music
-
Change One Thing
Paul Klee, Ancient Sound (1925) “The key about a process is that it has time in it.” – Nassim Taleb, Fooled By Randomness When I’m writing new music I sometimes preserve one thing from a previous project, but change it slightly. Let’s say I’ve just finished a work for solo keyboard. Usually what happens is… Continue reading
-
When Less Leads To More
My hope for every music production session is for something unexpected to catch my attention and open a new perceptual world. But such worlds almost never open right off the bat. Like anything aesthetically significant, they tend to require time and attention–you have to work into them. How does one do that? It helps to… Continue reading
-
Problems of Connection
(Detail from Leonard da Vinci’s Portrait of a Musician, c. 1483-1487) Something I encounter almost daily in the omnimusical realm of music production is the problem of connecting with my instruments, by which I mean DAW software, virtual synthesizers and samplers, and keyboard controllers. I depend on these technologies to make some kinds of music,… Continue reading
-
Holding Out For Better
“Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its center and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognizable as your own.The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.” John Berger, About Looking (1980), 204-205. There’s a type of being stuck that I quite like… Continue reading
-
Resonant Thoughts: Ben Ratliff’s “Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening” (2025)
“It occurred to me that there was a connection between the act of listening and the act of running, and I began to write from that point of connection” (24). “I am talking about running the song: a way to engage with the music’s forward patterns, its implications, its potential, its intention, and even its… Continue reading
-
Notes On An Autechre Concert, 2025
If you’ve been following Autechre for years, on recordings and in performance, you may have realized that they’re evolving in ways you are not. You assume the comforts of steady beats, hummable melodies, verses leading to choruses, predictable instrumentation, and genre conventions while they’ve left music’s crowdsourced paths, wandering the wilds of their software, exploring.… Continue reading
-
Resonant Thoughts: Ian Penman’s “Erik Satie Three Piece Suite” (2025)
“Certain pieces by Satie are like someone took the lovely opening minutes of Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert and cut away all the subsequent faff and bore and chaff and chore and ego moan.” (54) “IN-BETWEEN All those in-between emotions it’s hard to name. Old time feelings in danger of disappearing. Staring into space vs… Continue reading
brettworks 