Disquiet Junto Project 0341: Sample Forensics
The Assignment: Place a fragmentary sample into a natural-seeming setting.

Step 1: Choose a sample, a very short piece, roughly two to five seconds in length. It’s best if the sample has no fixed meter, no explicit rhythm, that it feels frayed at its beginning and its end — perhaps a snatch of melody, or a fragment of a field recording.

Step 2: Consider how you might create a piece of music into which the sample from Step 1 can be set, so that it is as if that setting is the point of origin for the sample. This is an act of forensics and of forgery.

Step 3: Record a piece of music based on the planning in Step 2. At the start of your piece, repeat the original sample three times separated by two brief silences, so the listener knows what to listen for in the completed piece. (It is fine to repeat the sample in your original piece, but not to run it continuously as a loop.)
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For this piece, I thought about how I could incorporate a "fake" instrument into a piece, and have it sound like it belonged.

I remembered recording a sample of water in a bucket when I was doing the Readycut Residency in 2016 [we were carrying the water from the river to the camp where we were staying], and I slowed it down to bring out this eerie resonance.

The other instruments here are a variety of gongs and chimes.

The piece alludes to how I feel sometimes when faced with writer's block!