Music for Shuffle
January 17, 2011 5:40 PM   Subscribe

Matthew Irvine Brown has written 18 short pieces specifically to be played in iTunes shuffle mode. The fragments can be downloaded from his site to create your own original track. A liking of glitch will probably increase your enjoyment.
posted by meech (22 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
The idea reminds me of Autechre/Gescom's Minidisc.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:43 PM on January 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Gescom did something similar with their album Minidisc.
posted by griphus at 5:44 PM on January 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Everything's catching, yes, everything's catching on fire...
posted by scrowdid at 6:08 PM on January 17, 2011 [23 favorites]


I didn't find it pleasing. I let it play for a few minutes and I kept thinking it was like watching someone else play a video game, but even less fun, since all I could do was hear the game be played.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:10 PM on January 17, 2011


What's the blue thing, doing here?
posted by gcbv at 6:13 PM on January 17, 2011 [6 favorites]


Like.
posted by grobstein at 6:34 PM on January 17, 2011


They Might Be Giants made an album with tiny songs on it. They were meant to be played on random. The album also has full-length songs.
posted by apiaryist at 7:36 PM on January 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Please pass the milk please. Please pass the milk please.
posted by painquale at 8:03 PM on January 17, 2011 [4 favorites]


I
posted by Brainy at 8:13 PM on January 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Walk alone
posted by Brainy at 8:13 PM on January 17, 2011 [2 favorites]


Darkened corridors
posted by Brainy at 8:13 PM on January 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


Aside from all the TMBG "Fingertips" quotes, this is precisely what I use the songlets from songstowearpantsto for.
posted by Pinback at 8:23 PM on January 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


I'm going to try it on the principle that people stretching the boundaries of music should always be encouraged, but I worry that my reaction is going to be the same as it frequently is to glitchy kinds of things I expect to like: I want it to be Art of Noise and it turns out to be too 8-bit.
posted by immlass at 8:29 PM on January 17, 2011


I had Apollo 18 on cassette and it wasn't until years later I realized that all the short songs were for CD shuffle play.
posted by fleetmouse at 8:54 PM on January 17, 2011 [3 favorites]


It is an interesting idea, but short of compositional thought (the author admits it was a half-day experiment). Brown has some interesting insights in the text description, including this:

Doing this experiment meant thinking about what happens when the listener presses skip – in a sense, they become a performer. Even with this little experiment, it’s quite nice to press the skip button in time, finding and making your own little rhythms.

Good for him for doing the experiment, and the nice documentation.
posted by ianhattwick at 9:20 PM on January 17, 2011 [1 favorite]


Well come on
(come on)
and wreck my car

Well come on
(come on)
and wreck my car

Well come on
(come on)
and wreck my car

Well come on
(come on)
and wreck my car
posted by memebake at 2:25 AM on January 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Interesting fact: the original UK pressing of the Apollo 18 CD had all of the Fingertips tracks joined together into one track on the CD, thereby making the shuffle thing impossible to do. Someone in the UK bit of Elektra clearly hadn't been paying attention to the press releases.
posted by memebake at 2:28 AM on January 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


Huh. Following the wikipedia link, I just discovered that I have been into glitch since the Richard D. James album but never knew that that kind of music had a name. I played that album for my dad, who's a musician and owned a recording studio, and he said, "what, is someone tapping two uninsulated wires together?"
posted by oneironaut at 4:07 AM on January 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


... never knew that that kind of music had a name

Electronic music has too many sub-genres in my opinion. Changing the timing of your drums slightly, or using a particular sound filter, should not be enough to propel you from one genre to another.
posted by memebake at 6:08 AM on January 18, 2011


Changing the timing of your drums slightly, or using a particular sound filter, should not be enough to propel you from one genre to another.

You're talking about shufflewave, which is completely different genre than skip-core. Duh.
posted by fuq at 7:15 AM on January 18, 2011 [2 favorites]


Also - Mick Harris' project 'Lull' in 1998 - Moments

I seem to recall Boyd Rice talking about having done something like this with a REALLY bizarrely pressed vinyl back in the mid-80s - there were a series of off-center grooves pressed on top of each other, with intersecting moments, so the record needle would jump from groove to groove at different points in the rotation. I think it also had multiple holes drilled in the center to allow for even greater rotational variance. Of course, he may have been bullshitting, but it SOUNDS like the sort of thing he would have done.
posted by FatherDagon at 7:51 AM on January 18, 2011 [1 favorite]


My copy of Apollo 18 (all of them?) didn't quite segment the song fragments right, so when I do try the shuffle thing, or have Fingertips bits shuffled into my other music, it sounds cut off and bad :(
posted by Gordafarin at 11:42 AM on January 18, 2011


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