Disquiet Junto 0647 Day Drone

The Junto project this week is to "Make some daylight drones for Drone Day."

This took me about five minutes.

My son dismissed the results as "New Age-y" but that seemed appropriate to me.

The video shows a pair of Rainbow Lorikeets that were at the Museum the other week, which is a bit unusual but not the first time I've seen this species in the Riverina.

naviarhaiku490 – The cold forest flaunts

 

When Naviar Records shared the haiku this week, I thought of the wind rushing between the trees in my front yard.

It's not really a forest but Australian trees don't really grow that way.

I don't know what a wood anemone looks like, since apparently they don't grow on my continent, but I thought it might sound like wind organs.

Disquiet Junto 0515 Talking Cure

The Disquiet Junto prompt this week is to write a piece of music for a psychotherapist's office.

While I've never been in a psychotherapist's office, my impression is that it'd be good to have something ambient with enough variation to mask the possibility of hearing a voice from the next room.

Last weekend a swarm of bees arrived at the end of my driveway and I'd been looking for an opportunity to incorporate this recording into something.

I liked the idea that one might be eased out of the bustle of daily life by hearing something more bustling than human life.

As I listened to the looped bees I turned to the bowed vibraphone samples that are one of my favourite ambient instruments.

After exporting a two-minute version to loop, I realised it didn't work as seamlessly as I'd like.

So I went back and created this four-minute version, which was almost the limit of my bee recording.

Triggered

Feel somewhat attacked by this meme, since I also made a three-hour ambient album.

In my defence it was back in 2010.

Sometimes I think about revisiting it to see if I can do a better job of mastering the recording, which became irritating with compression.

Disquiet Junto 0478 Collage of Collages

The Disquiet Junto activity this week is a musical collage and I've layered up some of my more ambient recordings from last year. 

Seven years of Naviar Haiku

Great to be part of the Naviar Records community and appear on their recent compilation.

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.

naviarhaiku331 – Peaks of cloud

The haiku shared by Naviar Records this week brought to mind the weathervane at the end of my street.

It prompted me to explore piano loops of varying lengths, while aiming to get an Eno-esque ambient result.

Immersion

If it weren't for Covid-19, I'd be at Valla Beach right now.

It's been a few years since I last visited and I leave with so many great photographs and recordings, they appear in Junto and Naviar projects for years afterwards.

For now I'll have to make do with music.

Ambient relay

Recently I joined an "ambient relay," where each participant contributed to two tracks.

This asynchronous collaboration crossed the finish line today and is now on Bandcamp.



I've been involved with various relays and appreciate they all have different approaches.

At first I thought we'd only be listening to the contribution of the person ahead of us, then realised that was an assumption from other processes.

You can see in this graphic how the process was designed for each participant to build on the previous collaborator.

I find myself a bit irritated that some of the more textural sounds sit in the foreground of the mix, but enjoyed the prompt to develop new work and explore a different practice.

naviarhaiku325 – true tranquillity

I've been missing the sea, so the haiku shared by Naviar Records this week stirred me.

Sounds from the global lockdown

I've contributed to a couple of Cities and Memory's projects this year

Recently they published #StayHomeSounds and I shared a recording from my porch.

It features galahs rousing at dawn and the song of the pied butcherbirds who visit around the start of autumn and spring.

When I posted the link on a local Facebook page, I got this nice comment.

Hulong

Historian Bill Gammage describes Hulong as the site of a conflict during the Frontier Wars, which arose as Europeans settled along the Murrumbidgee River in the mid 19th Century.

Evidence of the Wiradjuri culture can still be found in the region, although Hulong is now known as Whitton.

After being inspired by Garlo Jo's Ventdeguitares.com project to record at Poison Waterholes Creek in 2017, I've returned to the idea of using a guitar played by the wind at sites of conflict between black and white Australia.

Australia's First Nations are the oldest living culture, so it seems appropriate to show the scars of what might have become a shield remain on a living tree.

Yindyamarra

Emily Yang on ambient

Ambient music is perhaps sort of a record of cultural exhaustion, of being caught in situations that seem to demand a collapse of context. It seems to say — if we have found our present cultural landscape unlivable, the best we can do is create miniatures of it for ourselves.

Disquiet Junto 0350 Selected Insomniac Works

The Junto this week asks for music to treat insomnia.

