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Resonant Thoughts: Kyle Chayka’s “The Longing for Less: What’s Missing from Minimalism” (2020)
[On the art of Agnes Martin] “They’re consistently sized, most of them six-foot squares of canvas, and as simple and gentle as any artwork ever made, yet with an inner strength. Each canvas is covered with repeating patterns in soft, pale colors; some are grids drawn with a ruler in pencil, others vertical or horizontal… Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “Hand Covers Bruise” (2010). This four-and-a-half minute track is a gem of minimalist melody, orchestration, and form. The music is the opening theme of the 2010 film The Social Network, which chronicles the earliest days of Facebook and historicizes how Mark Zuckerberg invented a website that would go on to… Continue reading
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Database: Michel Bras On Aesthetics From Nature And The Expressiveness Of Limited Means
“There is an expression I love from Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘Nature talks, experience translates it.’ All the aesthetics of my plates, I picked up from nature. There is an aestheticization of cooking for me that came from my relationship with nature. And there is another expression I adore from [artist Pierre] Soulages which says: ‘Plus les… Continue reading
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Database: Bjarki On Field Recordings And Free Energy
“Making field recordings is just trying to capture a certain mood. A lot of the sound that you hear–drums, percussion–I would like to capture certain vibe from nature by just going out with a drumstick and trying to find a kick drum in the stones, or trying to find the kick drum in the sand… Continue reading
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Keywords: Prompts
Why am I working on this? Sometimes your music making answers this question, but often it doesn’t. So it can be helpful to think about possibilities and paths of action before you start by devising prompts to orient yourself in directions you could go. A prompt is a phrase to guide, inspire, and energize your… Continue reading
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The Alchemy Of Imperfection
(Photo: Drazen Nesic) Many music production tools steer us towards perfection. With a click we load a sample with immaculate verisimilitude to a real instrument, auto tune errant vocal pitches by cents or semitones, quantize a shaky drum hit to the nearest sixteenth note or downbeat safe haven, loop a phrase to exactly four measures,… Continue reading
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Database: Trent Reznor On Liking The Way The Other One Sounded
“We’ve been having that happen a little bit with orchestral stuff, too, a couple scores we recently did. The intention was just dropping some Spitfire strings to mock-up something and then when it’s time to do it for real, after you’ve spent a fuck-load of money and add 1,000 people in and an orchestrator and… Continue reading
