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brettworks

thinking through music


  • August 6, 2025

    Freeze Studies 6

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    Uncategorized
  • August 4, 2025

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Burial’s “Comafields” (2025)

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    Brett’s Sound Picks
  • August 1, 2025

    Curating The Week: Jaron Lanier On Musical Instruments, Spotify, Adam Gopnik On The Renaissance

    • An interview with Jaron Lanier about musical instruments. “To me, musical instruments are the best user interfaces that have ever been invented. If what you think a technology is for is to help a person affect the world with ever greater acuity, then musical instruments are the most advanced technologies that have ever existed.”… Continue reading

    Curating The Week
    art, music, reviews, technology, writing
  • July 31, 2025

    Fragments: Musical Advice

    Musical virtuosity and musicianship are not the same. The first is obvious and focuses on Me, while the second is subtle and dissolves into Us. The first iteration of a series of pieces is often the most interesting, because you don’t yet know what you’re doing. Preserve that naïveté. You don’t have to know all… Continue reading

    fragments
  • July 30, 2025

    Database: Oklou On Loops

    “…take as the basis of the tracks this idea of a loop that I could be listening to forever. Just because I think it sounds close to perfection. Shorter patterns and this idea of a cycle repeating itself forever and ever, and how I can build a pop song on top of that.” Oklou database… Continue reading

    database
  • July 29, 2025

    Freeze Studies

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    atelier, Uncategorized
  • July 28, 2025

    Resonant Thoughts: Matthew B. Crawford’s “Shop Class As Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work” (2009)

    “The craftsman’s habitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the objective standards of his craft. However narrow in its application, this is a rare appearance in contemporary life—a disinterested, articulable, and publicly affirmable idea of the good. Such a strong ontology is somewhat at odds with the cutting-edge institutions of the new capitalism,… Continue reading

    craft, Resonant Thoughts
    craft
  • July 26, 2025

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Ganavya’s “madi” (2025)

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    Brett’s Sound Picks
  • July 25, 2025

    102 Bpm Dub

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    dub-ish, Uncategorized
  • July 24, 2025

    Music’s Negative Space

    M.C. Escher, Sky and Water I (1938) Pause the music that soundtracks you.Notice silence, music’s other half. Listen to its space, your thoughts, the wind.Tune in to a soundscape without spacing out. To hear what music is saying, experience what it replaces. Continue reading

    negative epistemology, perception
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Thomas Brett is a musician and writer who holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from New York University. He is the author of Principles of Electronic Music Production and The Creative Electronic Music Producer, a book described by Sound On Sound magazine as “a deep philosophical analysis of the various creative inspirations, ideas and processes involved in producing electronic music.” His essays have appeared in the journals Popular Music and Popular Music and Society, as well as edited collections by Routledge, Oxford, and Cambridge University presses. Thomas has played percussion on Broadway since 1997 and writes about music at brettworks.com.

Recent Posts

  • Database: Christian Löffler on Working Quickly and Using Field Recordings
  • Curating the Week: The Additional Touch, Philip Glass’s Music, How to Write a Paper
  • Performance Practice: Lessons from Music for 18 Musicians
  • Resonant Thoughts: James Marriott’s “The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” (2026)
  • 5 October

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