I had my first go at the Disquiet Junto music making project and it was a great experience. I highly recommend giving it a try, especially if you’re anything like me and find it difficult to just let personal music out into the wild and declare it finished.

Here’s my track and if you’ve listened to my track “Apply Yourself To Hearing” (also on SoundCloud) then you’ll probably recognise the shortwave radio preacher.

The basic premise of the project was to use dice rolls to pick a title from the Text Instagram Twitter account and an Instagram filter and then use those to create a picture that served as the notional cover art for a short ambient track. You can find the full instructions on Disquiet.

My first dice roll ended up being 14, so my title was “Food using the Toaster filter for that classic Chinese restaurant menu effect.”

My second dice roll was 7 and that got me the Brannan filter, described as “Low-key, with an emphasis on grays and greens”.

I had a very vivid image pop into my head of a bowl of broth, gray/beige noodles studded with dark green vegetables, sitting on a wide wooden table in front of a tall, open window, framed by gently moving white curtains. The window was overlooking a large square in an unknown South-East Asian city. Whoever the noodles were for also had a radio on the table, tuned to some obscure station. Filtering through the walls or corridors of the building was someone else’s radio, tuned to a different station.

So, I plugged in my shortwave radio and tuned around until I found something interesting, an American preacher who’s voice I’ve used before. I recorded for about ten minutes and then edited some choice phrases, including the “He prayed twice, he prayed twice” section, which seemed to have a hypnotic rhythm of it’s own. Then I separated out the two radios spatially, using EQ and a convolution reverb on the distant one to place it in another room.

The static in the background of the “He prayed twice” section seemed to me to suggest a deliberate synthetic pulsing, so to provide another texture and suggest the busy square whilst avoiding anything too cliched or blatantly “Oriental” I plugged in my Korg Monotron and recorded three bass pulses.

Two slow pulsing single notes were recorded, with the pulse created by opening and closing the LP filter manually. Then the two pulses were panned hard left and right and a long, washy reverb was added as a send on both. A third, more percussive pulse was panned in the centre and faded in and out during the length of the track.

I had to use Izotope RX to de-noise the Monotron, as it has an incredibly noisy output, which is a shame as it’s a lovely sounding little thing. It doesn’t matter a great deal, as you can simply record a few seconds of just the noise then let RX do it’s magic and I happily removed 30dB of noise from the recorded tracks with little adverse effect on the sound.

All in all, the Disquiet Junto was great fun and for a couple of hours work as I was winding down in the studio on Friday night and a couple more as I was gearing up for the week on Monday morning I’ve got a little track I’m really happy with out in the world.