• An essay about how to get new ideas. “The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken?” • An article about monks and attention. “We inherited the monkish obsession with attention, and even inherited their moral judgments about the capacity, or failure, to concentrate. But most Continue reading

• An article on interconnected production. “The approach that several people work on a project is essential for me. In terms of authorship, there isn’t a singular ‘great creator’ but many people who play around with it.” • An essay on creative algorithms. “I felt violated. The way I draw is the complex culmination of Continue reading

• A documentary about the A World Without Ice exhibit. (Thanks to R. Hartenberger for the link.) “When you watch ice melt, it doesn’t really make a lot of sound on its own. So I froze some ice and put a drum underneath that and it sounded good.” “In this piece there is a certain Continue reading

• An article about how a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. “The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.” • An article about music streaming platforms. “The platforms right now are flooded by a tidal wave of content as millions of creators getting Continue reading

• An article about the cognitive effects of brown noise. “No research suggests a specific kind of noise is the key [for focus or sleep]. Frequencies can activate and stimulate the brain in different ways.” • An article about cooking and the senses. “A single recipe is never the one true version of a dish, Continue reading

• A short film about repetition. • An article about A.I.-generated art. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.” • A blog post about getting the hard part right. “What’s the hard part? What’s the part that has to be right for the rest to matter?” Continue reading

• A documentary about the Fairlight CMI sampler. “We started just sort of sampling anything we could get our hands on to see how it would sound when it played back at different pitches. I happened to have this record [Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite] on my shelf…and I recorded the first half a second of one Continue reading

• A video about the philosophy of bass in music production. “It’s your choice how you think about the psychoacoustic element: either your brain hears those upper harmonics, and calculates that there must be a low fundamental causing that harmonic series to emerge. Or the inherent nonlinearities of your hearing mean those sum and difference Continue reading

• A blog post on craft and imperfection. “As soon as we mechanize, measure and perfect something, it becomes far less interesting.” • An article on ambient music streaming. “Now, in an era of constant uncertainty and overwhelming malaise, the new age imperative to slow down and heal thyself is deeply embedded in mainstream culture. Continue reading

• An article about plagiarism in popular music. “There are only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music and coincidences are bound to happen if 60,000 songs are being released a day on Spotify, that is 22m songs a year, and there are only 12 notes that are available.” – Ed Continue reading