Tag: disquiet junto

Cat Links aired|reviewed|remixed / transient lines / vid

[aired] Kites Riding Waves

[edit: Watch here. Playback disabled on external sites. Maybe that’s one reason the video only has 17 views a/o 23 June 2019… :^D]

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Lac du Der ‘station nautique’ France.

Natuur en recreatie, genoeg te beleven voor een weekendje weg.
Ondanks het koude weer toch nog een uurtje gevliegerd met de Freilein.

Nature and recreation, enough to experience for a weekend away.
Despite the cold weather, still flying an hour with the Freilein.

Music: Westy Reflector – ‘Riding Waves’

The Internet is at its best when shared passions become community. When the net first started to gain cultural traction, smack was talked, of course, but digital space wasn’t a tool of division, so much as a journey of discovery and connections. It was a weird (in the best way) and wonderful window into what other people were thinking and doing, made even better when the most obscure and arcane pursuit saw a light of day in ways no other communication system in human history allowed. Net 1.0 was a network of tangible dreams built by concrete dreamers. The physicality of the network itself was way more evident, too: the iconic modem handshake sound; the wires into your computer; the relentless arrival AOL discs in your mailbox…

“You’ve got mail,” indeed.

It was work to get online, but a few dreamers did the heavy lifting and posted sites, or created and managed email listservs. All of a sudden, within a few years, anyone who did anything could find a critical mass.…

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Cat Links disquiet junto / sounds / words

[dispatch] 20170905.1749

September 05, 2017 at 05:49PM
via IFTTT

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Cat Links disquiet junto / sounds / tracks

[track] sun child [disquiet0294-offlinestatus]

This is the fourth track I’ve recorded in honor of Bassel Khartabil Safadi, a pioneering and beloved Syrian open-source programmer who gave his life to ensuring an open web, teaching others about technology, and contributing his experience freely to help the world. Syrian military police arrested him in 2012 for unstated crimes, and held him without trial. In August of 2017, the world learned he had been executed in October 2015. To this date, his body has not been given to his family for proper mourning and burial, and the manner in which he was put to death remains a mystery.

In the end, pessimism breaks people quicker, and with more permanence, than fear. The greatest weapon used against free-thought warriors such as Bassel is not to make them scared – it’s to make them feel alone in their fight, discouraged and ashamed.

Apologize for nothing, Bassel.

All sounds either Bassel or guitar.

Underlying bed is reversed “Amazing Grace” mixed with three tracks of Bassel’s phrase ~13x stretched: One track is him harmonized and pitched down to F#; One is him disambiguated as noise; One is him just straight up sloooowed doowwwn.

Floated over the affair with an eBow.

This track marks my 69th Disquiet Junto contribution.
https://soundcloud.com/thereflectors/sets/disquietwesty

My studio suffered an irreparable crash last week while attempting the first of these two most recent #freebassel projects. Kind creative forces graced me, however, with a few workarounds and a long-overdue seat kick into a more current-era workflow. I hold onto the thought that all my tech disruption (forced unwinding and time-zero reconfiguration of twenty+ years of habits) would make Bassel, well, just laugh.…

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[track] ’57 Echoes [Disquiet0258-RoomsWithinRooms]

Spending this week in Venice, FL, at The Herron House. Built by architect Victor A. Lundy (FAIA) in 1957 for the Herron family, the house was restored to its original grandeur by its current owners, Ursula Kohl and Peter Bartos, in 2008. It’s a masterstroke of mid-century American imagination, and a timeless time capsule that will always feel like the future.

Most of the house is open-plan (only the bedrooms and offices have doors), all the rooms, save one, have at least two glass walls, and there are two spectacular rooms within the envelope of the roof line that have floor-to-ceiling screens as their 4th walls separating them from the outside. The result is a house that breathes with its occupants (lizards included), creating an inside-out and outside-in soundscape that leaves you in a true suspension of time and space.

