It’s been running continuously, without a break, since 2012. Every Thursday morning, Disquiet’s Marc Weidenbaum posts a call to a community for a new compositional assignment. And this week, the project reaches the 750th (!) week. That means a call for something epic.
No, literally: the assignment this week is to make something epic. It’s entitled “Let’s Get Heavy.” Here’s how it’s going so far:
You can join in!
Disquiet Junto Project 0750: Let’s Get Heavy
It’s really the opposite of the current trend toward sameness, big data, and extractivist industry capitalism, or even snobbery as an antidote. Membership is open. You can post however you like, though SoundCloud is an easy shortcut. (Hey, it started in 2012, back when that was sort of the only game in town.) It’s just a chance for people to share music with each other. None of the elitist think-piece agonizing about whether there’s “too much music” and art requires scarcity, blah blah.
As Marc puts it, the goal is “to use constraints to stoke creativity.” It’s the process of making — that challenge in the assignment — that’s a big part of the appeal, and the camraderie of tackling it together and discovering how others respond.
Whatever it is, it must be working.
And there’s history:
There are the weekly Beat Battles sponsored by Stonesthrow, in which dozens if not hundreds of participants craft instrumental hip-hop beats from a shared sample. There is the tradition of Oulipo, whose embrace of creative constraints is personified by one of its co-founders, the author Raymond Queneau. Several comics artists with whom I have worked, including Matt Madden, have bonded under the banner of Oubapo, and there is, in fact, a related musical tradition, which goes by Oumupo. The Iron Chef of Music projects at kracfive.com (which were, for many years, a big part of the Downstream department here on Disquiet) influenced my thinking, as well.
The word “junto” comes from the name of a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in Philadelphia in 1727 as “a structured forum of mutual improvement.” In Franklin’s honor, the third Disquiet Junto project explored the glass harp, an instrument he experimented with in the development of what he christened the armonica.
Well, look, it was also very 2012 to be thinking positive thoughts about the USA (speaking as a US citizen), but we can all still rally around the glass armonica, right?
There have been so many great notions over those years. But for example, let’s hear it for ice cubes, archival Edison cylinders, palindromes, trash, Sherlock Holmes, sine waves, the fictional Metronomic Society, declassified NSA documents, tea kettles, abandoned movie theaters, vowels, failing Bluetooth signals, the news, the Xbox One startup sound, ice cubes again, invented insects, sirens and the Doppler effect, breathing, the number 23, locked grooves, made-up countries, breaking things, the Juno spacecraft, William Gibson novels, and changing the meter of a 1918 jazz recording by the Louisiana Five.
Discussions, the sign-up, and FAQ, and more at the Junto page:
And despite everything, Disquiet.com itself continues — a project since 1996.
Celebrate the internet that will outlast all the nonsense that is trying to replace the internet. Subscribe to that RSS feed. And this week, if you can, do something epic.
Pictured at top:
Disquiet Junto Project 0112: Calendrical Score (based on your day planner)
Disquiet Junto Project 0090: Between Stations (as in radio)