Thomas Brett
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On Grid Music Antidotes: Harold Budd’s “Quadari”
Like a lot of people, I listen to a lot of “grid” music. Grid music is any music with a clear, consistent, and steady meter. By this definition, most music is grid music. Electronic music–especially the kind with steady beats, which is sometimes referred to as electronic dance music–is uber grid music. All of its… Continue reading
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Running Music
(Listening on headphones recommended.) Continue reading
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Music Distillation: On Tim Hecker’s “The Piano Drop”
pulsing up small steps of a minor scale staircase– dissolves into noise. Continue reading
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Notes On Another Kind of Wonder: A Phenomenology Of Remixing
“I confronted the tradition directly as a sound form and kinesthetic activity, and made it my own in an act of appropriation that transformed me, my self, into something I hadn’t been before, a person capable of playing in this tradition with at least minimal competence.” – Timothy Rice, “Toward a Mediation of Field Methods and… Continue reading
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On Composing At 40,000 Feet: Afrojack And The Soaring Economics Of EDM
In a recent New Yorker article, Josh Eells describes the economics of the electronic dance music (EDM) scene in Las Vegas. Here, working at gambling resort clubs, marquee-name DJs (Armin van Buuren, Tiesto, David Guetta, Diplo, Deadmau5, Afrojack, and others) are paid mind-boggling sums to perform their sets for big spending and very drunk audiences. Increasingly,… Continue reading
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Notes On “Arvo Pärt: 24 Preludes For A Fugue”
“A composition comes as a single gesture which is already, in essence, music. (…) The compositional task is to find the appropriate system for the gesture.” – Arvo Pärt in Paul Hillier, Arvo Pärt (Oxford U. Press,1997), p.201 In the documentary “Arvo Pärt: 24 Preludes For A Fugue” there’s a remarkable seven minute scene (10:30-17:02) in which we… Continue reading
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From The Archives: Bill Bruford’s “Bruford And The Beat”
“Sometimes faults can be turned to good advantage. A musician is the total not only of his good things but his faults too. And when you can understand your faults and live with them and turn them to creative use, that can be of interest.” – Bill Bruford The two things that made the drummer Bill… Continue reading
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Music Distillation: On Nest’s “Stillness”
Four phrases, five notes– cluster broke into fragments, clouds of emptiness. Continue reading
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Music Distillation: On King Crimson’s “Nuages (That Which Passes, Passes Like Clouds)”
Skittering sub bump, synth chords floating harmonies, sobbing lead guitar. Continue reading
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On The Music In Apple’s FaceTime Commercial
“Seeing music as a model could seem cold or trivializing. But the urgencies and the passions of living are among the things that music models: music doesn’t belong to the detached world of mathematical modeling. And there is nothing trivial about the musical enterprise: it is far removed from toy model airplanes or fashion models… Continue reading
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