Mountaz [Disquiet0305] by Suss Müsik

In a sense, William Golding’s classic 1954 novel Lord of the Flies examines serendipity gone wrong: a group of young British boys are randomly isolated on a remote island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Unconstrained by parental supervision, laws or even personal ethics, the children’s behavior is increasingly fueled by hormonal desperation and a hunger for conquest—a social parallel to one’s loss of innocence.

There is a lovely accidental moment at the 00:15 mark of “Wandanawe Yamu Pevila Thisarana Sile Wadimta,” likely an audio artifact created when someone pressed the Pause button on their recorder. There is also a fantastic vocal loop that occurs naturally at the end of “Man Rikzo Karaya,” and a terrific interlude in “Aatha Chandana Ime” that braids distant voices into a violent, wailing cacophony. It’s great stuff.

Suss Müsik employed these three elements to create this weird, creepy piece. The piece begins with the first loop sounding almost like a jack-in-the-box or some other children’s toy. A percussive phrase was then created from a small sample of that loop and played as a melody. Meanwhile, two other loops were stretched and phased at different binaural settings, concluding with the bleat of a fourth sample played via EWI device. There’s a little shaky percussion in there as well.

The result made Suss Müsik recall this quote from Golding’s novel: “I was asleep when the twisty things were fighting and when they went away I was awake, and I saw something big and horrid moving in the trees.” Happy weekend!

The piece is titled Mountaz, a rough derivative of the Persian word مونتاز which means “assembly.” The image is a gold-painted leaf.

More on this 305th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Three Princes: Explore chance by exploring the roots of the word “serendipity”) at:

https://disquiet.com/0305/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0305-three-princes/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.