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It’s kinda funny that it’s called “program music,” given what such a term suggests in our age of computer-assisted cultural activity. That’s the term for the classical tradition in which an instrumental work has an inherent but unspoken (that is, unsung) narrative. Perhaps the best known, and best loved, example is The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, by [...]
Two of the 10 most popular posts on this site during the month of may relate to Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album (cover shown at left), the recent free album download I compiled. Each track on the album is a response-in-music to a misinformed article (“The Freeloaders”) about copyright and creativity in the May [...]
The 16 tracks that comprise The Coat Hanger Clinic, its title and content reportedly informed by a binge of Korean horror flicks, range from vocoded computer vocals to elegiac piano to 8-bit giddiness to abstract electronica to saccharine pop. Recorded by Cursed Chimera (aka Benatos Thompson, and formerly L.A.M.P.), it’s a purposeful mixed bag, but [...]
The world of video-game music is just that, a whole realm unto itself, with its own rules, its own obsessions, its own stars, it’s own logic. Judging by the sheer density of video-game-music sites, there is a large group of people much of whose listening time is spent on pixelated tunes that, by tone and [...]
To listen to 4mat‘s “Bingo Speedmath” is to hear the recent past through the distant past (MP3). Specifically, it is to hear the IDM (that is, the late-1990s mix of elastic beats and shoegazer melodies) filtered through 8bit (that is, the early-1980s computerized sound of a video arcade). The transition works well. The beats, in [...]
Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere: ● On the Making of Brian Eno/Peter Chilvers iPhone/Touch Apps Bloom & Trope (usoproject.blogspot.com): Interview with Peter Chilvers on his development, with Brian Eno, of the iPhone apps Trope and Bloom, and the app Air: “It was something of a two way process,” he says of the development [...]
The promotional art for the recent Kind of Bloop compilation, which resets the classic Miles Davis album as if it were a collection of 8-bit tunes for old arcade video games. The pixel-art rendition is credited to Andrew Duhan, who based it closely on the original cover photo by Jay Maisel, also reproduced below: The [...]