brettworks

• An article about decolonizing electronic music software.

“I find Ableton pushes me towards following the beat grid. Everything sounds somehow Western—very mechanical, not organic like the rough tones and raw drums I heard growing up in Nairobi. Even as I try to break away from the loops and the 1-2-3-4 drive of these music tools, I always end up back there somehow.”

• A 1963 article by Max Mathews about computers as musical instruments.

“There are no theoretical limitations to the performance of the computer as a source of musical sounds, in contrast to the performance of ordinary instruments.”

• An article about YouTube ambience rooms. 

“Ambience videos provide a respite from the ‘hypermediacy‘ of the internet, she said — a break from the constant bombardment of ads and emails and the self-inflicted burden of dozens of open browser tabs. (Hypermediacy can be defined as the act of viewing, consuming or interacting with multiple forms of media at once.)”