Music I play for friends

 

Disquiet Junto 0449 Page Machine

The Disquiet Junto assignment this week is to "Read a page of text from a book as if it were a musical score."

I settled on page 18 from the introduction to Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The layout of the page appealed to me, as it looked like it might be a drum intro and it was 8 August -- so I thought I should use 808 samples.

My process was to tally the syllables, since the text was largely haiku, as well as capital letters and punctuation.

The syllables became high-hats, while the capitals denoted kick drum and the punctuation triggered sound effects from the M-Tron Pro VST.

Then I decided to add a riser to convey the interpretive text, as it kinda serves to raise the rest of the writing.

And, finally, I flicked back to the contents page and took that last entry's page number to be the tempo.

The world right now

Disquiet Junto 0447 Listen Ahead

This week the Disquiet Junto asks "Imagine...what your world will be like six months from today."

The instructions prompted me to record Jo's song, which she'd asked to do after returning home from a solstice event."

When you google the lyrics

Disquiet Junto 0446 WWWLDD

The Disquiet Junto activity this week involves responding to World Listening Day.

It's prompted me to share a soundtrack I composed from field recordings for an exhibition by the Murrumbidgee Field Naturalists at the Leeton Museum & Gallery.

It was composed to be looped in the background and accompany the many photographs members have taken of the natural Riverina environment.

The material draws on a decade of field recordings, which have been layered to provide a rich sense of the landscape.

Seems an appropriate recording to share for World Listening Day.

Music from my formative years

Jarvis Cocker on writing

The written word is the nearest we can get to being inside someone else’s head. That’s kind of a magical thing, and it’s part of the magic of books.

My playlists when I leave them on shuffle

Disquiet Junto 0445 Aare Tribute

The Disquiet Junto this week asks participants to read a map of the river Aare as a graphic score.

My immediate thought when looking at the map was that Bern looks a bit like Wagga.

Then I remembered a recording I'd made at the beach late last year.

So I've combined the video of Wagga Beach with my track for relaxing by the river.

When you walk away

Disquiet Junto 0444 Bot Ensemble

The Disquiet Jutno assignment this week is to "Make music as directed by the great twitter.com/InstrumentBot account."

As I looked over the Bot's tweets, I took in the repetition of terms and started to formulate an idea.

Language like "tiny explosions" and "metronome" led me to think about recording drums, while the metallic descriptions reminded me that I'd been meaning to record various things in town.