Arcadia Night [disquiet0340 - portaparty] by Belly Full Of Stars

Created for the Disquiet Junto Project 0340: PortaParty
@disquiet

The project: Record a piece of music entirely on the go.

There was a bit of fail this week that hampered my recording completely on the go (my kingdom for some batteries), but I tried to at least incorporate the spirit, by using samples from the weekend's musical roadtrip in the piece.

All the instruments and gear used by me, at least, were battery powered and portable - Behringer mixer, Korg SQ-1 sequencer, Volca FM, VD400 Vintage Delay, tc electronics Hall Of Fame 2 reverb, and a Zoom H4n recorder looping the sample. The looped recording was taken from an improvised performance by David Dunn and Bryony Stroud-Watson on bass clarinet and violin, respectively. They played a beautiful abstract set with the cicadas, under the trees and stars on artist/musician Linda Heck's makeshift backyard stage for the Electric Arcadia Festival II, on Monteagle Mountain in Sewanee, Tennessee on a summer Sunday night (July 8, 2018).

While looping the sample, I ran a simple sequence on a custom patch on the Volca FM, clocking from the CV gate out of the SQ-1, with odd steps activated to give a bit of randomness to the sequence timing. I performed the piece by occasionally pausing the SQ-1 to create legato holds on the Volca FM patch, while simultaneously swelling the decay time on the HOF2 reverb (via it's handy pressure sensitive "MASH" footswitch), and transposing the FM patch via the Volca front panel.

I hope I captured some of the essence of that lovely night of music. Despite my portable failings (the piece was also recorded, ultimately, in my studio... despite best efforts), the challenge at least pushed me to work with a couple of pieces of gear I hadn't touched before (the SQ-1 & HOF2), and reminded me that if I ever really want to record cordless, I need cables. And another portable recorder. And patience. And batteries.

Thank you to David Dunn, Bryony Stroud-Watson, and Linda Heck for their music and spirit.

More on this 340th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Porta Party: The Assignment: Record a piece of music entirely on the go) at:

https://disquiet.com/0340/

Thanks to Jason Richardson for inspiring this project.

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/ 1

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co :

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0340-porta-party/

There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.