This piece was recorded inside the house during night and day rainstorms (Rooms A and C, respectively), as well as a clear morning (Room B). Most of the time, the house provides a serene silence, which I wanted to capture for the C-section, but the iPad mic is not conducive to recording nuanced calmness, so this piece captures none of the house’s tranquility. Rest assured, however, this has been a relaxing week, replete with luck to have graced its environs.

Went minimal to the max for this. Only mics I have down here are an iPad and iPhone, and only DAW is a GarageBand program I never learned to use with any proficiency.…

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Cat Links disquiet junto / sounds / tracks

[track] sterling fades [disquiet0260-tonefade]

PROCESS
Thank you so much, Marc (@disquiet) for thinking of Sterling in this project. As I told Marc in an email exchange where he told me of the dedication in this week’s prompt, my thinking about how the sound waves we produce may somehow go on forever began with the Junto’s week dedicated to the death of Jefferey Melton (@Nofi). This week brings much of that exploration full circle.

Nick Drake’s ‘Northern Sky’ open tuning resolves to a Dsus4 chord (with the suspended G as the center note and F# up high)
D-A-D-G-D-F#

I was gifted knowledge of Drake while working at Rolling Stone as an intern in 1992, and ever since, ‘Northern Sky’ is the song I turn to when skies darken. Felt right to invoke it here by striking its open chord for a few minutes. (Note: Soundcloud’s auto-compression revealed my perceived silences to be not so silent. Hi ho.)

Sterling passed in our home at the hand of kind veterinarians, on a soft rug, with easy, knowing caresses on 22 December 2016 ~6:20 EST. I trust he’s suspended somewhere now between space & time in painless parallel peace. Fwiw, we had David Bowie on random shuffle and ‘Absolute Beginners’ came on as the process began. Perfect is a strange word in this context, but life works in curious ways sometimes to deliver solace.

All the love.

:^D

RELEVANT EXTERNAL LINKS:
My reflections on Sterling:
https://medium.com/westyreflector/sterling-at-the-gates-dcff944b76df

Alan Watts on how the universe is made of vibrations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhHfKqLR6NI…

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[aired] wrestling dreams

Moving use of a few of my ambient tracks by filmmaker Kenny Johnson in Wrestle Donst Wrestle (imdb), a 2015 documentary about independent professional (Absolute Intense Wrestling (AIW)) wrestler Tim Donst‘s battle to return to the ring.

“Upon A Child’s Doll Reflection,” “Truth Is A Lonely Place,” and “Space Walk” (all Disquiet Junto projects, btw) well up at critical times in the film. No spoilers, of course, but the poignancy and melody they lend their respective scenes affirmed all the reasons I started writing ambient wordless work in earnest a few years ago.

Professional wrestling cuts a deep, diverse and cross-generational swath through America (the WWE represents only a glossy major-label equivalency), threading across many eras with stories of soaring courage, unabashed victory, gritted determination and dream-shattering heartbreak. The 2008 film The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke touched on these themes and conveyed a raw just-below-the-surface look at someone akin to Donst. Aside from that film, I knew almost nothing of Donst’s indie wrestling world as I hit the play button here. Now I can’t imagine our world without his.

Life outside the mainstream too often is marginalized to appear frivolous or inconsequential – struggles too “real” for popular consumption, perhaps. I feel a kindred spirit with Donst. In the way he wakes conscious with wrestling moves in his head, I wake thinking only of writing music. DNA isn’t just physical – it’s also spiritual. The moment you tap into what makes you you, life starts.…

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Cat Links cypher /e dreams / sounds / tracks

[track] wake up time

Sing a song for life in the morning
As the sunrise waltzes through leaves
Let all the anger and pain
And destructive refrains
Dissolve into your dreams

Maybe we’ll wake up
It’s time we wake up
Maybe we’ll wake up
Wake up time

The first thing you see before you open your eyes
Is the truest reflection of you
One day the first thing we’ll know
is a sunrise so slow
And a world renewed

