-
Welcome
Have a listen
-
-
Field Notes
News, essays, reviews, surveillance
-
Downstream
Daily recommended free MP3s
-
Interviews
Talks with musicians/artists/coders
-
Projects
Remixes, commissions, collaborations
5 Most Recent Posts
- Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
- Korean Piano Solo (MP3)
- Disquiet Junto Project 0059: Vowel Choral Drone
- The Ghosts of Union Station
- The Library Drone
Upcoming Activities
Spring 2013: The Disquiet Junto is assisting Geoff Manaugh in a course he is teaching at Columbia University's GSAPP, "San Andreas: Architecture for the Fault." Details at bldgblog.blogspot.com.
February 6, 2013: First day of 15-week course I'm teaching about sound in the media landscape at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, California.
February 10 - February 13, 2013: The Paolo Salvagione work One for Each, for which I wrote several letterpressed essays, will be displayed at the Codex International Book Fair. Details at sfcb.org and codexfoundation.org.
May 15, 2013: Last day of 15-week course I'm teaching about sound in the media landscape at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, California.
Ongoing: In January 2013 I became part of the SoundCloud Heroes project, more on which in the near future. In the short term, full disclosure, I was gifted the top-level account, Pro Plus. Initial post here: "What I'm Up To."
Ongoing: The film The Children Next Door (2012), on which I served as music supervisor and collaborated with Taylor Deupree on sound design, is currently touring festivals. It won a special jury prize at DOC NYC and has also played at the Denver and Hamptons festivals. Directed by Doug Block, produced by Lynda A. Hansen. More at thechildrennextdoor.com.
Down the Pike: Concerts in the Disquiet Junto series are in various stages of planning for London, England; Portland, Oregon; and elsewhere.
Way Down the Pike: Currently writing a book about Aphex Twin's landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, for the 33 1/3 series.
5 Most Recent Comments
Guy: "This is reminiscent of Laurent Prexl’s Poésure et sculptrie project. The recordings of some 17 poets were..."
Ao: "Thank You very much "
Joaquín Mendoza: "link to the fifth www.joaquinmendoza.net/ archivos/JM_estudio05.pd.zip thanks for..."
Anton: "Damn! Did anyone download the classic RJDJ desktop file while it was still available? Is there a way to send..."
Anthony: "I’m writing a dissertation on the use of aleatorics in Richard D James’ work. Any chance of a..."
disquiet junto
The Disquiet Junto is an ongoing weekly collaborative music-making space in which restraints are used as a springboard for creativity. It's housed at soundcloud.com. Subscribe to the announcement list at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto. These are the weekly projects to date: 1: ice cubes • 2: duet for foghorn and steam whistle • 3: expanded glass harp • 4: remixing Marcus Fischer • 5: adding sounds to everyday life • 6: remixing archival Edison cylinders • 7: create through subtraction • 8: rework Benjamin Franklin's autobiography • 9: cross-species collaboration • 10: remix a previous Junto track • 11: everyday mechanical rhythms • 12: cut and paste • 13: remixing wild Up playing Shostakovich • 14: sonic version of Matt Madden's Oubapo story • 15: aural RGB • 16: sandpaper and dice • 17: transition between field and composed • 18: relative prominence • 19: graphic score (photo by Yojiro Imasaka) • 20: use the NodeBeat app • 21: the four seasons • 22: sonic decay • 23: palindrone • 24: a suite of sonic alerts • 25: remixing project 24 • 26: making music from your trash • 27: turm the instruction text into sound • 28: remix a netlabel release • 29: music from water, inspired by William Gibson's Count Zero • 30: sounds from silence • 31: Revisiting a 1955 Yoko Ono Fluxus piece • 32: sonify the 2012 U.S. presidential election polling data • 33: making music with a turntable but without vinyl • 34: Use the theme song of the Radius broadcast as the source of an original composition • 35: Make music from a sample page of Beck's Song Reader sheet music • 36: Reworking Bach into abstract expressionism • 37: The sound of commerce • 38: Make a fake field recording • 39: Combine three tracks from the Nowaki netlabel into one • 40: Turn a Kenneth Kirschner duet