no.239 | Soundwriting with Soft Edges

Towards infinite music with Brian Eno

Earlier this week, the sun reached over our house to touch a neighboring tree. For a moment, one set of branches was set apart from the others before dissolving peacefully into a complex network of other limbs. The color was crazy. Winter conditions occasionally conspire to conjure intense pink, orange, and soft blue hues in the morning skies.

The other night, it started to rain as we went to bed and continued softly into the morning. When recorded, the patter of rain sounds like the crackle of fire. French philosophers and Zen thinkers say that all things contain their opposite. Or maybe that is where my head is in the light of the Los Angeles fires and hoping for rain.

I just finished an online soundwriting class (I originally meant to type “songwriting,” but I like “soundwriting” better) with Brian Eno. It was an amazing experience. Shout out School of Song for an incredible program managed with panache and empathy.

Eno told a story about how years ago, while bedridden after being hit by a cab, he struggled to listen to a record of harp music his friend had left on for him. One of the speakers was broken and he was too weak to fuss with it. The music was hard to distinguish from the ambient sound surrounding it. He surrendered to the sound without boundaries and resolved to try to create “music without edges.” His 1975 release Discrete Music was the result.

Afterward, he recorded Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) and many more borderless records in a genre he invented in the pop idiom.

Porch Swing Orchestra is very much practiced in this Cageian tradition. We at PSO stan less division and more amalgams.

Porosity creates possibility.

PLATFORM PROBLEMS AND SURVEY

Are the vibes at Substack too weird (i.e. social media cringe and Nazi tolerant?) Should PSO go back to being an email?

Leave a comment or email me at info@porchswingorchestra.org.

Recommended Listening: Discreet Music by Brian Eno

This is the first track written expressly to be the maximum length of one side of a vinyl record. Eno was gesturing toward an infinite music. He later accomplished continuous music using serial tape loops and an array of CD players, his preferred storage media. In the streaming era, whether on YouTube or with your own large-language model, music generation is boundless.

More prosaically, music is always being made in the world around us but a frame lends it meaning. Perhaps truly edgeless music, the likes of which are generated by the ouroboros of AI, is truly formless and may not hold one’s interest. An endless feed of lo-fi study beats. Perhaps what is called for is a softening of traditional edges, which builds innovative armatures for new structures of feeling.

Here is a 6-hour stretched version of Discrete Music and a great picture of the artist in art school made by Tato Schab.

Let’s Collaborate!

Let’s make something together.

I love to collaborate, remotely or in person, but if you have a piece you would like to feature on PSO (without contributions by me), by all means, please reach out!

Just reply to this email, or contact me at info@porchswingorchestra.org expressing your interest or ideas.

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