PROCESS

My 66th(!) junto contribution was written and recorded on Monday evening 26 Sep 2016 while watching the 1st 2016 US Presidential debate (on mute, CSPAN only) with the project photograph (goo.gl/djQ31Y) in my field of vision on an iPad and a few glasses of Russian River Valley Pinot Noir in my bloodstream. This may be the most normie crossover americana country pop track EVER posted to the Junto, but I’ve embraced that side lately, perhaps as a contrarian move to a deep dive into the dark web and anonymity in the last year (as well as being the caretaker of a terminally ill dog).

Acoustic and electric rhythm guitars and vocals are organic. Drums, bass, Hammond B3, pedal steel, and horn parts are built from samples looped in Acid (total ~60 tracks through 11 busses). If you think there’s more than one human involved in this, I’ve done my job.

3/4 waltz + rock, 148 bpm.
there are 27 figures in the graphic and the first verse has 27 words. couldn’t hold myself to that in the 2nd verse, but all’s forgiven.…

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Cat Links cypher /e dreams / disquiet junto / sounds / tracks

[track] europa sunrise [disquiet0236-hellojun(t)o]

PROCESS
The task to create a friendly “Hi” to the Juno probe based on the Morse Code for “Hi” (…. ..) became the perfect excuse to duet with my Teenage Engineering PO-16. I’ve owned it for a while and though I am fascinated by it and screw around with it at times, it hadn’t yet found its way into the studio. Part of that is because it’s one of those pieces of equipment I don’t fully understand and really can’t do much with, but its mystery deepens my affection. Kind of like astrophysics.

In any case, the PO-16 generated all the Morse Code beeping in various notes around the key of D. The rest of the piece fell into place around the syncopated and stacked tones. Diving into my effect library, I found a sample of a countdown and liftoff of a Saturn I rocket, and the track crescendos around that. Built basic basic drum and bass tracks to keep it moving (one of these days I have to try to loose myself from rhythms) and dropped in a few sweeping pads from the archives. Ended up a bit longer than expected but there’s not much difference between 1 minute and 2.75 minutes in light years, you know?

RIG
Teenage Engineering PO-16 factory, Peekamoose Guitars Custom M2, SmallSound/BigSound Sparkle Motion, tc electronic flashback delay, Earthquaker Devices Afterneath, Strymon blueSky reverb, Line6 POD-XT, MOTU 828-mk2, DAW: Sony Acid Pro (Win 8.1), Mastering: Harrison MixBus (OSX)

PROJECT
The Assignment: Say hi to the Juno Spacecraft by embedding Morse code in an original composition.…

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[aired] truth is a lonely timelapse

Gorgeous timelapses of the Meinerswijk (Arnhem), Netherlands, countryside set to my Truth Is A Lonely PLace [disquiet0138] off Particle Theory (2014) [bandcamp | freemusicarchive]. Shot and edited by Netherlands photographer and filmmaker Floris van Loon (http://florisvanloon.nl).

Published on May 25, 2016
http://florisvanloon.nl
With this video no monetization is intended.

Music “Truth Is A Lonely Place [disquiet0138]” by Westy Reflector

The music in this video is released under
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States
(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…

Download the track
freemusicarchive.org
bandcamp
soundcloud

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Cat Links almost x / sounds / tracks

Almost X

Ten more dice rolls. Records don’t so much freeze as liquify time. I’ve lost years to music. Time is the price you pay, however, to alleviate dreams.

Almost X where X = whom, where, what or even why you want to be. Let’s fly this town, through the looking glass, riding our 99th dream into the stars, towards X.

