I wrote this last summer when I learned about my father's dementia. I finally recorded the vocal tracks in January this year after I came back from Japan and saw my father for the first time since 2019. 

My father was diagnosed with dementia in July of 2022. My brother was the one who shared the news saying he and his wife had taken our father to a specialist. This had me thinking about memories and consciousness. How do we share memories if we can’t remember? Did we even have the same memories to begin with? Even if we experienced things together? 

I started with the lyrics before anything for this piece. I wrote about the running jokes I had with my father and my brother growing up. Catching crawfish in ponds in Tokyo near our apartment in Kokubunji, my father’s Sunday special natto omelet breakfast, the times we'd go to the beach in Chiba, how we'd play in the water all day and our sunburned skin would hurt in the bath. How my father would go buy kakigori after we'd slipped under the futon, how I insisted I'd get the same flavor as him even though matcha was too bitter for me and I really just wanted the neon red strawberry.

ザリガニ釣り
するめを付けて
家に大切に
連れ帰って

納豆オムレツ
キャッチボール
犬の散歩

毎年行った
岩地の海
波と１日遊んで
こんがり焼けて

並んだお布団に
入ってから
買ってきた　かき氷　
お父さんと一緒がいいと
言ったね
　
でも抹茶は苦かった　　　
本当はイチゴが欲しかった

後でみんなして笑ったよね

お父さんも同じ思い出なの？
無くさないで

Catching crawfish
with dried squid
Taking them home 
like some treasure.

Natto omelet
playing catch
walking the dogs.

Every summer we went
to the sea at Iwachi
Playing with waves all day
our skin acrisp.

Our futons lined up, tuckered away
You went and got us kakigori
I said I wanted the same flavor as Dad.

But matcha was too bitter
I wanted strawberry instead.
We all laughed at the end.

Dad, do you remember?
I hope you don't forget.

More on this 579th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Memory Serves (The Assignment: Rerecord a piece of music), at: Disquiet Junto Project 0579: Memory Serves – Disquiet

More on the Disquiet Junto at: Disquiet Junto F.A.Q. – Disquiet

Subscribe to project announcements here: Disquiet Junto by Marc Weidenbaum (Disquiet.com)

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0579-memory-serves/

Remembrance with vocal (disquiet0579)

More on this 578th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Rabbit Spirit Ally (The Assignment: Make music for Lunar New Year), at: https://disquiet.com/0578/ 1

Associated public-domain cover image by Johann Daniel Meyer (1748).

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-0578-rabbit-spirit-ally/

Rabbit Spirit Ally

The Euclidean Chromaticon | Rabbit Spirit Ally - disquiet0578

You are in a shop run by a rabbit who cycles through 2-3 bits of dialogue.

Weeks of Songs

Rabbit's Shop [disquiet0578]

Vocal Samples courtesy of:

Tourdille [https://www.looperman.com/acapellas?page=1&mid=Tourdille&dir=d]
Fragile [ also at Looperman but the link seems to be dead now ]

More on this 579th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Memory Serves (The Assignment: Rerecord a piece of music), at: https://disquiet.com/0579/

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-0579-memory-serves/

Memory Serves

The Euclidean Chromaticon | Memory Serves - disquiet0579

A track I originally made in Summer 2020 with North American writer Francisco Cantú.  For the re-recording of this track I kept the lockdown themed Spoken word by Francisco but created a whole new backing music, much more stripped down then the old verion.
Very pleased with how this sounds.  
The original track can be heard on this album. 
https://audioobscura.bandcamp.com/album/love-in-the-time-of-the-anthropocene

--------------------------
Disquiet Junto Project 0579: Memory Serves
The Assignment: Rerecord a piece of music.

Step 1: The goal of this project is to simply perform and record again something you’ve performed and recorded previously. Think about something you’d like to revisit.

Step 2: Now rerecord the piece of music you decided upon in Step 1.

Audio Obscura  - Three Sisters (with Francisco Cantú) [disquiet0579]

Disquiet Junto Project 0579: Memory Serves
The Assignment: Rerecord a piece of music.

Step 1: The goal of this project is to simply perform and record again something you’ve performed and recorded previously. Think about something you’d like to revisit.

Step 2: Now rerecord the piece of music you decided upon in Step 1.

Track notes:

Something a bit different this week and certainly something I couldn't perform in SuperCollider! 

