Junto Project 0578: Rabbit Spirit Ally [repost]

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

“You said a moment ago that everybody you look at seems to be a rabbit,” says the doctor to his patient in a cartoon by James Thurber. “Now just what do you mean by that, Mrs. Sprague?” Meanwhile, Mrs. Sprague recoils in horror at the vision of her therapist’s enlarged, leporine head.

There is a rabbit who lives in the underbrush just behind Suss Müsik headquarters. We’ve named her/him Clover. Clover has grown to be fairly large and tends to regard humans with more curiosity than fear. Still, Clover can still easily escape from predators when compelled. Perhaps Mrs. Sprague could take a leaf from Clover’s book.

The rabbit is viewed in Chinese tradition as a calm, gentle yet crafty animal, whose energy emphasizes balance and intelligence. The phrase jiǎo tù sān kū (狡兔三窟) loosely translates as “a cunning rabbit has three burrows and more than one means of escape.” With the arrival of the Lunar New Year, this is the approach Suss Müsik took with this week’s Junto.

The piece begins with a gentle piano arpeggio, broken into three fragments that randomly shift cadences like a tone poem. A fake fretless bass moves things along until a DIY synth glitches things up. Brief stabs of percussion interrupt the calm, gentle atmosphere, yet the overall feeling is one of balance and crafty intelligence (or whatever the Suss Müsik equivalent would be).

The piece is titled Jiǎo Tù Sān Kū. The image is based on an etching owned by The Welcome Collection, the use of which is covered under Public Domain Mark (PDM) terms and conditions.

Suss Müsik Featured on CKRL “La Croche Oreille”

On Sunday 16 October, Suss Müsik will appear on the CKRL radio program La Croche Oreille, hosted by Gaëtan Gosselin. The program is hosted from Quebec City and broadcast in French. Maybe someone who speaks that language fluently will kindly let Suss Müsik know what’s being said. This coincides with Suss Müsik’s latest album New Hopes being listed as this week’s “What’s New” feature. Exciting stuff.

Contact Mic Synth & MIDI Device + Meng Qi Wingie 2

Suss Müsik created a video demonstrating a handmade contact mic synth and customized MIDI device, built from recycled 1990’s computer hardware. (You can see the hard drive housing that serves as a sort of “plate reverb”). One channel was run through a Meng Qi Wingie 2. Reverb and delay pedals were controlled via footpedals; vocal samples were triggered by another handmade device using pads. The piece was largely improvised and recorded live in September 2022.

Junto Project 0557: Condensation Is a Form of Change [repost]

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

Condensation is a form of change, but this is only half of the story. Condensation is what happens when vapor transforms to a liquid state; evaporation is what happens when liquid changes back to vaporous form. It’s a constant, cyclical form of reclaiming what was lost.

Michael John Harris, author of the book The End of Absence, has an interesting perspective on loss vs. gain: “My child will never know the value of learning to read a map without GPS. This is the problem with losing lack: it’s nearly impossible to recall its value once it’s gone.“

Some cognitive scientists argue that digital media has rendered our brains into mush. Others believe that, like how the clouds above manage moisture content, it’s simply a matter of displacing one form of cognitive processing with another.

For this Junto project, Suss Müsik explored the cyclical nature of something being there and then not there. The original photo was scanned and rendered to high-contrast, which revealed two distinct patterns: the first a reasonably formed outline comprising a circle (we’ll call that v.1), the other a series of amorphous blobs (v.2).

high-contrast scan of four condensation rings

high-contrast scan of four condensation rings, abstracted

v.1 became the basis for a cyclical riff played on fake bass and a DIY synth device. v.2 was played by tracing a finger across a DIY piezo mic resonator (constructed from old hard drive enclosures) and passing the signal through a Meng Qi Wingie 2. Some sloppy piano was overdubbed; interruptions were designed per interpretation of the “score.”

The piece is titled after Hieronimo Squarciafico, the 15th-century Venetian editor who warned that the invention of the printing press would inhibit humankind’s ability to remember things.