“Nothing means anything.” – Kurt Vonnegut

:^D

released January 15, 2016

Written, performed and produced by Westy Reflector

Cover photo: “Drew’s Spare”
Dave Westreich, 17 July 2010, 04:02

Lead guitar on That Old Guitar:
Jason Perkel | switchfactory.com

Samples on Sedimentronic Figures
courtesy of:
Rupert Lally | rupertlally.bandcamp.com
and
Ahornberg | ahornberg.bandcamp.com

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Cat Links almost x / sounds / tracks

[track] King Jack’s 99th Dream

This track started out life as a disquiet junto challenge a couple years ago:

Assignment: re-tell a single-page comic strip, 99 Ways To Tell A Story [Panel 1], by Matt Madden:

Background (via disquiet.com): “Matt Madden’s single-page comic is the template for a book he created titled 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. In the book, Madden told that same story 99 different ways, each in a different comic-book style. For example, he told it as a superhero comic, he told it as a manga, he told it as experienced from upstairs, and he told it as if it were overheard at a bar. Madden did this in homage to the French writer Raymond Queneau’s own Exercises in Style, which is a key text of the literary movement known as Oulipo. Oulipo approaches the act of writing with intentional constraints, and the movement’s approach to creativity was a strong influence on the development of the Disquiet Junto. Oubapo is the name of the comics version of Oulipo. What we’re up to is the musical version: Oumupo.”

Original track is here.

Time to make up your mind
Time never falls behind
Time to make up your mind and close the door

She drew you in, black and white
From her studio in the sky
She drew you eight times ninety-nine…

Frames in time
And you will never escape that night
Until you make up your mind
And close the door

Should’ve paid off those bills
Should’ve laid off those pills
Should’ve written one more word
Before you put your machine to sleep

What the hell were you looking for
when you opened up that door?

…

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[track] Parallel Memories [disquiet0207-remixingmarilli]

The records you make don’t freeze so much as liquify time. As with Michel, 1983 was a pivotal musical year for me, too, so this week’s challenge fired a wonderful cascade of memories.

Playing with the tonal and harmonics filters in Paulstretch, I stretched each of the three 32-year old samples to 32x their original length (and M1 also to 64x)a few times. Brought them into Sony Acid and started layering at random. Touches of reverb, compression, chorus and resonance found a sweet spot of lushness – where I was at ease with bygone days. The piece runs at 137.1 BPM (which is what M1 beatmapped to), so a sync’ed 8th note amplitude modulation was added to the M2 sample to create a ping-pong glitch beat at that tempo.

—————————

More on this 207th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Rework source audio from Michel Banabila’s 1983 album, Marilli”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/12/17/disquiet0207-remixingmarilli/

The audio was sourced from the 1983 album Marilli by the album’s composer, Michel Banabila. This project marks the release of the 2015 album Marilli Remixed:
https://banabila.bandcamp.com/album/marilli-remixed-free-download

More on the Disquiet Junto…

Join the Disquiet Junto…

Subscribe to project announcements…

Disquiet Junto general discussion…

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[track] Life In Candid Wonder (The Cost Of Future Tense) [Disquiet0202-CostOfFreedom]

“Creating is living doubly.”
Jean-Paul Sartre

This was the third Disquiet Junto project that revolved around Bassel Khartabil Safadi, a coder, artist and free-expression pioneer wrongfully jailed by Syria, his home country, for “harming state security.” In October, he was transferred to a secret location, and his whereabouts as of this writing are unknown. This past week (2015.11.14), disturbing rumors surfaced of a possible death sentence. The background and all current updates on Bassel’s case can be found here: http://freebassel.org.

Please sign this petition and hold the Syrian government accountable for Bassel’s fate.

Twenty seven artists contributed to this Junto project, which endeavored to create an audiobook of the Creative Commons collection of essays about Bassel, The Cost Of Freedom.

I chose hellekin’s epilogue, The Cost Of Future Tense, a beautiful piece of writing that became more transcendent with each successive reading. I didn’t want to get in the way, so went about crafting a minimal, improvised ambient duet for acoustic guitar and AniMoog to allow the words to float and breathe.

