brettworks

thinking through music

writing

August 1, 2025

Curating The Week: Jaron Lanier On Musical Instruments, Spotify, Adam Gopnik On The Renaissance

• An interview with Jaron Lanier about musical instruments. “To me, musical instruments are the best user interfaces that have ever been invented. If what you think a technology is for is to help a person affect the world with ever greater acuity, then musical instruments are the most advanced technologies that have ever existed.”… Continue reading

Curating The Week

art, music, reviews, technology, writing
July 22, 2025

Curating The Week: Fake AI Bands, AI’s Effects on Writing and Reading

• An article on fake AI bands. “The internet has fragmented and flattened subcultures. The Velvet Sundown’s puppeteers present the band’s soft pastiche of genres—psychedelic, folk, indie—as sophisticated fusion, but of course it’s nothing more than a careless smear of stylistic averages. Psychedelic, folk, and indie rock each in their own way have something to… Continue reading

AI, Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, music, technology, writing
June 2, 2025

Resonant Thoughts: Nadia Asparouhova’s “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading” (2025)

“Creative self-expression is the only way we will continue to make our mark as humans in times of uncertainty, and it doesn’t come from doing what you think will sell to other people “(21). “Antimemetics are a shadow city built on thoughts, knowledge, and practices that do not spread easily, despite their importance to our… Continue reading

Resonant Thoughts, Uncategorized

consciousness, philosophy, science, spirituality, writing
April 22, 2025

Curating The Week: The Bottleneck, Drum Machines, AI and Writing, What To Do

• An essay on the bottleneck. “The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.” “It starts with substitution:… Continue reading

AI, Curating The Week, drum machines

AI, artificial-intelligence, chatgpt, technology, writing
April 15, 2025

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch” (2019)

“intuitive knowledge exists, silent wisdom exists, instinctive insight exists, and I believe this unarticulated understanding of the world comprises a much larger part of our self than we usually imagine” (42). “No art is free of morals, for the simple reason that all art entails a set of assessments of reality, and they are always… Continue reading

Resonant Thoughts

art, artist, painting, writing
April 3, 2025

Curating The Week: Athletic Training, Work, Elite Cubing, AI Love

• An essay an athletic training. “The main idea of my training program was that you will become good at whatever it is that you train.” “My training program was very simple and therefore very robust. It was cheap and reliable. Not fancy nor extraordinary. I tried not to involve things that I could not… Continue reading

Curating The Week

AI, artificial-intelligence, politics, technology, writing
January 30, 2025

On Writing Tools

• iA Writer. For everyday writing I use iA Writer, an app for Mac OS and iOS. The app is quite expensive, and you need to purchase one version for the phone and another for the computer, but it’s well worth it. iA Writer looks pleasingly minimal and cloud syncs perfectly across devices, so if… Continue reading

writing tools

books, scrivener, writing, writing-tips
November 13, 2024

Curating The Week: Writing, Clichés, Music Streaming

“AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.” “The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle… Continue reading

Curating The Week

blog, books, clichés, writing, writing-tips

Thomas Brett is a musician and writer who holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from New York University. He is the author of Principles of Electronic Music Production and The Creative Electronic Music Producer, a book described by Sound On Sound magazine as “a deep philosophical analysis of the various creative inspirations, ideas and processes involved in producing electronic music.” His essays have appeared in the journals Popular Music and Popular Music and Society, as well as edited collections by Routledge, Oxford, and Cambridge University presses. Thomas has played percussion on Broadway since 1997 and writes about music at brettworks.com.