Tag: electronic music

Not quite drone, not quite noise…

This was originally the pump on our Nespresso machine, looped and mangled on an SP-404 before further mangling by a Kaoss Replay and then into an Eventide H-90 for some serious reverb.

This grew out of some work from Disquiet Junto’s “Consumer Drone” project that just wrapped up last week, but isn’t what I posted for that. I found this didn’t quite fit what I was looking for for the project, but something I thought might appeal to others.

New drones!

Another collection of drone sketches.
This one was fun. I did it entirely on the Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field. I did the sound design, laid down one four-track digital tape with the sounds, and then for the three tracks I used different tape speeds and effects on the master bus. The only thing done off of the OP-1 was the loudness normalization at the end.

NaNoWriMo, Jamuary, and a 5K!

So, I don’t do the New Year’s resolutions thing; I never have. Instead, I try to step back every year around my birthday in late summer and take stock of the previous year, and look ahead to what’s going on. This year I made a conscious decision to try to set reasonable monthly goals for myself and see how I did at the end of each month. I’ve been using a modified bullet journal for goal-setting and tracking for the previous year, doing a bit more up-front planning and thinking and reflecting at the beginning of each month. How it went

Book Review: Audio Culture

In college, I took an electronic music class, which I absolutely loved. Recently, I’ve been dabbling more with electronic music again, and I thought I should at least return to some of the fundamentals I’d learned in school.

Man, do I wish Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Amazon), edited by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, had been out in ’89 when I took that class. It’s an awesome collection of short essays (most are 3-4 pages; a few are more) written by musicians, philosophers, and others about the experimental music and sound art scene in the last century. First published in 2004, it’s been freshly reprinted in 2013, and is as valuable now as it would have been when it first came out.

It’s divided into two parts, “Theories” and “Practices”, and in each part are sections such as:

  • Music and its others: noise, sound, and silence.
  • Modes of listening.
  • Music in the age of electronic (re)production.
  • The open work.
  • Experimental musics.
  • Improvised musics.
  • Minimalisms
  • DJ culture
  • Electronic music and electronica.

The sections on minimalism and DJ culture really knocked my socks off, with essays by Steve Reich and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, among others.

It’s a great book to dip in and out of, and includes an extensive discography. For a lot of the music the book mentions, you can find excepts or the whole pieces on YouTube and Spotify, which really engages you with the different ideas and thoughts around sound and music.

What I found really interesting, and what took me back to my college course, is that it covers the whole century’s thinking; it’s not just about house or techno or DJing or hiphop; there’s a lot of discussion of music concrete, early electronic music, and all of the experimentation that led us to where we are today.

My only regret is not having other people to discuss the book and discography with while reading it; if I had that course to do all over again, I’d hope that this would be a textbook for the course.