Old Drummer

Last week I planted a garden. This week I walked away. For Disquiet Junto 0772 I built a small percussion garden — glass bells, marimba, gong and chimes looping at 5, 7, 11 and 13 beats, a drone underneath, wooden roots in the soil. For 0773 ("Let your garden go to waste") I didn't plant anything new. I took that exact garden and let it rot over nine minutes. The seeds stop showing up. Sour notes...

Process The soil. A drone on a Bb root with an open fifth, using Ableton’s “Fat Heavy Drone Pad.” Every 16 bars a soft B natural drift in over it. The key. Bb Phrygian at 66 BPM. That B natural is the flat second, the one note that makes it feel ancient and unresolved. The seeds. Four pitched percussion parts: glass bells, marimba, a gong, and chimes, all native Ableton instruments (Collision and...

Two identical bell voices. One holds still. The other drifts away and never comes back, sliding through flams, ripples and a doubled pulse before stopping one hair short of the next alignment. A ten-minute tribute to Steve Reich on his 90th birthday, made for Disquiet Junto Project 0771. Headphones recommended: Voice A is in the right ear, Voice B in the left. More on the 771st weekly Disquiet Jun...

Reverb x Reverb — Disquiet Junto Project 0770 A single Massive X tone, struck once and let ring, pushed through two reverbs in series rather than one turned up louder: a close copper room first, then that room's own wash fed straight into a second, much larger space — pitch-shifted, shimmering, cathedral-long. The send between them opens and closes across the piece's four-phase arc, so the cascade...

Sol — Day 21 of One Track a Day. The capstone of the planet arc. For nine days I traveled the solar system — Saturn out to Pluto, then Mercury back around to Jupiter. Every one of those tracks orbited something they never visited. This is the Sun. Helioseismology tells us the Sun literally rings like a bell — pressure waves make the whole star vibrate in roughly five-minute cycles. So here the pit...

Process For "Remix Therapy," I went back to the oldest track in the Achronia catalog: "Bronze and Skin," Day 1 of One Track a Day, recorded back in June before the project had any of its current conventions. The original session was three dry, unprocessed bounces — a tuning bed (bronze drone), struck metal (mallet weave), and a tumbao-style percussion pattern — arranged across the usual four-phase...

Day 20 of One Track a Day / One Planet a Day. Ninth planet visited, continuing outward past Mars and the asteroid belt. Jupiter's four largest moons — Io, Europa, and Ganymede — are locked in the Laplace resonance: an exact 4:2:1 orbital ratio that's held stable for billions of years. This track builds that lock as a literal three-voice polyrhythm. A fourth moon, Callisto, joins as a looser textur...

First drum experiment in a series

Roche Limit — Day 19 of Achronia's One Planet a Day. Phobos is falling. Mars's larger moon spirals a few centimeters closer every century — in 30 to 50 million years it crosses the Roche limit and comes apart into a ring of its own debris. This one is that descent: four tightening orbital passes, a controlled destruction, and what's left drifting on afterward. 76 BPM, Bb Minor. Eighth stop inward...

Obliquity — Day 18, One Planet a Day The seventh stop moving inward through the solar system: Earth. Its axial tilt — 23.5°, fixed in space, never wavering — is the entire reason seasons exist. This track turns that fact into rhythm: a 23-beat ostinato drifting against a straight 4/4 pulse, the two only realigning once every 23 bars. One full drift cycle, one full year. Four movements trace a year...

Day 17 of One Track a Day — Achronia's One Planet a Day arc. The Rose of Venus. Venus is one of the only planets that spins backward — so this one breaks its own rules by literally reversing on itself. Five phases, mirrored around a center: Morning Star, Ascent, The Turn (the axis), Descent (Ascent's notes played in reverse), Evening Star (Morning Star's notes in reverse) — same object, seen as th...

Old Drummer creates journeys between ancient wisdom and distant futures. Near the sun, Mercury's spin plays a trick on the light — dawn happens twice. This track is built on that rhythm: two voices circling each other, colliding at the climax, then drifting apart again. Day 16 of Achronia's One Track a Day / One Planet a Day series. After Pluto, the arc turns back inward. 88 BPM · Bb Minor · 9:27...

