music
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Notes On Virtual Instruments
If you played a musical instrument when you were growing up you spent years getting to know how the instrument worked and how to work with it. It took time—concentrated lesson time with teachers and diffuse time alone, practicing for thousands of hours. You learned good tone, technique, repertoire, and how to play this repertoire Continue reading
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Perspective Lessons
(Photo: David Hockney) “I feel the important part of making a track is to recognize the point where you have to listen to what the track wants. This point comes in around 40 – 50% of the whole process, where it’s not so much about what you want with the track anymore, but what the Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Benge, Twenty Systems, “1981 Yamaha CS70M.” Benge (Ben Edwards) is an English musician with a longtime interest in analog synthesis. His 2008 recording Twenty Systems is an archeology of iconic synthesizers that traces a history of selected models from the late 1960s to the late 80s. Each track features a single instrument recorded without effects, Continue reading
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Performance Lessons
“The performer necessarily comes at the music from within […] Most often the performance situation catapults a musician into a rare and unusual condition, one that reveals the basic features of experience with eloquent directness, free, at least to some extent, from the usual overlay of cultural and philosophical presuppositions that nearly always obstruct our Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Stars Of The Lid, “Even If You’re Never Awake.” Good music often doesn’t go how you thought it would go. It may have parts and sections that repeat, it may use recognizable sounds, it may introduce themes, it may have a discernible structure, but still it manages to surprise you by how it goes and Continue reading
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Musical Prompts: Four Rooms
In a large gallery with white walls and hardwood floors, heard from the end of the room. A pad sound plays loud and long chord washes, while the sub bass underneath moves away from root notes. The sound overwhelms the room and you. It’s hard to tell if the music is repeating or not. In Continue reading
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Musical Longitudes And Latitudes
Music has geography– located in a place, rooted in a set of coordinates, mappable onto interpretive grids. Like a spinning globe music’s time moves from left to right, it’s melodies fall from high to low, it’s bass and treble create near and far. Music has depth–it’s 4D. Music also has inner coordinates. Imagine smashing that Continue reading
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Notes On Toggling Between (Disparate?) Musics
Lately I’ve been thinking about toggling. I think about it as I switch among various go-to apps on my phone–email, news, Twitter, blog, music player, Wikipedia, calendar, amazon.com–back and forth, quickly, seamlessly, without thinking much about it. The process, made possible by the technology of my phone, feels like the essence of thinking itself: continuous Continue reading
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Music Distillation: On AlunaGeorge’s “Your Drums, Your Love”
Triple pitch drumming, saccharine auto-tuned voice, synthetic joy-noise. Continue reading
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