RE: [microsound] confield

[Philip Sherburne <psherburne@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> i only listened to _confield_ in-store, what i did was to 
> fast forward 
> through each tracks only to find out that, just as on 
> chiastic slide, their 
> compositional technique seems to amount to pressing play, go 
> get a coffee, 
> & come back in seven minutes to press stop.  yes, i'm 
> exaggerating & i know 
> there's a more thought-out process than that at work, but 
> that's really how 
> it sounds like. 

Yeah, but to point out the obvious, can you REALLY get a feel for the
subtlety of an album that way? Hell, half the time I browse by needle-drop
for dance records, I miss subtleties that I only hear much later. Confield
seems exactly the sort of release that won't really reveal itself through a
"speed reading."

I'm more intrigued by something in Kim's comment -- is it something that
only somebody with a pretty intimate grasp of the software (in this case, I
guess Kyma) would pick up on? I'm not sure, Kim, whether your point was
simply that Confield didn't sound terribly evolved and/or compositionally
interesting, or whether it was that any user of Kyma could see through their
tricks immediately. Which, if it's the latter point, I think has some
interesting implications for the role of novelty and the "wow" factor in
popular reception of music, at a point when tools appear to be advancing so
rapidly.

Cheers,
Philip