Original Text:
http://costoffreedom.cc/book/epilogue/the-cost-of-future-tense
Author:
hellekin (http://twitter.com/hellekin)

RIG
GUITAR
“Whitey” (1988 Ovation Custom Balladeer) –SmallSound / BigSound Sparkle Motion –tc electronic Flashback Delay –Earthquaker Afterneath –Strymon blueSky reverberator

TUNING
C-G-D-D-A-E (Michael Hedges “Breakfast In The Field” tuning)

VOCALS
AKG C3000B –Lexicon MX200 rack reverb

SYNTH
AniMoog for iPad –Flux:FX (Multi-Verb preset)

AMP / DAW
Line6 Pod-XT Tube PreAmp –MOTU 828mk2 –Sony Acid 7.0 (Win 8.1)

I was proud to contribute a track to the first #freebassel Junto project in 2014, which coincided with the 2nd anniversary of Bassel’s incarceration.…

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[track] The Young Unicorns [disquiet0196-wholelottawhole]

PROCESS
In which I fire up my old-friend Casio CZ-1000, program a quasi new wave dance groove with Acid loops and sight read the notes in the photo. The CZ was set to a square wave with a slight detune and vibrato. Luckily, it goes 6-note polyphonic so it handled the 3-note chords fine. The 11-measure sequence in the photo is repeated as 8 measure sequences break it up into a couple verses, choruses and a bridge. The 11 vs 8 tension resulted in no two verses or choruses having the same melody line, which served to amplify the fun. Very meditative, too, to allow whole notes to fill spaces.

I had designs on recording the bass on the Casio, too, using the image’s staff as a bass clef. This created more mess than movement, though, so I left the photo to represent a treble clef staff only and built the piece around a right hand melody.

122 BPM
Key: C

PROJECT
Sight-read the whiteboard notation from a children’s music class.

Step 1: Read the music notation in the following image (note that the photograph was taken at a music class for elementary and preschool students).

The image is here:
goo.gl/2C1mqT

Step 2: Record a piece of music based on that notation.

Step 3: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.

Step 4: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This assignment was made in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, October 1, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, October 5, 2015.…

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[track] split seconds [disquiet0194-clockplay]

PROCESS
I do not own a clock (or any time keeping device) that makes operational noise, so I used a CC-Attribution sample at freesound.org of 4 one-second clock ticks that looped perfectly without any cutting at 120 BPM. This juggled me a bit, since the 60 BPM clock ticks were playing in double-time to be in real-time at half-time to the track time.

The clock is layered a few times to build counter-rhythms and dynamics, to evince the double-timeness of its sampling. A very rough bass track came from a few 8 and 16 bar loops. The bed arose from an 800% stretch of my recent “chasing flight” (Thereflectors – Chasing-flight). Aiming for playful sweetness, I strummed chords over the result in two live passes and voila, here we are in the present.

In the end, I learned clocks can keep all sorts of time.

:^D

Clock Loop by Natalie Kirk (Esper Studio, Sydney, AUS)
freesound.org/people/OwlStorm/sounds/212181/

PROJECT
More on this 194th Disquiet Junto project (“Record the sound of a clock and make something playful and sweet out of it”) at:
disquiet.com/2015/09/17/disquiet0194-clockplay/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:
disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:
soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
disquiet.com/forums/

Image associated with this project by Brian Biggs, who drew it specifically for this project, and who provided the project’s timely creative nudge.
mrbiggs.com/
dancerobotdance.com/
@dance-robot-dance

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Cat Links almost x / disquiet junto / sounds / tracks

[track] sedimentronic figures [disquiet0190-missedconnections]

PROCESS
20 bars of Rupert Lally‘s “Sediment Layers”

8 bars of Ahornberg‘s “Digital Frippertronics”

Loads of flying, fluttery harmonics and shifting undertones as these loops cycled together. Rupert Lally’s track loop is 30% right and ahornberg’s is 30% left in the mix and they’re both blended (smeared?) together by a slight (27% wet) band-pass (1500Hz) resonance filter and a bit of room reverb. They’re both in related keys (G and D, it seemed) so their ensuing conversation took some pretty turns. Put my guitar down this week in favor of Propellerhead’s Figure app for iPad (the latest update’s “arpeggiator” has become a tiny addiction). I programmed 8 bar synth and bass loops in the key of G at 96bpm and played the percussion pad live as the track streamed along with the sources on my Acid timeline. Figure ran via Audiobus into Flux:FX’s “Multi-Verb” preset located in the app’s stock Ambient bank.

