“I’m addicted to the idea that you put yourself in a place and surrender to it. It’s about making space for a kind of attention that you’re not normally offered by entertainment media.” – Brian Eno MPD Continue reading

“Presence died a million deaths in the seventies. In its place was the Edisonian dream: record the music, not the room. There was a cultural and geographic component to the dry-as-a-bone sound. It was especially prevalent in West Coast studios, and especially audible on the California-centric rock bands of the seventies—put on an Eagles record… Continue reading

“I always think of myself as being on this producer’s end of listening: the way that a producer might listen to a recording, or might listen to an instrument, or a microphone or whatever. So usually the way I would want people to think about sound is trying to listen to these details. And listening… Continue reading

“…It’s often these ones [tracks] where there’s really not a great deal going on, but somehow they’re still more than the sum of their actual parts.” – Hudson Mohawke Continue reading

“The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. Another example we can take from painting is the way that paintings are created by gradual refinement. Unseen details combine to produce something that’s just stunning, like a… Continue reading

“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