Bassling blog

Disquiet Junto 0719 Riding on the Metronome

The Disquiet Junto assignment is: Play with and against a steady beat.

Step 1: Locate a metronome and set it to play at a speed of your choice. Recommended: 70 bpm.
Step 2: Practice playing with, and against, and entirely apart from the beat.
Step 3: Record a piece of music in which you start off playing with the beat, and then veer away from it, and then are drawn back to it, and then veer away, around and again. End the piece while playing apart from the beat, not in sync with it.

My metronome was Ableton Live and the 70bpm recommendation stirred a couple of tracks as I let the Junto directions simmer since reading them on Thursday evening.

After a day or so an idea arose for a beat that veered away, so I started scaffolding a structure of a track.

Sunday morning arrives and I start recording a drum track, using the second take, then first takes of bass and ukulele.

Along the way I thought of veering on the bass too, more than the ukulele anyway.

Brian Eno on mental laziness

I think what bothers me, which is exactly part of what you’re saying, is the possibility of not making a mistake at all, of making things that always come with this professional finished gloss of what a real pop song looks like or what a real picture looks like. And I think that’s lethal.

I have an architect friend called Rem Koolhaas. He’s a Dutch architect, and he uses this phrase, “the premature sheen.” In his architectural practice, when they first got computers and computers were first good enough to do proper renderings of things, he said everything looked amazing at first.

You could construct a building in half an hour on the computer, and you’d have this amazing-looking thing, but, he said, “It didn’t help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings.”

I went to visit him one day when they were working on a big new complex for some place in Texas, and they were using matchboxes and pens and packets of tissues. It was completely analog, and there was no sense at all that this had any relationship to what the final product would be, in terms of how it looked.

It meant that what you were thinking about was: How does it work? What do we want it to be like to be in that place? You started asking the important questions again, not: What kind of facing should we have on the building or what color should the stone be?

When I see people fiddling around with synthesizers — this has always been a problem with synthesizers — they always come with a bank of sounds ready-made for people who don’t want to learn how to program them, which, it turns out, is most people.

I remember talking to Yamaha once, which had just produced the most successful synthesizer of all time, which was the DX7. And I said, “You should really make these a little bit easier to program.”

And they said, “Well, we don’t bother because nobody tries to change them anyway. We often get them back for repair, and we can tell if somebody has tried to change the programming, and nobody’s ever done it. They’ve just used the presets.”

That seems, to me, a kind of mental laziness that I really don’t think fits well with making new things.

This tape

Disquiet Junto 0718 Planet Jam It

The Disquiet Junto project this week is to "Record the sound of an advanced alien civilization."

The year is 2126, and your spaceship is on a routine science expedition of the outer reaches of previously unexplored parts of the universe. Your crew has encountered, for the first known time in human history, a planet that is home to sentient life that has developed an advanced civilization not unlike our own. After settling into geosynchronous orbit, you send down a stealth drone to explore. The drone captures audio and video. Please share the audio of your drone’s reconnaissance mission.