music
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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
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Musical Genealogies: Aphex Twin’s “#3” (1994-2024)
Released in 1994, Richard James/Aphex Twin’s “#3”, sometimes referred to as “Rhubarb”, is a beautiful, almost disinterested piece of music. Anchored by a five-chord pad sequence, the track runs seven minutes thanks to repetition, a modular structure, and some beguiling Aphexian details. The structure is broadly in seven parts. It begins with the main chords,… Continue reading
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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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