music
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Same Walk, Different Music: Squarepusher’s Brief Music
Producer and multi-instrumentalist Tom Jenkins (aka Squarepusher) is (re)known(ed) for his intense drum and bass rhythm programming, electric bass playing, and forward thinking about music production. But it may be Jenkins’ mellower and very brief tracks that are his best work. Leading the way is the magisterial, one-minute-and seventeen-second “Tommib”, a piece that’s organ music Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Toby Manning’s “Mixing Pop and Politics: A Marxist History of Popular Music” (2024)
“What’s audible in millennial-angst music isn’t piety but a profound sense of loss: not of something remembered but, in this retro, YouTube, internet meme era, something re-remembered” (518). “The centrality of sampling and quotation in contemporary music, alongside the perennial accessibility and audibility of music’s entire back catalogue, means the past is always alive in Continue reading
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Keywords: Musical Idea Curating
If you compose music with a computer, eventually you’ll face the accumulation of what you’ve been doing over the years. Digital files, while invisible, add up, with only their names and dates as clues to how they might sound; you can’t be sure until you double-click, load, and play. Musical idea curating is periodically listening Continue reading
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Keywords: Musical Spells, Musical Clichés
Along the spectrum of possible musics the musician-composer-producer can make, two types are most important: that which casts a spell, and that which sounds cliché. Music that casts a spell has power: it creates a state of enchantment through its sounds and what they do. Enchanting music enchants by many means: through orchestration and timbre-textures, Continue reading
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Keywords: No Expectations
No expectations is an approach to workflow as open-ended and non-determined. The mindset celebrates continual play on your musical system’s edges: exploring tools, trying things out, noticing how the sounds feel and work on you rather than having preset, a priori ideas of how you should use them. Play a few chords, turn a few Continue reading
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Keywords: Genre & Style Thinking
Genre & style thinking is reflecting on the kind of music you could be making. You may find inspiration in what you listen to, but the music you could be making is more than the sum of your fandoms. In fact, it probably isn’t like anything you already know. Try to imagine its sound— its Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Ravel/Peter Phillips, “Miroirs: No.5, La Vallée des Cloches” (1904-1906). MIDI’s non-electronic predecessor was the piano roll, a punch card-like storage medium that was used to direct “player” pianos in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. Piano rolls were continuous (looped) rolls of paper with perforated holes whose vertical and horizontal locations on the sheet represented, Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
M.C. Escher, “Relativity” (1953) Stereolab, “Crest” (1993). I first heard this song—and learned about Stereolab—during a musicology graduate seminar over twenty years ago. Another student had chosen the track as way to talk about a topic in musical time which I don’t recall, but the music mesmerized me and I’ve never forgotten it. Years later Continue reading
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