naviarhaiku503 – Caterpillar
This haiku shared by Naviar Records prompted me to record the chords I'd been jamming with on my electric ukulele.
Disquiet Junto 0608 Nature-to-Text
As someone, I think Brian Eno, once said “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.”
When I read the Junto instructions I thought they said to use a text-to-speech tool to turn a field recording into instructions for a composition.
Anyway, it led me to plan to use lines from my micro-journal with a recent field recording to start a composition.
After I double-checked the assignment and realised my error, I tried Youtube's auto-subtitles and Macwhisper but couldn't use a speech-to-text tool to turn a field recording into instructions.
So, I took the instruction to also include considering Eno and his hidden intention is where that recording landed.
Disquiet Junto 0607 Silence Wave
There’s just one step to this project:
Compose a piece of music in which the relative amount of sound to silence starts at zero (that is, no sound), rises to approximately 40 percent (that is, 60 percent silent) and returns to zero again. Keep the pace fairly steady.
I returned on the upright bass to the piece I first recorded.
Disquiet Junto 0606 Three to One
The project this week is to "Compose a piece of music with three times as much silence as sound."
Once again I reached for the guitar and began recording while waiting for my son to return home.
I recorded a few takes but the camera battery ran out before completing the final.
This version is the first take and I picked it as it has more silence.
In post-production I added some tape delay and reverb, as well as tube-style saturation.
Disquiet Junto 0605 Fifty Fifty
The Disquiet Junto prompt this week is to "Compose a piece of music with as much silence as notes."
It came from a suggestion I made to Marc after hearing Mozart on the radio while driving to work.
Ed Le Brocq had introduced the piece observing that it had as much silence as notes and it seemed perfect for a Junto exercise, particularly since I've found myself frustrated by making busy music.
(And, as an aside, I read Ed's book 'Whole Notes' recently and enjoyed it. One of the volunteers at the museum where I work had recommended it, saying all of the members of her ukulele group had liked it.)
Anyway, I found half an hour this morning to set-up a camera on the balcony of my out-laws place outside Wagga and recorded a few takes.
This evening I've tried to improve the sound quality by EQ-ing away higher frequencies and sneaking a bit of tape warble and delay, as well as compression.
And, I've got to add, I was pleased to read this from Marc in the Junto email:
Major thanks to Jason Richardson, aka Bassling, for having proposed this week's project. There may not be another person who's recorded as many Junto projects as Jason has, and so he has a unique sense of them. He interviewed me back in 2017 for Cyclic Defrost, and I learned quite a bit about the Junto myself during the conversation. I think frequently about an observation he made, in the context of one of his questions: "Junto themes seem to have proportion to daily life, with a number about sleeping, waking, eating, walking, etc." I couldn't agree more.