-
Resonant Thoughts: David Epstein’s “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better” (2026)
“artifacts of chance” (39). “Given complete freedom, we tend to default to simple solutions, not because they are good, but because they are familiar” (47). “Because we are cognitive misers, breakthrough creativity happens when the easy and intuitive path is blocked—by choice or by force” (48). “Constraints push the brain beyond its default tendencies, forcing… Continue reading
-
Database: Alva Noto On Production Monoculture
“I also noticed how incredibly unified people produce music in these days, leading to a kind of monoculture where we’re all using the same tools and so produce, of course, something where the music sounds more and more similar. It’s really difficult to have a very radical approach of having completely different sound aesthetics.” Alva… Continue reading
-
Techniques: Small Windows
Small windows—the real thing or as metaphor—are inherently poetic. Through them we see only a fragment of the world outside their frame—sunlight streaming in, the building across the street, a stranger passing, an abstract arrangement of sky and cloud. Small windows are inherently minimalist this way, because of how they contain what you notice. As… Continue reading
-
Resonant Thoughts: Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2019)
“Anomalies are often the path to a new understanding.” “Today all the available sources of intuitive life – the natural world, cultural tradition, the body, religion and art – have been so conceptualised, devitalised and ‘deconstructed’ (ironised) by self-consciousness, explicitness and the systems and theories used to analyse them, that their power to help us… Continue reading
-
Sonic Fictions
We were watching a short-form video on the phone. A handsome pilot sits in the cockpit of a commercial jet, explaining all the technologies that make flying safe. The tone of his voice is confident and calm, his ideas make reassuring sense. But something’s off. The pilot’s in a cockpit, but his voice is somewhere… Continue reading
-
Database: Mark Clifford On Squeezing The Life Out Of Equipment
“Everything’s so sophisticated in terms of equipment that you can just put a guitar through an effects pedal and you think, ‘Wow, that’s cool.’ But anyone else could have done the same thing. That ceases to interest me then because I’m not interested in doing things which are simple. I don’t think less of people… Continue reading
brettworks 