My First Half-Year with Disquiet Junto

Or how a search for experimental jazz led me to a weekly music and sound challenge in effect since 2012.

Are you familiar with “The Wayback Machine,” the search engine where you can find older preserved versions of websites? It is part of Internet Archive, a wide-ranging project to preserve web-based materials and word, sound, and visual uploads of all kinds. If you ever clicked on an external link listed in a Wikipedia article, there is a significant chance that you were directed to a website that remains now only as a snapshot, a nifty way to sidestep problems with broken links. (They’re not screenshots - you may be able to access more links contained in these archived versions.)

I became intrigued while I was searching for free, accessible, and occasionally hard-to-find texts for my university students. The attraction was that the materials are free. Later, I got an education about the Archive’s vast audio collection.

My first search was “experimental jazz,” more or less as a broad term for the free improvisation that not long before I began to play at that time. The first recording that caught my interest was surely because of the group name: Orchestra Eclettica Sincretista. Their album Aulodie (2015) is built on an intriguing cycle of dreamscapes interpreted by several collaborators organized by prolific keyboardist and composer Marco Lucchi.

Following Lucchi on social media, I saw his contributions for Disquiet Junto in early Summer 2023. I was curious about his contributions to this fellow collaborative project, a weekly series of challenges that also spreads the range of music and sound delivered weekly by longtime music writer Marc Weidenbaum that, as of this writing, is rapidly approaching its 700th sonic stimulus. I entered the community for number 0649, the instructions of which was to compose a concerto.

Note that musical terms can be interpreted broadly here.

Both my first and second contribution, “Loud Work in Progress,” were essentially noise ambient experiments. My third was a melodic instrumental with me speaking “On Humans, Electronics, & Improvisation.”

Recently, I assembled a list with these and more of my first six months — July through December — of responses to these challenges, plus a few extras that were inspired by them, in Disquiet Year One (Volume 1).

There are 25 tracks in all, including one inspired by my first challenge, remixes for two of my tracks, and three remixes by fellow Disquiet Junto crew of my lullaby “Al Mar Mi Piratita” (“To the Sea, My Little Pirate”). Thanks to Raincat, Jimmy Lem, and Hugh G Three for having fun with it.

There is also my remix of Raincat’s lullaby “Welcome to the World.” Actually, if you’re looking for something to sing or hum to your little ones. I invite you to check out the whole compilation and, if you dare, the remixes we did of each other’s lullabies the following week.

All but one track that was in my Student Success Symposium playlist are also here, so it is largely because of my responses to the challenges that allowed me to create that exhibit too.

Grazie mille, Marco.

Thnx, Marc W.

Enjoy.

https://disquiet.com/

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