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Accretion By Small Decisions
When I’m making music I try to prioritize the performative parts of my workflow over other, more technical tasks, because performing—which can be defined as committing to a concentrated state over time—intuitively feels like the most musical thing I can do (and it’s something I’ve practiced). I’ve written here about the urgency of performance and… Continue reading
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Shifting Frames Of Reference
If you work in tandem with digital music technologies, you may find yourself adrift in possibilities and a prisoner of recency bias, as your focus slips and slides and your attention wanders towards whatever seems most exciting right now. One way to mobilize this scatter and focus your work is to commit to whatever sound… Continue reading
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Brett’s Sound Picks: Teddy Rok’s “Awake” (2022)
2022 playlist here Continue reading
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Notes On Dylan Henner’s Marimba Music
“I still believe that the primary virtue and usefulness of criticism resides precisely in its limitations—in the fact that the critic’s fragile linguistic tryst with the visible object is always momentary, ephemeral, and local to its context. The experience blooms up in the valley of its saying, to borrow W.H. Auden’s phrase, but it does… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Richard Sennett’s “The Craftsman” (2008)
“Going over an action again and again, by contrast, enables self-criticism. Modern education fears repetitive learning as mind-numbing. Afraid of boring children, avid to present ever-different stimulation, the enlightened teacher may avoid routine-but thus deprives children of the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating it from within.” “The difficult and the incomplete… Continue reading
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On Musical Yakisugi: Taylor Dupree’s “rem” (2022)
Within contemporary ambient music’s often texturally generic world, the work of Taylor Dupree carves a distinctive sound. Dupree is a master of assembling tableaus of small, delicate sounds suffused with noise to convey the aura of aged materials. The music conjures Yakisugi, the Japanese method of wood preservation through burning. The best of Dupree’s music excels… Continue reading
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