“There seems to be a trend of placing field recordings into electronic music, presumably to portray some sort of connection between organic and electronic worlds […] For me, this sort of approach has become a bit of a trope, and I think there are much more interesting ways of including field recordings. The thing I… Continue reading

“Not only do listeners not want music to become undifferentiated ooze, but no other part of the music economy wants it, either. Artists don’t want to have to make music that can’t be told apart, labels have no way to manipulate an attention economy around noises that resist attention, and streaming services can’t convince you… Continue reading

“What may be true of photography, though, is not necessarily applicable to art. The latter depends on ambiguity, polyvalence, resonance, obfuscation, and illumination […]” “Jan Peter Tripp’s paintings, too, have a consistently analytic quality rather than a synthesizing one. The photographic raw material which they take as their starting point is painstakingly modified. Artificial distinctions… Continue reading

“Today, it can often feel like there is no creativity without attention, and no attention without the accelerant of algorithmic recommendations.” “That kind of internal creative process, or even the process of thinking on one’s own, is something that feels lacking in the Filterworld era, when any idea or thought can be made instantly public… Continue reading

“The Gas sound is literally spliced together out of small samples from classical records, which Voigt subjected to processes of ‘zoom, loop and alienation’. The music’s provenance is instantly audible from the rainfall-like hiss of aged vinyl, the discernibly orchestral sonorities of the grave cellos and tingling violins. There’s a marvelous irony to the fact… Continue reading

“Unpredictability is a defining hallmark of complex systems. Unpredictability is also the source of all the extraordinary capacities for unbridled creativity in complex systems. Its implications are profound.” “With just the right, low level of randomness, sometimes referred to as quenched disorder, the system blooms with the ability to explore what Stuart Kauffman calls the… Continue reading

“Instinct and intuition. What drives the basic mental operations that are involved with creating? In other words, what is the source of our ‘agile, inspired imaginations’? Primarily our instincts and intuitions. Instinct is the more primal of the two. It comprises thought and behavioral impulses that we share with other members of our herd (or… Continue reading

“The hand carries the load of value through lived experience. And experience cannot be automated.” “Few artists like to admit to painting by the numbers. Nobody wants to seem ordinary. The occasional visibility of artifice—portable, explainable, documented, transferable, automated—therefore tends to startle or repulse audiences acculturated into the privilege of exceptional human genius.” “The hypothesis… Continue reading