New Hopes Album Released on Bandcamp

Suss Müsik has released a number of mini-albums and EP’s since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of our globe. The latest is an eight-track LP of short electro-acoustic compositions for handmade sound-making devices, fake strings, piano, percussion, barely detectable vocals, and (in one track) a penny-whistle. The album is entitled New Hopes and currently available on Bandcamp. New Hopes will soon arrive at your favorite music streaming service. In the meantime, listen and read the always entertaining liner notes.

New Hopes album cover

Junto Project 0553: Break That Cycle [repost]

Someone suggested that Suss Müsik repost our contributions to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects, because they enjoy reading the explanations of the tracks. While you’re reading the original post, make sure you check out the other contributors’ works as well.

Any break or interruption in tempo might classify as a form of bond fission. To compose a piece that celebrates fracture as a creative element, Suss Müsik sought to understand how to locate bonds in non-musical terms. Enter Colorado School of Mines geochemistry professor Mark Eberhart, author of the book Why Things Break:

“Picture yourself flowing in space. Off the right and left are atomic nuclei. Neither can be seen, however, as each is surrounded by a dense cloud of electrons. Move up or down, backward or forward and, as if you were descending through a cloudbank, the fog diminishes. Alternatively, move toward one of the nuclei, and the electronic fog engulfing you becomes denser. Follow the path to the nucleus along with the electronic fog is densest and you are moving along the bond.”

That’s the approach Suss Müsik took with this weird piece for piano, fake strings, and rudimentary homemade synth. A simple, repetitive chord sequence was twinned on two instruments in 4/4 time. An occasional blip of piano arpeggios exceed the time signature while staying relatively in tempo.

Things bust loose midway through the piece, as the strings succumb to excessive glitch refactoring at a much higher tempo (moving toward the “nuclei” of the arpeggio tempo). Meanwhile, an electronic gadget burps in approval at the same rate. In true Sun Ra fashion, the piano tries to hold it all together before the primary chords resume their respective places, this time accompanied by a fake cello mirroring the arpeggios.

The piece is titled Homolysis, a form of fission by which each broken part of a bond retains fragments of the other.

Stereo Resonance

Suss Müsik recently acquired a Meng Qi Wingie 2. This little device takes any audio input and converts the signal to a resonated series of tones. The results are quite beautiful.

To optimize the utility of this device in Suss Müsik’s sound world, a DIY contact microphone was built from a reconstituted heat sink pulled from an old Dell computer. Placing a sheet of aluminum on the top of the instrument allowed for additional signals to be picked up via the “alleys” of the heat sink. Combined with a customized MIDI controller built into the housing, the sonic possibilities are endless.

DIY MIDI device with heat sink contact microphone

Here are a couple of YouTube videos demonstrating the instrument at work.

Beige Nostalgia

“Beige box” is a term applied to older personal computers with dated aesthetic appeal and, by today’s metrics, substandard performance specifications. It’s typically used in derision when referring to consumer technologies made by IBM (and their ilk) in the 1990’s.

Suss Müsik is old enough to have used such devices unironically. Syquest drives, Iomega removable media drives, La Cie CD-writers, and (yes, admittedly) the odd IBM Model 30 have all graced Suss Müsik headquarters at some point or another.

For nearly two decades, these “beige box” devices have occupied space in Suss Müsik’s attic. There they sat, resigned to a status as dusty relics of a long ago time before iPhones and high-speed wifi freed us all from the shackles of 56k modems and 16-color graphics cards.

What those devices did have, however, were enclosures of exceptional strength and agility. They were often made from electrogalvanized steel, sufficiently rigid to protect their sensitive inner guts yet pliable enough to drill and cut holes. In other words, the perfect housing for a DIY synth or customized MIDI device.

Suss Müsik, ergo, has given these 25-year-old devices new life as sound-making implements. The first is an Iomega Jaz Drive from 1999 or so; the next piece is a removable SCSI backup drive. Perhaps the next project is an album inspired by technology of a long forgotten and underappreciated era.

Jaz Drive and SCSI backup drive from 1999 or so

front of Jaz Drive synth

back of Jaz Drive synth