“The sequencer’s automatic sound sequences and the drum machine’s loops hypnotized me. These black boxes brought the trance quality of African, Indian and Asian musical cultures into pop music, a quality that had been the starting point for the minimalist concept.” “Working with automatic music machines is fundamentally different from human music-making, simply because machines… Continue reading

“Our twenty-first-century snake oil promise of ‘more choice’ often devolves into homogenous slip, a moraine of thin and strong repetition. In the current YouTube moment, we’re told that we have a limitless look-see option on everything there ever was, laid out right before us—but at the price, perhaps, if a complete absence of critical chiaroscuro.” Continue reading

“The world is not like a computer. Computers – like us, like plants and animals, like clouds and seas – are like the world. Some more than others, some better attuned to its processes – and many not.” “As John Cage discovered through his use of the I Ching, a complex dance of chance-driven and… Continue reading

“Having things so that they’re not in any way masked, so that they’re really crisp, clear images in sound. So that you can always identify the source of the sound. It’s like a really vivid version of the thing that you’re hearing.” – Nicholas Worrall  Continue reading

“The kind of signposts I’m thinking about are often little more than short phrases—or even single word neologisms—that, due to what ideas they have compressed within them, reorient how you see specific spheres of experience. These are ‘catchy’ concepts that often combine two or more words in unexpected ways, creating a mental hook for a… Continue reading

“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

“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

“Knowledge has to be laid down in the brain in overlapping and criss-crossed layers. You need the underlay before you can have the carpet and then—then you can abandon the analogy because it’s completely unsustainable. Everything has gradually to become a kind of sediment in the brain, its ocean floor—a place so dark and mysterious… Continue reading

“I like styling with something that’s really intricate and complex, sound‑wise. Like dragging a whole finished song into a granular synth. So, you’re starting from a point of real intricacy and trying to find order in it, as opposed to coming from a pure sine wave and trying to add intricacies. I like going the other way around more.” – Fred… Continue reading

“To not work in a linear way when making a track. It’s better to just start somewhere and explore from there, don’t try and write a song from start to finish, make it random. And also don’t be afraid to get theoretical when making music, especially electronic music. There is a lot to be found… Continue reading