Category: Music

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.

In 1997, members of a religious cult called Heaven’s Gate believed that the passing of the Hale-Bopp comet would be followed by a spaceship. Convinced that the spaceship would take “true believers” aboard to the Afterlife, several members bought an expensive telescope to gain a better view of the comet. Within days, they requested a refund; when asked why they returned the telescope, they complained that the item was defective because it didn’t show the spaceship in the comet’s wake. Shortly thereafter, all 39 members of the cult killed themselves.

Cognitive dissonance is a term coined by psychologist Leon Festinger to describe the state when a person’s beliefs and behavior contradict one another. It manifests itself in various ways, from what we eat to how we vote. The COVID-19 pandemic was a breeding ground for cognitive dissonance; political and cultural biases invaded factual discourse, impeding our capacity to solve a global condition whose reverberations persist to this day.

Suss Müsik sought to explore the vexatious nature of dissonance using DIY-glitch technologies and manipulated vocalizations. Sounds emitted from handmade devices were recorded to tape and “performed” using a hacked cassette Sony Walkman. The most interesting bits were sampled into loops and run through a grain synth engine. The vocal effect (which features a sample of psychologist Dr. Dan P. McAdams) recalls that of sound art pioneer Alvin Lucier, whose seminal piece I Am Sitting In A Room suggests a new form of musicality: spoken words verbalized and abstracted, the non-tonic becoming tonic and back again.

The piece is titled Festinger and was recorded live to 8-track.

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.

“The sun is not the well-behaved neighbor we would like to imagine,” says Sten F. Odenwald, the author of a book entitled The 23rd Cycle: Learning to Live with a Stormy Star. During the year 2000, at the peak of the sun’s 23rd cycle (according to when scientists began tracking solar storm activity), the number of observed sunspots reached its highest recorded peak to that point.

Geomagnetic storms are defined by changes in the disturbance-storm-time index (or DST), measured in units called nano-Tesla (nT). Think of it as something like barometric pressure, only on the sun. A geomagnetic storm is considered an intense “super-storm” when it reaches a minimum DST of less than —250 nT.

As the 23rd cycle closed in the year 2008, Odenwald warned that outbreaks of solar storm activity would only increase in future cycles. The historical models are already sobering; a geomagnetic storm caused the March1989 failure of Québec’s entire power grid, leaving six million people without electricity and causing auroras seen all the way to Texas. The minimum DST of this storm was —589 nT. (It would have been a delicious irony if the integer was 529, but alas).

With this cheerful tidbit in mind, Suss Müsik considered how the ionosphere of sound could be rendered unstable, causing fragments of foreboding beauty. A sampled bowl was refactored using a grain synthesizer, its shimmer used in parallel with a distressed organ sound. A Red Panda Particle pedal was used for the looping parts at 23 BPM.

The piece is titled DST —589 nT and was recorded live to 8-track.

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.

In 1925, Helen Keller challenged members of the Williamson County Lions Club, located about 20 miles southwest of Nashville (USA), to do more than just be business leaders. Keller instilled upon them the responsibility of better serving their community by adopting a philosophy that acknowledges accessible biodiversity. With that message came a commitment to providing experiences that a blind person could appreciate, even something as simple as being outdoors on a sunny day.

The result was a sensory park for the blind, located behind Grassland Elementary School and cared for by local volunteers. This small but inviting nirvana offers a feast for all senses, even if a visitor isn’t able to use one or more of them. A circular walkway features different stations, each devoted to exploring the possibilities of the soundscape, with natural earmarks (bubbling fountains, buzzing bees) helping visitors navigate the grounds without having to rely on visual clues.

Suss Müsik considered how auditory clues might be utilized to prevent blind travelers from trampling on fragile vegetation. The result is this strange and thankfully short piece. All the sounds are composed entirely from VCV Rack. Midi inputs were run from a Leap Motion controller, programmed to respond to gestures that move from side-to-middle. An Electro-Harmonix 8-Step CV sequencer controlled a Meris Enzo pedal from the mixer’s send channel.

Suss Müsik’s performance of this piece looks ridiculous, so of course there’s a video of it. Enjoy.

The piece is titled Liminality, a word to describe the status of being on a threshold. The image is a refactored bucolic scene somewhere in Pennsylvania.

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.