RIG
Propellerhead Figure: “Sonny” drum kit (4/4 kick, 6/4 snareclap, 12/4 hats, 10/4 toms), “Bassguitar” bass (5/4 rhythm, 7 scale steps), “Super Poly” synth (5/4 rhythm, 7 scale steps)
Noiise Flux:FX for iPad (ver 1.01): Ambience “Multi-Verb” preset
Audiobus for iPad (2.1.17), Sony Acid 7.0, Win 8.1

PROJECT
“Set two out-of-sync loops atop each other, and then add sonic glue”

More on this 190th Disquiet Junto project

More on the Disquiet Junto

Join the Disquiet Junto

Disquiet Junto general discussion

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Cat Links aired|reviewed|remixed

[remix.reflector] Steve Burnett: Swellsandswells [disquiet0190-missedconnections]

Fantastic remix by multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Steve Burnett (Raleigh, US) of Zedkah‘s “Swells [disquiet 0189: tone layer]” with my C Swells [disquiet0189-tonelayer]. In Burnett’s hands, the combined tracks become synesthetic as his cosmologic expansion/contraction process fires all the senses at once. The forces at work here are extreme – too large and yet, also too small to comprehend, yet they resolve (evolve?) as human. Tres cool.

Burnett’s Liner Notes From Soundcloud:

I used Westy Reflector’s “c swells [disquiet0189-tonelayer]” and Zedkah’s “Swells [disquiet 0189:tone layer]” as they sounded best of the 0189 tone layer tracks when combined and compressed as I planned. Imported both into Audacity, copied both one-minute files out until I had a track exceeding 36 hours in length. I then used Audacity to change the tempo by one hundred thousand percent, as shown in the screenshot – creating a track just over two minutes long compressed from over 36 hours.
(Both of the original source material sound great when played at normal speeds, and I commend them both to listeners’ attention.)

Find more of Burnett at:
subscapeannex.com
twitter/steveburnett

Source Tracks:



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Cat Links aired|reviewed|remixed

[remix.reflector] Conjecture Of A TIme: Whooshed Connections [disquiet0190-missedconnections]

Conjecture Of A Time is a wonderful, mysterious sound artist who has contributed to the Disquiet Junto since back in year two. This week, [he? she? them?] remixed small loops of my C-swells [disquiet0189-tonelayer] along with Olaf Wisselink’s Cascade [disquiet0189-tonelayer], adding in “whoosh” sounds to mask the loop endings. The result is a joyful noise. File under: Summer road trip asteroid rest stop on the Andromeda-M83 Intergalactic Highway, drinking a Terra Novacaine Fizz, leaving Earth in the rear-view for a while…

COAT’s soundcloud liner notes:

I started from the excellent tracks of #olafwie (Olafwie – Cascade-disquiet0189-tonelayer) and #thereflectors (Thereflectors – C-swells) and extracted a 6 bars loop and a 10 bars loop.

I used gradually louder Whoosh sounds to distract the listener attention from the ending of each loop, and then just had to end with a final Whoosh at bar 60 where the loops stop to remain around 2 minutes.

More on this 190th Disquiet Junto project:
“Set two out-of-sync loops atop each other, and then add sonic glue”

More on the Disquiet Junto.
Join the Disquiet Junto.
Disquiet Junto general discussion.

Find more Conjecture Of A Time at:
soundcloud

Source Tracks:

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