What do we talk about when we talk about “laptop music”? Over at newmusicbox.org, there is now an open thread for discussion of “laptop music,” spun off from the article I published there last week Wednesday: “Serial Port: …
While on the subject of remixes: there’s nothing with quite the free feeling as a series of remixes of something entirely unfamiliar. Listening to the wide variety of treatments of Matthew Rozeik’s “Oh Lord Please Give Me Another Brain,” a …
There’s something understandably derivative about the remix. It is, by definition, a secondary object. Even though the word “mix” would be sufficiently descriptive, the “re” just, well, reinforces this sense that it’s a subsidiary development. At a communal-remix website like …
A recent performance by Kronos Quartet played a central role in a story I published last week, at newmusicbox.org, on the history of “laptop music.” Three laptops were involved in the performance: one played by a member of Matmos …
The Bush of Ghosts remix site seems to be working better than it had recently been. You can, on the Listen page, pick the Filter format, choose from a range of subjective-aesthetic continuums, and then map the songs as they …
I was invited by newmusicbox.org to write an overview of “laptop music.” My intial instinct was that this would be less an introduction than a requiem. Isn’t the phrase “laptop music” sorta “over”? Well, as it turns out, no. …
As of this writing, some 31,586 songs have reportedly been downloaded from the public-domain website dedicated to the re-release of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Two Ghosts songs, their 20 to …
There’s always a beat in the noise, some routinized element of a given signal that is inherent either in its source (like, say, the tumble of a motor) or in itself (e.g., the peak and valley of a sound wave). …
Mark Rushton has posted a half-hour live recording of him with bassist Jon Harnish. Between Rushton’s overdubbed intros and outros, he and Harnish, playing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, perform two pieces: one a rush of rustling wind chimes and gauzy …
The organizers of E3, the big annual video game expo held a week ago at the Los Angeles Convention Center, have turned down the sound, even as video-game manufacturers have begun to turn up the music. What in the past …