Disquiet Junto Project 0737: Opening Ceremony

The Assignment: We’re just getting started.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
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Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.

Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.

Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks also generally appear in the llllllll.co discussion thread.

Disquiet Junto Project 0737: Opening Ceremony
The Assignment: We’re just getting started.

There is one step to this project. Thanks to Mahlen Morris for having proposed it.

Record a percussion piece that fills the listener with anticipation for what’s to come. Imply forthcoming spectacle, thrills, and excitement.

Tasks Upon Completion:

Label: Include “disquiet0737” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.

Upload: A person participating in the Disquiet Junto should post only one track per weekly project (SoundCloud account preferred but not required). If on occasion you feel inspired to post more than one track (whether to a single account or across multiple accounts), you should clarify which is the “main” rendition for consideration by fellow members and (if on SoundCloud) for inclusion in the SoundCloud playlist.

Share: Post your track and a description/explanation at https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0737-opening-ceremony/

Discuss: Listen to and comment on the other tracks.

Additional Details:

Length: The length is up to you. 

Deadline: Monday, February 16, 2026, 11:59pm (that is: just before midnight) wherever you are.

About: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Newsletter: https://juntoletter.disquiet.com/

License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).

Please Include When Posting Your Track:

More on the 737th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Opening Ceremony — The Assignment: We’re just getting started — at https://disquiet.com/0737/

RIP, Greg Brown

Thinking back across the distance

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Been thinking a lot about Greg Brown, the founding Cake guitarist, who died recently, age 56, way too young, even by rock’n’roll standards. We weren’t close friends or anything but he lived nearby when I was living in Sacramento, working for Tower Records, and we’d yap as he’d pass by, usually on the way to/from a rehearsal/gig. I can still easily picture him, slightly slouched, jacket a little larger than it needs to be, ratty case in hand. Such a sweet, thoughtful guy, and his playing in those early years of Cake was sublime: taut, economical, driving, restrained, bristling — whatever a song called for, it was exactly that. Seeing the band countless times as they came into being was a wonderful experience, central to my 20s. It’s one thing to go to concerts occasionally, to catch a touring band, maybe get to the venue in time for the end of the opening act. It’s another to be part of a community where bands are constantly playing, and you’re observing as they form, emerge, and yes often decline, and how the ones that persevere proceed to mesh, mature, evolve, and yes often splinter. There are a lot of ways to spend your 20s, and going out to see live local music all the time is about as good as it gets. I find it fascinating how certain periods of your life don’t sit with you in full, but get encapsulated in a fragment of a conversation, in a bit of afternoon sun, and, of course, in a riff. Brown contributed many such riffs. RIP, sir.

Time to Cull

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
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When I posted this image on Instagram, I got an immediate warning. Apparently the phrase “Time to cull” is often associated with posts, presumably images, that are removed from the site for being inappropriate. This alert was, to say the least, surprising to me, and I did briefly consider whether I should proceed with the post. (I did.) But in any case, I do wanna trim some of my vinyl (and CDs, for that matter).

Looking at Field Recordings

Thanks to a piece of visualization software by Scott D. Brown

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
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Scott D. Brown has created an elegant web interface for creating starkly beautiful circular spectrograms for uploaded audio files. The above one is the result of a 30-second recording I made of a fire alarm. The one below is of birdsong played in a bathroom (read for more details). Note how much less self-evidently rhythmic it is, and how the shading between frequencies is more varied and nuanced:

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The next one, resembling a slice of a tree, is the sound of a train beginning to slow as it approaches a station. Looking at field recordings is a great way to listen to them. By observing how machines register to machines, you can find touchstones for your own attention.

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And this final one, from the earliest of my recent spate of field recordings, is the phase shift of contrasting beeps from retail protection devices, plus occasional appearances of cashier pings and muffled human speech (read for details). You can actually see the phase shift as the distance between rhythmic elements grows smaller and then larger, round and round.

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You can upload your own sounds to see what they sound like at spectrogram.scottbrown.co.nz. Brown is, per the URL, based in New Zealand.