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Here is an excerpt from Adam Payne’s new movie Damn Dirty Hippies, which I recently scored. This segment is an animation depicting a dream of one of the main characters, Katie. The song is Fell (For Two Musicians and a Computer), which appears on my album Den of Maniacs; the song is edited for the [...]
This site is currently under construction, with new color schemes, content (such as reviews of my new album Den of Maniacs, called “crazy soup” by one reviewer), and an improved, user-friendlier layout coming soon. I’ll be working on the site in my spare moments. In my other moments I’m putting together a new live set and working on some [...]
Earlier today I posted Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares if You Listen?” as an example of an avant-garde attitude that I don’t care for. As an antidote to that, here is a beautiful article by the visionary avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse. To me, this writing is an expression of hope, passion, creativity, and only the slightest bit of [...]
In 1958, High Fidelity magazine published the following article by avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. Babbitt is known for taking serialism to the extreme and for being an active proponent of the modernist movement. This isn’t as cool as it might sound. Fortunately, the sort of attitude in which he took so much pride is increasingly [...]
This is an essay I wrote during a recent period in which I was interested in the question of to what extent, if any, emotion as an inherent property of music contributes to our emotional experience of music as listeners. I first look at some of the prevelant existing ideas on the topic (especially from philosophy [...]
My latest album, Den of Maniacs, has been out for almost two months now. Response has been slow (fewer reviews so far than any other album of mine by far), but mostly positive. One comment that I’ve gotten consistently, and which I think probably accounts for the slower than usual response, is that the album seems to [...]
(I’ll get this obligatory preface out of the way quickly: It’s been a long time, I’ve neglected my blog, I’m mad at myself for it while also forgiving myself due to the understandable circumstances in which this transgression occurred. I shall now hopefully resume with regular postings.) For the longest time I’ve been meaning to up [...]
