Thomas Brett
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Resonant Thoughts: Harold Budd On New Age Music
“Well I’ll tell you very frankly that this whole ‘new age’ business is very distasteful to me. I don’t like being even considered in that category and I have almost no respect for it at all. To me it’s a kind of arrogant philosophical point of view where music has a metaphysical or biological function. Continue reading
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Creative Edges
We speak metaphorically of edges when we wish to describe the most forward-located point in technological, scientific, or artistic development. We say, that’s cutting edge computer software, or her work is on the leading edge of contemporary music. To be at the cutting or leading edge is to be at that point where the trajectories Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: John T. Lysaker’s “Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music For Airports (The OxFord Keynotes Series)(2018)
“Taking his bearings from cybernetics, Eno works through interventions rather than utterly spontaneous creations. The variety he finds through systems music came from the system, after all. And therein lies the key–one takes steps to outwit oneself, whether with an oblique strategy or a pattern (or system) with which to generate sounds. That is, one Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Ian Kirkpatrick On Dynamics
“There are only certain ways to have dynamics in your song: there is volume, there is brightness, and then there is stereo field. Sometimes I want a chorus to explode outward, and I want the drums to be mono in a certain place, and then get wider. You also can get such a crazy contrast Continue reading
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On Beginnings and Endings: Fennesz’s “Nebenraum”
In Austrian producer and guitarist Christian Fennesz’s “Nebenraum” (2022), the first three minutes are filled by a three-note dissonant drone that sets up you for something you couldn’t have anticipated. As I listened to the piece over and over, I thought about the connection between the music’s three minutes and its final 75 seconds, which Continue reading
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Brett’s Sound PIcks: Julia Kent’s “Echo Of Wings” (2022)
(Isn’t this awesome?) (Playlist 2022.) Continue reading
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