Yesterday would have been John Cage’s 95th birthday. What better way to belatedly celebrate his serendipitous musical philosophy than to fill your MP3 player with 100 short tracks, select gapless playback and hit shuffle?
That’s the theory behind “One Hundred Ambient Tones,” a collection of, well, 100 very short sound clips credited to Zen Pho, which […]
Here’s an hour-long recording of two musique concrete pieces that should be required listening for anyone venturing into laptop music. Recorded back in 1971, it’s a textbook case of the effort required, in those days long before home-computing, to make electronic compositions built from found sounds. Now that audio-processing software comes preloaded with countless transformative […]
A new version of the popular music software Ableton Live has been announced. Ableton is gearing up to release Live 6. Musicmakers will be happy to check out the Ableton website, ableton.com, and read about drag’n’drop movie importing, project management tools and “multicore” processing, not to mention its massive “library of meticulously sampled and selected […]
Brian Eno named the Long Now Foundation, the San Francisco-based organization that promotes long-term thinking. How long term? The Foundation writes years as a series of five digits, thus suggesting a continuity well beyond the sort imposed by a mere four digits, or so the theory goes. Thus it was this past Monday, June 26, […]
This year, an electronic-music anniversary passed with little fanfare. Two decades after the release of Brian Eno’s album Thursday Afternoon, it was made newly available in a remastered edition. The occasion provided an opportunity for something I’d wanted to do for a while: host an online discussion on a specific topic, and then post a […]
New York-based composer Kenneth Kirschner is a believer. “If I have a religion in life,” he says, “it’s the iPod.” Asked to detail the tenets of this faith, he quotes science-fiction writer William Gibson, who once noted, “The Walkman changed the way we understand cities.” Gibson’s much-referenced comment touches on how personal technology has allowed […]
Kenneth Kirschner is a New York-based composer whose format of choice is not 12-tone, nor drum’n’bass, nor electroacoustic, but Flash. That’s Flash, as in Macromedia Flash, the pervasive multimedia software platform that powers countless websites. Kirschner composes in layers. He sets up batches of MP3 segments, groups of sounds that complement each other. He crafts […]
The design of New York-based composer Kenneth Kirschner’s eponymous website couldn’t be more elegant. It simply presents a horizontal, chronological chart of his work, subdivided into increments of between two and five years. On the far left is a piece dated July 18, 1989. Currently the rightmost point along this line is dated November 18, […]