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On Minimalism and Aural Illusions
One of the enduring contributions of the so-called American “minimalist” composers–particularly Steve Reich and Philip Glass–to global music culture was to re-introduce shape-shifting, metamorphosing aural illusions to our listening experience through intense repetition, polyrhythm and additive rhythms. These rhythmic devices are not new in music–you can certainly hear them in some African and Indonesian musics–but they… Continue reading
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On Practicing Wonder: David Abram’s Becoming Animal
“This whole terrain is talking to our animal body; our actions are the steady reply.” – David Abram David Abram is a phenomenologist and ecologist who is interested in “the qualitative language of direct experience” (289). And since his 1996 book The Spell Of The Sensuous, he’s been on a mission to get his readers… Continue reading
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On Matthew Herbert’s One Pig
Several years ago I read an interview with the English experimental electronic musician Matthew Herbert in Tape Op magazine and I remember him going on about the importance of his audio samples. Herbert didn’t want to use just any old sound sample. He wanted to use sounds that had some meaning for him–sounds that had… Continue reading
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(Im)Perfect Congruence: On Dancing To Music
There’s a funny and almost disturbing video on YouTube that shows a couple apparently dancing to the angular beats of Autechre. The video is funny and strangely compelling because of its unlikely pairing. On the one hand, the video looks to be from the 1970s or 80s–some kind of European (Greek?) television program featuring a… Continue reading
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On Wonderment And Scripts In Electronic Music Making
“I always say to myself, what is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment?”—Buckminster Fuller There’s a feeling I’m getting used to by now as I make electronic music: a sense of wonderment regarding all the sonic possibilities I’m not exploring at this very (extraordinary) moment. Once upon a time… Continue reading
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On Bjork’s Biophilia: Music, Technology And Enchantment
There are a lot of ways to characterize the music of the Icelandic singer/composer/instrumentalist/imagineer Bjork, and certainly the labels “adventurously creative”, “experimental”, and “electronic” come to mind. But these labels inevitably come up short since it’s hard to categorize Bjork’s sonic output; moreover, artistically she achieves the ideal of being an idiom unto herself. If… Continue reading
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On Sonic Persuasion: The Music Of Oneohtrix Point Never
Over the past few months I heard about Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin)’s electronic music in at least two disparate places–in Simon Reynolds’ fine book Retromania and in a recent article by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker–so I decided to buy his most recent recording Replica and check it out. Compelling music sometimes… Continue reading
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On Musical Taste: Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love
Musical taste is a funny thing in that we usually know what we like, but we can’t always say why. Instead, we often delineate the boundaries of our tastes by knowing what we don’t like. So, for instance, we might insist that we never listen to country songs, or that Romantic classical music is an… Continue reading
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On Imitation, Oral Tradition And Pleasure: Nicki Minaj’s Super Bass Travels
“That self-organizing living force is what we’re having to ride. What we’re doing with the web is making a very large-scale global organism that in a few decades or so we will be able to identify as an organism in every sense of the word.” – Kevin Kelly on the Technium One of the most… Continue reading
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