creative strategies
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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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On Small Joys Of Making Electronic Music
One small joy for me with electronic music is the sounds. Oh the crazy interesting sounds! It’s easy to find sounds that excite me in ways that acoustic sounds don’t always do. Electronic sounds seem infinitely open and malleable, responsive to my limitations and even my (brief) moments of control. Electronic sounds are also mysterious… Continue reading
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Roger Linn On Drum Machine Groove And J Dilla’s Off-Beat Sound
Music is fortunate to have inventors like Roger Linn. Linn has designed or co-designed a number of drum machines–such as the LM-1, the LinnDrum, the Akai MPC series of sampling workstations, and Tempest, a recent venture with Dave Smith. Linn is skilled in making instruments that musicians can, and do, use with ease in musical… Continue reading
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On Lessons From A Recent Musical Project
The trick is to work swiftly and then stop just before you completely figure out what it is that you’re doing. Continue reading
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On Musical Systems And Four Tet’s Good Musical Sense
“I don’t want to sound like anybody else.” – Kieran Hebden I have written previously on this blog about the music of Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet). Hebden not only has good musical taste but also a thoughtful and unique approach to using technology to create his work. In this video from Red Bull Music… Continue reading
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On Four Tet’s Good Taste
“It’s very rare for me to use instruments or synths or anything like that.” – Kieran Hebden I have long felt that the electronic musician Four Tet (aka Kieran Hebden) has good taste. He makes what critics once labelled “folktronica” music, a term that probably came about in an effort to describe how Hebden deftly… Continue reading
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On Finding Cross-Sensory Inspiration: The Spell Of Michel Bras
The Michelin-starred, self-taught French chef Michel Bras may as well be a music composer, such is his multi-sensory approach to his culinary craft. In the ambient and thoughtful documentary Inventing Cuisine: Michel Bras (2008), directed by Paul Lacoste, we see Bras at work on the kitchen–poaching fish, peeling veggies, brooding over his (fascinating) sketchbooks, and… Continue reading
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On Beginnings And Anywheres: A John Cage Aphorism
I see the words on an inspirational magnet in a shop window. “Begin anywhere” the late American experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992) tells us. But what was the point of this telling? Cage in fact walked the walk of his talk, relying on rolling dice, consulting the Chinese I-Ching book of hexagrams, and even scrutinizing the… Continue reading
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On Pop Music Production Geneologies: Ester Dean’s Compositional Process
In his recent New Yorker article “The Song Machine”, John Seabrook explores the songwriting process behind contemporary pop music. Today’s Top Forty hit, says Seabrook, “is almost always machine made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops, and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, the voices are Auto-tuned for pitch,… Continue reading
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Sound Decisions: On Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”
“Instinct puts us in the moment, intellect is slower.” – Robert Fripp “The proof that you truly understand a pattern of behavior is that you know how to reverse it.” – Daniel Kahneman Sometimes while working on writing new music I’ve noticed how I oscillate between two frames of mind. One frame feels spontaneous and intuitive.… Continue reading
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