Disquiet Junto 0582 X Techno


After seeing the Junto prompt, I went looking for a sample to manipulate and found a video of my youngest from our visit to Canberra in 2019. 

That trip featured in a couple of Juntos around then and I’ve used this material elsewhere. 

The title is a pun too, since Sunday suggests relaxed but also “son day” techno. 

I knew the percussive instrument could be pitched down to create a kick, which is the foundation of the genre. 

Going for a relaxed feel, I opted for a slower tempo and a bit of dub-style tape delay. 

The video was edited in Ableton Live along with the audio.

naviarhaiku476 – Birds in a bare tree


The Naviar prompt mentioned birds, so I took it as a cue to try another approach to the material used for the Junto this week.

Disquiet Junto 0581 Helsinki Downspout


At first I listened to the pipe and appreciated how the splash kinda swings against the drip. 

Then Soundcloud wanted a log-in, so I thought I'd look for a drain recording of my own. 

It was weird looking back to 2015 as this week I returned to the job I started then. 

I couldn't find drains, but I did find drips. 

Can't remember why I recorded various objects in the shower. 

So I've edited my drips to get an effect like what I remember liking in the Helsinski downspout.

It's called "Cheer up" because that's what we say to down pipes!

Disquiet Junto 0580 Evo Evol Evolve

The Disquiet Junto assignment is to "Record a piece of music that develops like an organism evolves." 

The so-called Horseshoe crab came to mind after I wondered what my son would pick. 

He described these as a poster child for not evolving. 

As I considered how that might sound, I remembered a sketch of a riff that had been sitting on my desktop for a few months.

So I opened the Live document, shifted the loops around a little to sit with the video from Archive.org and then put that exported version through Motion's comic effect.

A riff that didn't want to evolve as a soundtrack to a Horseshoe crab.

What I've learned from using the Cut-Up Technique

This week I gave a Studio Co!Lab Artist in the House talk on what I've learned using the Cut-Up Technique.

To begin I encouraged everyone to print a copy of Picasso's poem about noon, since he's known to have stated that artists steal and it feels right to honour this contemporary of Cut-ups.

My Cut-up experiences have been realised in lyrics, sampling and also a book that invites destruction.

I also mentioned the poetry reading that I gave at a book launch which performed a live remix.

We began cutting Picasso's poem into individual words while I explained how the imagery reminded me of the Riverina and introduced David Bowie's use of the technique.

The singer acknowledged his debt to Brion Gysin and echoed some of the magical attributes he promoted with a process pioneered earlier in the 20th Century by Tristan Tzara.

My recollection is Cut-ups were a significant development in the split between Surrealism and Dada, when Tzara created a "manifesto" using newspaper clippings.

At the time the Surrealists were writing manifestoes and took offence at this brute process for generating words.

However, the cut-ups have been seen to share in common the influence of Freud's ideas of dream analysis as a way of identifying cues from the unconscious.

Cut-up documents interrogate the text in a haphazard manner that reveals as much about the dynamics and relationships of the reader, while allowing anyone to be an author. 

In this way it shows a Dadaist antiestablishment attitude that can be seen as an attack on authorial intention.

Some might view the process as reassembling a document and the process can be viewed through a variety of philosophical positions, such as the magic and art roles.

When you begin creating a cut-up text there are decisions about the process that determine roles for chance or probability.

You might choose to draw a word from a hat, or you might assemble them from a visible pool of possible words.

My partner developed an exhibition that referenced William S. Burroughs' use of the Cut-up Technique in 2014 and that year introduced me to an alternate approach proposed by the Disquiet Junto.

While the process of preparing the pieces and then pasting them together has a meditative quality that suits gallery spaces that are open for more of a performance art aesthetic, the simplicity of the idea is ripe for technology.

It is interesting to see David Bowie returned to the idea as personal computing developed with the Verbasizer, which has been beautifully realised at this website.

The idea of cutting seems simple and it's worth remembering that many ideas about editing have developed since Tzara.

When you cut up a text the words are never entirely anonymous, even if the document become a palette for beige language.

Each discrete piece becomes a springboard for a chain of connotations, which is a process that has been called "unlimited semiosis" in semiotic theory.

These become potent symbols and through the popularisation by Gysin the cut-up practice came to be infused with ideas of magic that were researched by Genesis P-Orridge.

Burroughs undertook audio and film-based cut-ups that extended the ideas he identified in literary practice.

I explained an audio-based curse that P-Orridge detailed and how sampling harnesses a similar energy when it takes a small example from a larger whole.

Working with the landscape as a document to sample you find inspiration in selecting small symbolic examples to trigger memories of entire ecosystems.

Which l led into my discussion of my Soundscaping videos and exhibitions.

Using video as a medium for cut-ups led to the role of Arthur Lipsett's 21-87 in the development of Star Wars.

I pondered religious implications as well as broader philosophical questions of free will and determinism.

There were some questions towards the end, including some discussion of AI and machine-learning tools.

I talked about my collaborative poetry, where I fed lines about the environment into a website.

It offered results that were surprising in a way similar to cut-ups but overcame a key constraint.

The responses from AI saw angels, which was delightful and language that I never use.

So the AI experiment gave a nice counterpoint to the Cut-up Technique and Andrew, the moderator, decided that was the moment to end.

Motivation from Leslie Diuguid

Keep going. It’s one thing to try something new. It’s another thing to keep improving on that new thought.

Nine years of Naviar

Very happy to continue my collaborations with Naviar Records and see a few of my tracks from last year included with their latest compilation.

Disquiet Junto 0579 Memory Serves


This is a rerecording of the track ‘Hopped’ that I recorded last week. 

That piece was the second of three takes, so I went back and exported the third take to share.

In this version I take a different path to the F# chord progression from the song about being a tumbleweed and arrive sooner at the delay setting you can hear with it.

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