into a trio • 41: Dirty minimalism • 42: Record a "naive melody" with your oldest and newest instruments> • 43: Make mechanical roars from the sound of a retail space • 44: Transition from storm to calm using field recordings from Sandy 2012 • 45: Combine material from the public domain adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Tom Sawyer • 46: Investigate a recording of the voting process for its "sonic fingerprint." • 47: Turn the muffled voices of a distant party into the foundation of a recording. • 48: Celebrate the Creative Commons license that allows for derivative works by remixing music from the Three Legs Duck netlabel. • 49: Make a track, 50% of which is the sound of a tape cassette deck in motion. • 50: Encode a word or phrase in Morse Code and employ that as a track's rhythm. • 51: Create a 2012 audio diary with a dozen five-second segments. • 52: Celebrate the Creative Commons by remixing three tracks from the Bump Foot netlabel. • 53: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it (redux). • 54: Create an original musical score for the day's news. • 55: Combine two Nils Frahm solo piano pieces into one. • 56: Make music from the sound of the tick of a clock. • 57: Use sounds from the Phonetics Lab Archive at UCLA to depict emotions. • 58: Celebrate the Creative Commons by remixing three tracks from the Endless Ascent netlabel. • 59: Make music from three randomly assigned vowels.Tags
8-bit android app audio-games chiptune classical comics copyleft demix field-recording film forum-digger free gadget generative i-hop installation ios ipad iphone ipod ipod touch jazz junto live-performance mp3 discussion group netlabel noise reactive remix rock science-fiction score silence site-maintenance sketches of sound software sound-art sounds-of-brands turntablism TV video video-games voice year's besttwitter: @disquiet
- By far the top search term on Disquiet (.com) this week has been “cello” — followed, distantly, by “improvising” and, then, by “Xenakis.” 1 hour ago
- NaturalReader (iOS) and FBReader with TTS Plugin (Android) are my new jams. 1 hour ago
- Someone will assign Jonathan Lethem to review the new Glenn Frankel book on The Searchers, right? 15 hours ago
- Apparently “watermarked” means “so complicated to download that you never actually get to listen to it.” 19 hours ago
- Beautiful. MT @echosonic: New for @djunto: Miroitant de l’eau [disquiet0059-vwls] by @echosonic via @SoundCloud soundcloud.com/echosonic/miro… 20 hours ago
Follow Me on Twitter
instagram: @dsqt
Information flows through this.
-
Image to accompany field recording of library HVAC.
-
Impromptu Craigslist road trip. Crate digging.
-
Archives
By month & by topic
-
RSS
This site's RSS/XML feed.
Subscribe
-
Elsewhere
Resources on the Internet
-
Cont@ct
marc@disquiet.com
Image of the Week: Cassette Tape Loop
The word “tape” has long since moved from specific physical reference to metaphor. Most tape loops and mix tapes and tape recordings today are entirely digital, and the word “tape” serves as an aura-enhancing vestige of a time and place way back when and where those metaphors originated.
In the past year, the cassette tape has seen something of a resurgence, in large part thanks to the development of dedicated cassette-tape record labels. It’s also popped up in furniture design and illustration (and even as a Marc Jacobs USB-hub gadget), but in most cases when the cassette appears it’s as a totem of a time long gone.
Below is an image of an elegant cassette-tape loop constructed by Marc Fischer, a member of the duo Unrecognizable Now (whom I wrote about last month: disquiet.com).
As he explains it, it’s based on an earlier design, and his attempt involved using as much of the interior cassette space as possible. It’s lovely how the familiar mechanisms of a cassette tape appear in a slightly unfamiliar setup, how the looping device retains the structural integrity of the original, and simply builds upon it. This isn’t nostalgia, and nor is it ironic; it’s a logical step forward for a device that time hasn’t quite forgotten.
More on Fischer’s tape-loop experiment at unrecnow.com/dust. He’s promised audio examples in the near future.
By Marc Weidenbaum
One Trackback
[...] says: As he explains it, it’s based on an earlier design, and his attempt involved using as much of [...]