I’ve just released a short collection of experimental, generative music called Still Life with Perfume here. And you know what they say about that: nobody wants to listen to that stuff, but somebody’s gotta make it.
Well, here we are.
Generative music, according to Brian Eno, is made by creating a set of rules and procedures and seeing how they react together, rather than the usual methods of composing where one might follow or devise actual arrangements. “The point is that you, the composer, don’t know exactly what the end result is going to be – and it may be different each time….”
These five pieces were recorded using various rules and procedures that encouraged randomness in the sounds. For instance, techniques were deployed to have some instruments play only a small percentage of the notes that actually existed, while other instruments were instructed to repeat, say, every third note it encountered. Many other guidelines and effects were also instigated to see what would happen, but I’ll spare you all the geeky details of that here.
Some of the pieces used loops as their musical starting points, while others sprang from simple four or eight bar progressions that I played on the keyboard or guitar. Playing them back after applying the systems mentioned above resulted in thousands of possible permutations, as each time I listened to a piece it presented itself differently than the time before. Some wonderful moments were lost to the ever-diminishing soundwaves of time, but I was a happy audience to many interestingly evolving sonic moments.
It can all be a bit chaotic, and the music doesn’t necessarily do anything or go anywhere (and is often glitchy and repetitive), but this is where the idea of judgment becoming more important than skill in the studio really comes into play: deciding what to capture (and document) from what was generated was where a more human aspect, if you will, entered the picture. Perhaps these may be considered musical wallpapers, if they serve any purpose at all outside of the mere creative act.
As an homage to Tom Robbins, who left us in February of this year at the age of 92, the song titles are all random snippets culled from a few of his books, and the title is a mash-up of sorts from a couple of his book titles. “There are only two mantras, yum and yuck. Mine is yum.” Thank you, Thomas.
Here are a few of my favorite quotes from Eno about generative music and other related topics…
Generative means that, instead of starting out with a precise sonic plan, “I want the music to sound like this at this point, this at that point” – specifying the whole thing in advance, which is how composition normally works – instead of that, saying, “I’m going to invent a system of some kind, a musical system, and I’m going to let the system play out. And I’m going to listen to the result.” So, the composer becomes sort of the audience, the first audience for the piece. You let the piece run. You listen to it. And if you don’t like it you change the rules and try again. It’s basically a different assumption about what “composing” means. Is composing something like architecture, the careful putting together of all the elements of a plan to make a finished building, or could it also be making a set of rules and materials and procedures and seeing how they react together – which is more like gardening. The point is that you, the composer, don’t know exactly what the end result is going to be – and it might be different each time the piece is performed.
The composition is really inventing this system. You don’t specify precisely what it’s going to do. The piece generates itself…the score would be a description of how you make this piece come into existence…you might say, “Take a small loop of tape, play it on two tape recorders which don’t play at exactly the same speed.” That would be a sort of description of how to begin to get that piece. But that’s a description of a process, you know, it’s not a description of the sonic experience or exactly how the piece plays out.
So I was trying to make the point that if you’re working with electronic media in the recording studio, judgment becomes a very important issue and skill becomes a less important issue.
Presto MusiCo 