Fortunately I've done a lot of recent research into this phenomena and know that what I like is to hear something soothing.

The sounds come from a Kawai GMega run through a Line6 delay pedal and a Waldorf Streichfett.

Disquiet Junto 0323 Music for Meditation

The Junto this week is pretty much as described.

Down below you can see my initial attempt, which seemed too random and distracting for meditation.

So I returned to an earlier recording of bowls floating on water and changed my approach, as well as including a wider variety of reverbs.

Naviarhaiku217 – It has come to pass

My response to the haiku shared by Naviar Records this week is a simple one, a recording of a morning scene on the Goulburn River.

Disquiet Junto 0256 Music in Place

The goal of the Junto project this week is to record a piece in place using only sounds from that place. It's an idea I've explored in my "Parktronica" and it was in reflecting on previous recordings that I concluded it should be Mountford Park.



Mountford Park is central to the town of Leeton and I've recorded it many times before. For example, in the video above you can see the playground before they replaced the large slide with the flying fox in the video below.



Mountford Park playground was also where I screened results from my remixes of Leeton playgrounds and it was then that I appreciated the bells of the churches ringing from different directions.

Today I took my Nikon camera to the outdoor stage but wasn't quick enough to get the start of the Anglican church bells. It's more pronounced when the Catholic church bells start ringing. Similarly, it's more noticeable when the Iris 2 part starts using the Catholic church bell than when an earlier part uses the Anglican church bell.

In addition to the two Iris 2 parts, there are two loops. During the first bells there's a passing car that's looped, giving a rising and falling that I feel like a kettle drum. It continues throughout, as well as another after the bells finish chiming and also has a car rumble.

Disquiet Junto 0252 Sonic Palindrome

The Junto this week asks for a sonic palindrome.

My initial idea was to pick through Em and G chords on my guitar with MIDI pick-up, then double the parts and reverse one. So it would play backwards then forwards, moving from a minor key to a major one to get a sense of resolution.

When I started reversing the part in Live, I noticed it changed the placement of the notes. Where reversing the audio means the notes fade in, reversing the MIDI seem to make them start in about the same spot. So I resorted to exporting the MIDI part through the Oddity pad with Valhalla reverb, then importing it in and reversing it.

The forward and backward parts now sit on top of each other and the result is more like a palindrome in sounding the same in either direction.

At the last minute I decided to add another instrument using the MIDI part, settling on the bowed vibraphone samples that are part of the Live Suite. This isn't doubled with a reverse part, so it kinda ruins the palindrome approach but adds a lot more interest to the song I think.

Disquiet Junto 0250 Soothing Sounds

The 250th Junto asks for sounds to soothe a baby. I really wanted to record my ukulele but I remembered what worked for my kids and it wasn't instrumental music.

For my first pregnancy I made mixes in the hope that the stories were true about kids calming when they hear the theme of a TV show watched regularly by their mother.

My partner likes Aphex Twin's ambient works, so there was a lot of that as well as Cliff Martinez' Solaris soundtrack. The latter was on very high rotation throughout the pregnancy, birth and subsequent months. Then around six months I went through a Duke Ellington phase and I think that contribute to my son's skill singing because he's always had good pitch, although so does his mother and grandfather.

With successive children there was less opportunity to focus but I have been a fan of ensuring my kids have soothing background noises. One album that has been popular through all three pregnancies and been recommended to friends is a CD reissue of the Environments album of 1969 with waves crashing on a beach. It's funny that there's a break on the CD for the two sides of the album.

My partner reminded me of the album when I asked if she'd record some of the songs she sings for the kids to go to sleep. Just this week my youngest asked her to start doing this again, despite him being nearly eight years old. She knows a few old English lullabies with surprisingly mellifluous melodies.

This recording of beautiful Valla Beach was made during our winter holidays to the north. Well, as far north as Brisbane.

Valla is about a half an hour south of Coffs Harbour and my partner's family have a beach house there. It's been the subject of a previous Junto track this year, as well a site for great lightning pics and I saw an octopus and a seal and maybe a merman.

It was recorded using a Rode Videomic on my Nikon D5100 SLR. I've added a couple of Valhalla reverbs, as well as a low C using Massive and mastered with Ozone 7.