For as long as I've been seriously making music (25-ish years) I've written songs as part of that continuum. Sometimes the songwriting has become my primary activity and other times it's been consigned to the background. My 30s during the 2010's were pretty interesting in that regard. I'd started off not writing lyrics (let along performing) for quite sometime and then mid-decade songwriting and performing became my primary creative activity. That's where and when this song, "Queen Tide" first materialised. 

It's a song that's been hanging around for about 7 to 8 years now and I've never been able to settle on a structure that feels quite right. Initially, it fell square into a strummed acoustic folk idiom and I'd often perform it under my Garden Ruin moniker with my friend Tom accompanying on guitar. I've included a video of a live performance from back in 2017 that gives an indication of what it sounds like and how I've attempted to record it in the past.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO0kNIsKyro

For whatever reason - and about 12 versions later - it just hasn't happened. As this year began, I realised I hadn't worked on songs in quite some time and thought it might be time to revisit some older material and see if it motivated me to work on some newer material. I was up super-early this morning and upon seeing the Junto prompt this morning my thoughts drifted towards revisiting "Queen Tide" and approaching it a bit differently.

Turning my thoughts to a song like "Queen Tide" could have also been the byproduct of the bizarre climactic interlude that has interrupted an otherwise straightforward summer here in Adelaide, South Australia. For the past couple of days, wind gusts have been huge, a cold southerly whipping from the Antarctic has dumped rain and the skies have looked volatile and foreboding. It's pure climate change stuff. "Queen Tide" is about climate change as well and is written from the perspective of wandering around my hometown of Normanville on the Fleurieu Peninsula in the aftermath of a climactic catastrophe.

One of the things I've always liked about the song is the use of an Em sus9 (or Em+2) chord in the main verse. My partner Lauren has often referred to this as the 'Twin Peaks' song, since the melody and structure does echo the TP theme a little bit. It's always sounded fine on guitar, but this morning I thought I'd change it up and find a way to replicate it on piano. I've been listening to a lot of John Cale's work lately as well, so I thought I'd drop the key by a few increments and sing it a bit lower.

So that's how it started and I spent a few hours on it with a few overdubs that turned into several. That was what became the 'kitchensink' version, completely with an 'iPad pedal steel' in the bridge and two simultaneous sets of algorithmically programmed drums. I've spared you of the 'kitchensink' version and presented a more sensibly austere version with a bit of additional keyboard accompaniment, restrained guitar and backing vocals.

[Disquiet_Junto_0579] Queen Tide (redux)

An electronic sequence created with Samplebrain. Although using the same input elements as 'Birdbrain Bash' (my track for disquiet0561), it has turned out very different.

More on this 579th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Memory Serves (The Assignment: Rerecord a piece of music), at: Disquiet Junto Project 0579: Memory Serves – Disquiet

More on the Disquiet Junto at: Disquiet Junto F.A.Q. – Disquiet

Subscribe to project announcements here: Disquiet Junto by Marc Weidenbaum (Disquiet.com)

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0579-memory-serves/

Birds of Change (disquiet0579)

More on this 579th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Memory Serves (The Assignment: Rerecord a piece of music), at: https://disquiet.com/0579/

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-0579-memory-serves/

There Was A Girl (disquiet0579)

Capricorn_Courage

Bass made with A-111-6V. Ableton Analog for the pad sounds. All mixed down on the Boss BX16 and sent to the Alesis Quadraverb for reverb.

Oasis (Original Mix)

OFO TEMPLE WL MX

All here, in reality, are works in progress and are therefore apt to change at any time. All those except XIII Sisters and RAW which, as many of you may have done, I literally gave away in return for their placement in a library. Something I won't be doing again any time soon. If you have a use for something you hear here please just ask.

 .ooO -------------------------------------- Ooo.

ChatGTP said of AI Music...
'Creative AI tools can be seen as sophisticated plagiarism software, as they do not produce genuinely original content but rather emulate and modify existing works by artists subtly enough to circumvent copyright laws'

Sometimes it takes a dispassionate, independent view to actually see the truth of it ...

 .ooO -------------------------------------- Ooo.

There are links to XiiixxiQ below. Your mileage may vary as to whether it decides to work on your system or not. It only runs on a Mac because I really don't have time to do all the necessary work to make it compatible with anything other than my 2015 MacBook Pro :-(. It is still being developed (for my own use) and improved, and I may yet get round to doing another release if I can find the time to tidy it all up.

The Euclidean Chromaticon | Memory Serves - disquiet0579

x i i i x x i