"For two years [Montano] prowled the streets of Melbourne, sucking sounds into their samplers, then built this entire album of elaborate funk-heavy instrumentals from tram bells clanks, road crossing buzzers, traffic sounds, thunder, clattering cafe cutlery and chattering children."
A wonderful album, brilliantly conceived and constructed. I didn’t want to go down the overture road again, though it would have been fun and rewarding – instead I thought that an almost random de-construction might be appropriate; sort of a molecular re-arrangement as might be experienced in some form of matter transport, one of the great technological dreams of the future.
I laid all 12 tracks together, in reverse order, in a single mix and saved it as a wav file. I had intended to then improvise on this using ambient v.03, but the software wouldn’t play ball (I don’t think it likes large files). So I used my limited, very touchy standalone version of The Mangle on it instead, multi-tracking the result and treating them with differing amounts of delay and reverb, as well as cutting small segments out, slowing their tempo and re-treating them. As it happened, this kept small sounds from the tracks intact but re-imagined their relationships and blended elements of all 12 tracks together in an almost organic manner.
The image is the Montano album art, similarly re-arranged using software.
I urge you to listen to their other albums.
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Encapsulate an album for efficient yet meaningful consumption.
This week’s project is a special collaboration with Real Future, as part of the Real Future Fair being held in San Francisco on November 6 and 7. On the evening of the 7th I’ll be presenting some of this project’s audio during the Fair’s Real Future of Sound segment, and talking about the Junto with Alexis Madrigal, the Editor-in-Chief of Fusion. Madrigal and Fusion’s Cara Rose DeFabio participated in the development of this week’s project.
Step 1: First, ask yourself this question: As the population on Earth increases, and more and more people are creating art, how will technology and our brains collaborate to process all that creative information. In 2015 it’s hard enough to keep track of all the TV shows, albums, novels, and video games. What about in 2055?
Step 2: Choose one of these two albums to be your source material and download it:
This self-titled ambient pop album by the New Zealand act Montano: https://montano.bandcamp.com/album/montano
This self-titled album by the French rock band Salmo: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Salmo/Salmo/
Step 3: Consider an approach to compress the selected album for … let’s call it “efficient yet meaningful” consumption. Already today supercuts and superfuses condense material through quick sequences and dense simultaneity. Come up with an approach to similarly compressing a full-length album. You might consider the “overture” employed in project 0198, but you’ll likely come up with your own approach. And keep in mind that the end result should be … let’s call it “enjoyable.”
Step 4: Apply the result of Step 3 to the album you downloaded in Step 2.
Step 5: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
More on this 201st weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Encapsulate an album for efficient yet meaningful consumption”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/11/05/disquiet0201-realfuture/
This project was developed for the November 2015 Real Future Fair in San Francisco at the encouragement of and with the participation of Alexis Madrigal and Cara Rose DeFabio:
http://realfuturefair.com/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
