Curated/instigated by Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet Junto is a “collaborative music-making space in which restraints are used as a springboard for creativity. Each Thursday a new Junto project is announced. Participants are expected to upload their completed tracks to the group by the following Monday at 11:59pm (that’s 11:59pm wherever you are).”
With a list of contributers approaching 200, this Soundcloud group is becoming quite the hot bed of creativity. I joined a couple of weeks ago and, last weekend, jumped into the deep end of the pool.
This track is an interpretation of a photo by Yojiro Imasaka.
I treated the photo as a head-on shot. The bottom of the picture is the “floor” of a mechanical plant; the stairs are a “walkway”; the openings in the walls are vents for whatever gaseous substances the plant is generating; the light is the destination.
All sounds are my voice – most of which have been processed.
A few people were already aware of this, but I think it’s time to let the cat completely out of the bag. (That’s a truly awful place to keep a cat, anyway.)
I have this ongoing issue with my singing voice. It’s, uhhh, going/gone away. And whatever the cause is, it seems to be voice related and not singing related. A lengthy conversation will cause a noticeable drop off in my speaking voice.
I’ve gone through the “it can’t be happening to me”; the determination to work my way through it; the depression when I realized no matter what I did, the situation was worsening, not improving. I’ve finally reached the point where I’m relating to it as an opportunity. Yeah – if you’d told me as recently as a month ago that’s what this is, I would have thought you were crazy too.
Here’s the deal, though. I don’t want to stop singing. Actually, I don’t think I can – it’s that much a part of who I am. I was fortunate to be dealt a half-way decent singing voice that, over a few decades, I turned into something better than average. It isn’t the techniques I learned that are going away – it’s the physical ability. So, I’m learning new techniques to go with what physical ability I do have – learning how to sing. Again. And it’s slow – and fun – and encouraging. And mighty, mighty slow. But I can tell that I’m making progress which, in itself, is enough to put a smile back on my face.
Meanwhile, I’m taking advantage of the “free” time the situation has created. I’ve been mixing a very long piece from vocal tracks I recorded last year. I’ve been resurrecting/digitizing some rehearsal tapes of a couple of bands I was part of in the late ’70s. And I’ve been working on new music as I’ve managed to acclimate myself to this “new” way of singing (three collaborations with folks who have been very patient, and a new song that will likely be placed under the Often Coiled banner).
Sadayatana is one of my favorite shows on Stillstream.com (it airs Saturday nights – 7pm Mountain Time). A couple of weeks ago, John played some excerpts from Swarm. They fit in beautifully – one of the many cool things about the show is the superb continuity and movement from beginning to end. Another cool thing is that they are made available as podcasts a week later. This one, called Signs and Stars, is available here.
As noted on the release page at Vuzh Music: “a slowly churning atmospheric soundscape full of foreboding, with howling voids and grinding glissandi.”
This one features no vocals from me. Every sound came from the yard behind the last home I had in Massachusetts. Ummm… well, the original sounds came from there – they’ve been altered a wee bit.
One of the parts I love about taking on a creative challenge is the uncertainty it brings – not really knowing what to expect from the effort, and usually not really knowing how the effort will be channelled. Another valuable part comes from the opportunities to learn. They go hand-in-hand, of course, and the List of Loss project is a great example.
Internalizing someone’s poetry to the tune (heh…) of one new song per month is a challenge with a deadline. It would be a deadline more easily met if I was willing to repeat/slightly change melodies and structures from one month to the next. I’d feel like I was cheating though, and would be far, far less than satisfied. Besides, Gregory’s poetry – while occupying a recurring theme – does not repeat itself. I truly would be doing his words a disservice if I chose repetition as a crutch for ease and quickness.
My composition approach begins with reciting (so to speak) the words until a melody and cadence has come along – a method that hasn’t taken long to provide results, so far. Then the real work begins. What structure would this melody work well in? The January piece (Skin in 13) is a melancholy lead with a choral background. The lyric melody in the February piece (Black Rainbow) sits on top of a gradually building drone and between a repeating hard left-right panned “drone”. For March, I decided to sing over the top of a keyboard accompaniment – which I had to write based on the vocal melody I already had. Well, I did that and it’s complicated enough for me to have trouble simultaneously playing and singing it well. The obvious next step, then, was to record the keyboard part and then record the vocal track. Easily done. Except that the melody changes tempo throughout as dictated by the feel of the words. Recording it that way wasn’t an issue as I was singing along with it. What has proved to be most difficult is singing over the top of the already recorded keyboard part. With no fixed tempo, a click track is useless. And there aren’t any obvious change cues. It’s all by feel. Apparently, I don’t feel it quite the same way each time, as the “syncing” results have been very unsatisfactory.
But “by feel” is how I prefer to work and, frankly, I believe it’s a large reason that I sound like “me”. Which pretty much leaves learning to play and sing the song – Well – simultaneously. That means practice, repetition, more practice, and more repetition. And I can’t take forever to do it, either, as there are a finite number of days left in March.
A challenge that becomes an opportunity to learn. Delicious.
Second month, so it’s fitting that I have two new songs to mention.
First is the second track in the List of Loss series. This one is Black Rainbow and its foundation (or “bed”, if you will) is a vocal drone and two phrases repeated throughout. Over those is the lead vocal line.
The other song is the first music from Sara Ayers and me in a few years, If We Had Known…. Like the piece mentioned above, this is all vocals – a melodious drone made from a choir of our multi-tracked voices, and shared “lead” lines mixed in.
