<b>Thicket</b><br><br>I modified the app I wrote for <a href="https://jimkang.co…
Thicket
I modified the app I wrote for last week’s Junto prompt (https://jimkang.com/music/piece-RmOKTwaj.html) to fix some issues, but also to support 12 “plants” in each row. Then, I recorded myself playing it (https://vimeo.com/1238645329).
I allowed myself to kill and fertilize plants (which just appear as boxes) during the first go-round through the rows to reach “healthy garden” state, then I stopped touching it and let things grow as the virtual dice rolls dictated.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize it was quite so resource intensive, and when I scrolled in the browser late in the performance, some audio dropouts happened. It’s a bonus glitch!
As I was loading random seeds into the web app, then recording and playing, I got a bit of the ol’ evaluation psychosis. I became convinced that the playthroughs were all terrible and all of the recordings should be deleted.
Fortunately, I took a break and watched/listened back and found one I liked, even if it has the dropout.
19 Oct 2026
<b>Annfina Harper and Fitziak Edward</b><br><p>I wrote a <a href="https://jimkan…
Annfina Harper and Fitziak Edward
I wrote a web app (https://jimkang.com/rifffield/) (sorry, barely had time for the bare minimum; it’s rough) for this Junto prompt (https://disquiet.com/2026/10/15/disquiet-junto-project-0772-garden-grow/) that represents plants in a garden as players in an ensemble.
Each plant has, among other things, these characteristics:
voice (a timbre)
age
peak age
amp (volume)
pan
riff
base rate (the pitch that its riff is based on)
death chance (a periodic roll is made with a die with this many sides; if it’s under the plant’s age, it dies)
repro chance (its likelihood of having offspring)
Every tick, each plant in the active frame (which slides down the garden slowly):
Plays an event, if its riff says it should.
Sometimes reproduces.
When it reproduces, it will create a copy of itself in an empty neighboring space and mutate some of the characteristics of the copy.
The user can do the following things with each plant:
Kill
Fertilize
Make it more likely to reproduce (let’s ignore that fertilizing doesn’t exactly work like that)
Here’s a video of me performing this piece. (https://vimeo.com/1237400880)
I’m out of time, so I can’t evaluate whether this sounds the way I want and whether I should do a few more runs, but I think this tool has some potential for certain kinds of projects.
9 Oct 2026
<b>Got Me in a Cell</b><br><br>This week's <a href="https://disquiet.com/2026/10…
Got Me in a Cell
This week's Junto prompt (https://disquiet.com/2026/10/08/disquiet-junto-project-0771-phase-incident/) was to make Steve Reich-style phase music.
I've actually done phase music for two (https://jimkang.com/music/piece-xbZpmZob.html), four (https://jimkang.com/music/piece-uDyffGQB.html), five (https://jimkang.com/music/piece-uuEXofKm.html), and thirteen (https://jimkang.com/music/piece-ZCYjLOxA.html) weeks ago. I really love this technique, and I just enjoy trying samples and loop lengths and hearing what patterns emerge. It's like playing a slot machine, except less destructive, I'd like to think.
This week, though, I have a lot of weekend commitments, so I had to get this done today. I would have liked to use a more obscure sample, but in the interest of time, I just went to my Plex library.
So, this is a Chuck D sample in four tracks, each of which has a loop of a different length.
I really like listening to this, but I feel vaguely guilty because this is like some chef using some amazing ingredient that's already good raw. In fact, I lost a lot of time just listening to Public Enemy a cappellas because they were so good.
I think it is in the spirit of Steve Reich, though. The reason Come Out makes such an impact is because the sample he uses is so compelling itself and gets you to sink into the piece long enough for the phase artifacts to some into play.
I also made Sabbath (https://jimkang.com/music/piece-QyUohaFf.html) and Slayer (https://jimkang.com/music/piece-ofLzsQnH.html) phase pieces, which yielded a lot of amazing riffs, but I didn't like them quite as much.
Happy birthday, Steve Reich!
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