleasure to create this track, which is composed of samples used by Marcus Fischer for a piece from his latest album, Collected Dust. No material aside from Marcus' music was used for this remix.

My goal was to inject some of my own style but mostly remain true to Marcus' sound. The centerpiece of the remix is recording hiss that's somewhat hidden in Marcus' original tracks -- I magnified that sound and added a bit of reverb to give it a fuller feel. I didn't significantly alter the higher-pitched drones and tones heard on the remix; I wanted Marcus' original fingerprints intact, and I think the finished product adheres to that. Reverb was added to some of the samples and others were detuned, but mostly, the individual pieces were simply looped in Ableton Live.

More information on Marcus Fischer and the Disquiet Junto:

http://mapmap.ch/
http://www.tenchrec.com/TCH05.html
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Nearly There (Disquiet0004-mfischer Collected Noise Remix)

This track was as challenging as any in the Disquiet Junto because of the necessity to show restraint with layers of sound. I gathered a decent selection of field recordings ranging from the sound of an escalator thumping and whimpering to the sound of meatballs simmering on a stove. What I chose is the sound of the freezer in my kitchen at my Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment. The drone of the motor in my freezer was interesting enough to stand alone for this project, but I was intrigued by the additional, unexpected sound of ice cubes in the freezer intermittently cracking and popping -- not unlike a record -- due to the expansion of the ice when the freezer door remained open for an extended period of time, raising the temperature inside the freezer.

I selected a couple of different ice clicks and added a delay effect to introduce some rhythm to the track, and hovering above the other freezer noises were two drones created via MIDI in Ableton Live -- one of which is deep bass -- that I felt complemented the "cold" feel of the raw recording. My goal was to duplicate the noise of everyday life while adding a bit of flavor, and I'm pleased with how the noises buried inside a freezer held up when serving as the backbone of this track.

More on the Disquiet Junto:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Straining for Space [disquiet0005-layer]

All sounds used for this track were gathered from three century-old phonograph cylinder recordings, linked to below. I borrowed only one snippet from each recording, each one between one and five seconds, and lowered the pitch and speed for all. From there, reverb and other effects were added in Ableton Live to blur the individual samples into a haze of sound. The surface noise of the original material -- brightened and looped -- serves as a backbone of static as the track begins and ends.


All audio selected from these antique cylinder recordings:

http://www.archive.org/details/colnyp-15132
http://www.archive.org/details/edba-3871
http://www.archive.org/details/ind-986

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Alva's Fog [disquiet0006-cylinder]

For this track, I used only one sample -- a 78rpm recording of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante -- and hoped to add a sense of "monumental scale," which is part of the definition of abstract expressionism, according to the Clyfford Still Museum.

A few snippets from the original sample were the foundation of the track, including the hiss from the stylus and a couple of brief excerpts highlighting the strings in the piece. The pitch of the samples was adjusted, and reverb was added to some to create depth. One of the samples was reversed toward the end of the track, just before the sudden end.

---

This track is a transformation, in honor of painter Clyfford Still, of a sample of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante, culled from this recording:

http://archive.org/details/J.S.BachBrandenburgConcertoNo2

More on the Clyfford Still Museum at clyffordstillmuseum.org.

More on this 36th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/09/06/disquiet0036-cstillconcerto/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/

The Glow [disquiet0036-cstillconcerto]

For the 55th Disquiet Junto project, I created a piece through Ableton 7 that's a combination of two tracks from the album "Screws" by Nils Frahm, who began work on his record after a fall broke his thumb, requiring four screws to be surgically implanted.

No sounds beyond the source tracks "Do" and "Re" were used for my recording, which opens with a sample from "Do" that was adjusted only slightly. After a few seconds, I reversed the piano in the track and added some reverb to fill out the sound and set the tone for the rest of the piece, which gets more hazy and disorienting. The idea was to try to simulate Nils' fall through audio. The piece closes with distant but pelting high piano notes from "Re," created using delay and multiple tracks of the same sample piled together.



More on this 55th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/01/17/disquiet0055-twoscrews/


More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/


More on the Frahm project at:

http://reworked.nilsfrahm.com/

vourtsis

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