--- **Title:** Sonic Kin (Disquiet Junto Project 0765) More on the 765th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Sonic Kin — The Assignment: Give space to the unheard voices of animals — at [disquiet.com/0765](https://disquiet.com/0765). For this one I built a four-phase piece around a single cricket recording, treating it less as a sound effect and more as a voice worth actually listening to. **Process:**...

The Assignment: Create a sonic menagerie. --- **Gathering Call (disquiet0764)** Built this one entirely from processed animal one-shots — monkey chest-thumps standing in for a kick, a cockatoo squawk answering as the snare, cricket screeches (one at pitch, one dropped down a fifth-ish for contrast) doing hi-hat/rhythm duty, and a flock of geese sliced up for a granular flourish partway through. St...

Pluto by Old Drummer

Neptune by Old Drummer

Occultation Achronia — One Planet a Day, Day 13: Uranus Ancient rhythms. Future landscapes. One continuous journey. You cannot see the rings directly. You watch a star, and you wait for it to dim — that's how they were found, and that's how this one moves. Launch opens tumbling and off-axis, a planet that rolls instead of spins. Transit goes cold and sparse, the longest silence in the arc. Arrival...

Disquiet0761 When Doves Smile - Achronia BPM: 60 Time Signature: 4/4 Key Signature: Db Major Length: 4:40 Assignment: Compose a piece intended anonymously for someone who caused anger or disappointment — this response leans toward warmth and forgiveness rather than confrontation. Process 1. Chose a genuinely warm, forgiving tone throughout rather than an anger-to-resolution arc — just two voices c...

Shani — Day 12, Achronia Ancient rhythms. Future landscapes. One continuous journey. Shani opens a new chapter in the One Track a Day series: one planet, one visit, every day — a solar system tour told entirely in Percussion Ambient. Named for the Vedic deity of Saturn, keeper of time and karma, this piece traces a single journey in four movements: Invocation (launch), Emergence (the cold emptines...

A single strike, and everything that comes after it. Bonsho is built around the sound of a Japanese temple bell — one long tone, decaying, joined slowly by percussion, drone, and voices that don't belong to any known language. Ancient rhythms. Future landscapes. One continuous journey. Bb Minor · 65 BPM · 5:03

Filament - Vidyut | Disquiet Junto 0760 One 65-second recording of a light bulb, slowed to a bassline, sliced into a drum kit, and rung through its own hidden key. Made for Musikfestival Bern's "Harness the Light" — using Michael Vorfeld's bulb recording to explore the pervasiveness of energy. Four movements: Invocation → Emergence → Transfiguration → Return. B♭ minor, 65 BPM, 4:18. Vidyut — Sansk...

Disquiet0759 Rock Music BPM: 120 Time Signature: 4/4 Key Signature: N/A (unpitched percussion) Length: 4:33 Assignment: Make music with nothing but rocks. Process: 1. Reviewed the Junto 0759 assignment: make music with nothing but rocks. 2. Recorded raw rock sounds (clacks, thumps, scrapes, multi-hits) with a Tascam DR-07 mkII. 3. Imported recordings into Ableton Live 12; labeled tracks by sound t...

Gyuto by Old Drummer

"Rūpa Śūnyatā" takes its structure from the Heart Sutra — form and emptiness folding into each other. A single struck-metal hit opens the piece, then true silence. A slow-breathing drone fills the emptiness. Hits and reverb tails blur until you can't tell where one ends and the next begins. The piece closes exactly as it opened — same hit, same silence. 44 BPM, F Minor, ~5 minutes. Mastered at -28...

Four O'Clock Four drums. Four different clocks. One shared beginning. Four O'Clock opens with a single pulse — steady, four-square, unremarkable. Then three more voices arrive, each keeping its own time: a five-beat drag, a seven-eighths flutter, a three-beat sway. None of them agree. None of them are wrong. For nearly six minutes they drift — not randomly, but exactly, each voice locked to its ow...