• They don’t go on your ears, or over your ears. They sit next to your ears. My favorite headphones. • Steve Reich on composing “Runner”: • Four Piano Music:         Continue reading

• Adjustable soundscapes at MyNoise.net. • An article about a composer and her long-stringed drone instrument. “Try to find resonances — textural miracles that are confusing as to structure but spinning and mesmerizing.” • Nadia Eghbal’s newsletter. “I’m enjoying learning how to interact using a new, proprioceptive set of senses. Yes, it’s tactile, but I’m… Continue reading

• Kevin Kelly’s advice. “Art is in what you leave out.” • An article on vinyl album cutting. “The game is trying to do something that is anti-generic.” • Jon Pareles on the music of Brian Eno. “Amorphous, open-ended, unstructured time, with undercurrents of foreboding, pockets of boredom and fleeting interludes of peace or reassessment.”  Continue reading

• An article about the stoppage of live music. “A concert also presents an increasingly rare opportunity to focus attention on a unique event as it unfolds in real time. There’s a chance to let an extended, unpredictable arc of sound, light and information envelop me, with no capability to pause or rewind, no temptation… Continue reading

• A magnificent essay on writing essays. “Telling people something they didn’t know doesn’t always mean surprising them. Sometimes it means telling them something they knew unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those may be the more valuable insights, because they tend to be more fundamental.” • An essay on artist Anselm Kiefer.… Continue reading

• An article about excellence. “Excellence is mundane. Excellence is accomplished through the sound of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time. While these actions are ‘qualitatively different’ from those of performers at other levels, these differences are neither unmanageable nor, taken one step at a time,… Continue reading

• Amazon’s AWS DeepComposer demonstration. The video is worth watching, if only to hear how abysmal the music is. • An article on the art of Vija Celmins (someone who has inspired me to work in layers). “Up close, you see that every swell, curl, and cranny has been given its individual due. There are… Continue reading

• An essay about being a polymath. “The real master has no tools at all, only a limitless capacity to improvise with what is to hand. The more fields of knowledge you cover, the greater your resources for improvisation.” • A discussion about the human senses. “It’s always the combination of many experiences that are… Continue reading