"The Rationale Behind Machine Musik"

For the better part of an entire century, people have been producing music with machines of various kinds that run on electricity. As the 20th century progressed, music made and disseminated with electric machinery became commonplace throughout the world. As we move into the 21st century, digital technology now allows individuals - at least in the most heavily industrialized countries - to create and distribute their own music with ease relatively cheaply (when compared with the cost of such production a decade and a half ago). The spread of music over the Internet in various formats represents a revolution in the way that electric machines disseminate music, and has opened up aural possibilities unparalleled in human history.

Here in the year 2000, electric and electronic sounds are all around us. We make them happen every day, sometimes several dozen times a day. They confront us wherever we go, whether we want them to or not. Their ubiquity goes largely unnoticed and unquestioned. Collectively they form the soundtrack of the information age, a soundtrack that we have learned to tune out and ignore.

For many of those of us who have fallen between the cracks of our urban, concrete reality, electric and electronic sounds are a delight. They jump out at us and beg us to sample them, manipulate them, amplify them, and contort them beyond recognition. We notice them because we are hyper-aware of our environment in ways that others are not; we often seem to notice what others do not (or perhaps we are simply notice what others are too busy too notice). We are electronic noise junkies, constantly craving our next fix of bleeps and bloops, our next hit of low drones and bass.

Up to the present, it seems, most music made with electric or electronic machines represents a continuation or a modification of earlier musical forms, whether they be meticulously composed, rhythmic in nature, improvisational, or what have you. With precious few exceptions, the orientation of musicians using electrically powered equipment/instruments has been on the sounds produced by their gear rather than on the relationship between their gear and the sounds that they make. In strictly electronic music, this distinction can be carried a step further because of the (often lengthy) delay between the production of a piece of music and its performance. A piece of electronic music can be an elaborately complicated thing, involving an integration of dozens of electric/electronic elements and necessitating several changes in storage format before a final 'product' is arrived at. Any electronic musician must engage their equipment in rather different ways than a musician using more traditional instruments. Therefore, electronic musicians are likely (but not necessarily) to be more acutely aware of the relationship between their equipment and the sounds that they produce.

What I have proposed to do with this piece is to bring this relationship to the fore. By feeding the sounds that electronic machines make back into them to produce 'the music of electronics' - instead of simply recreating more 'electronic music' - I hope to push the envelope of electronic sound even further into the future. If electronic music can be shown to be music, then why not call the sounds that machines emanate from their innards music as well? I see no reason why we cannot, and Machine Musik is my first manifestation of this belief.

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