An Introduction to Instagr/am/bient:
Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?
Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards. They are pieces of music whose relative brevity—all are between one and three minutes in length—is designed to correlate with the economical, ephemeral nature of an Instagram photo.
The result of the 25 musicians’ collective efforts is an investigation into the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. What parallels exist, for example, between the visual filters that Instagram provides users to transform their photos and the sound-processing tools employed by electronic musicians?
In many cases here, the musicians employ sonic field recordings as source material for their music. In the case of both their photos and their compositions (photography in one case, phonography in the other), documents are altered to emphasize their atmospheric qualities: to eke a modest art out of the everyday.
The full collection is also streaming at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
The 25 MP3s are downloadable for free individually and as a Zip file atarchive.org.
Download a 58-page PDF with full-page reproductions of the images and additional information on all the participating musicians: PDF.
A Disquiet.com Project
Commissioned by Marc Weidenbaum
Design/Boondesign.com
Cover Photo/Brian Scott
Christopher Bissonnette 