Real life has been brutal, frankly, so I haven’t been updating the music blog even though I’ve managed to participate in a few Disquiet projects since the last post.

First, #77, ‘disquiet0077-netlabelsplice’:

This project gave us links to three deriv-friendly netlabel tracks, and specified a time range for each of them. We were to take material from these, and use them to create a deriv-friendly track of our own. This track was done in Ableton Live.

The next week, #78, ‘disquiet0078-minusmusic’:

An original Edison-era wax cylinder recording of an old-time orchestra was provided, and we were to ‘subtract only’ to create a new piece. Like most, I interpreted ‘subtract only’ to imply filtering and volume/mute changes. I attached mutes and filter controls to MIDI events in Audiomulch, and recorded the piece live.

The third week, for disquiet0079-juntofate, had us participate in a remix contest using the (apparently public domain) soundtrack to the MST3K favorite, Manos, the Hands of Fate:

We were instructed to go ‘downtempo’, but unfortunately my random choices pulled track #24, “Chaos”, which as you could imagine from the title, was not the most downtempo track in the source set. Typical ‘crazed saxophone’ noises familiar from movies of the late 50s and early 60s (probably already a dated sound when Manos was made in 1966). I did manage to find a nice syncopated hook inside one of the breaks, and decided to build the bulk of the track on that.

Additional process details (and links) are available at the respective SoundCloud track sites. I just wanted to update.