In their excellent book Healing At The Speed Of Sound, Don Campbell and Alex Doman mention how hospitals are experimenting with “[hiring] trained professionals [who] know how to harmonize with the sonic environment, mask ambient noise, and otherwise shape the auditory environment.”

Although numerous studies have been done on the benefits of sound design in clinical settings, Suss Müsik decided to seek some expert opinions.

Suss Müsik consulted with two friends for this project: one a mental health professional, the other living with the after-effects of a traumatic brain injury suffered a few years ago.

Both agreed that music is preferable to silence when sitting in the waiting area of a therapist’s office. Although neither had any interest in pop or rock music, there wasn’t much support for strictly ambient, shapeless, Enoesque soundscapes either. “I need something that rewards my attention if I choose to actively listen to it,” insisted the friend with a TBI, “I’m also fine if it recedes pleasantly into the background.”

The therapist friend echoed this sentiment, equating the music in a waiting room to the sonic equivalent of a fishtank. “There’s movement, light, shadow, and depth, but nothing that distracts or causes anxiety. The last thing we want is the environment causing mental or emotional friction. Something that functions well with natural light.”

For this short piece, Suss Müsik sought to create an actively calm, pleasantly busy soundscape. Something that rewards limited attention, settles into ambience when necessary, and serves as the auditory fishtank we all need from time to time.

The piece is titled Plume and named after Jenny Plume, a Nashville songwriter who created a music therapy program at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and in 2013 released a CD of their works.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0, which allows any remix, adaptation or derivative works from the original. If you like it, have at it.

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.

Suss Müsik of late has been studying the art of technoscientific semiotics. Don’t be too impressed. Most of the concepts befuddle and confuse Suss Müsik’s tiny brain.

According to a paper written by Zachary Horton, humans make sense of our environment by reducing everything to a transcribable surface. The sky, the land, the ocean — these vast entities represent forms of media that must be collapsed, in order to achieve comprehension of our place within the greater Anthropocene.

Freezing and thawing play a large part in our understanding of climate change. According to IPCC lead author and climate scientist Richard A. Betts, CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere are currently 50% higher than pre-industrial levels. Barring massive carbon removal over the coming decades, the melting of sea ice and rise in reflective temperatures will result in a global increase of four degrees Celsius (and possibly 10 to 15 degrees at the poles).

Grim stuff, indeed. Professor Betts takes great care, however, to emphasize that different models present nuances of uncertainty. The core message is that everything is getting warmer; how quickly that is happening—and what actions we need take for the short-term and extended future—are the variables to be reconciled.

For this piece, Suss Müsik “thawed” two synth washes that had been “frozen” in time since 2006. These were broken into rhythmic shards using grain synthesis, metaphorically representing the splitting of sea ice into melting and floating fragments. The vocal is a refactored recording of Professor Betts’ 2009 speech for the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, hosted by Oxford University Centre for the Environment.

The use of Professor Betts’ speech is covered under a Creative Commons license and is “free for reuse, remixing and redistribution in education worldwide.” The use of this material is intended to promote broader interest in learning more about the scientific evidence supporting our planet’s climatological transformation.

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.

“Teleology takes a different approach to organizing and writing history,” writes David J. Gunkel in his book Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics After Remix. “If archaeology rummages around in the past for an originating ancestor, teleology begins from the end of the story, then reads backward into the past to find traces, precursors and nascent versions of the practice.”

This is the approach Suss Müsik took with this week’s Disquiet Junto project, a revision of Disquiet Junto project 0290. For that piece, Apple VoiceOver was used to record four quotes. These phrases were then refactored to approximate the gasps, hiccups and nonverbal noises that accompany everyday human speech. That part from 0290 was then isolated to create this new piece, recorded live to 8-track with some sloppy piano and DIY electronics.

The piece is titled Teleology. The quotes used in the piece are as follows:

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.” ~ Groucho Marx

“Life is too short to work on inconsequential problems.” ~ C.K. Prahalad

“Somebody asked me, ‘If you had to give advice to a young actor, what would it be?’ I never even knew I was thinking this, but I said, ‘Always, even in a limo, wear your seat belt.’ To me, that’s good advice.” ~ Christopher Walken

“I’m seven people away from myself at the moment, but getting closer all the time.” ~ Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart