All cultures have these feelings about non-functional areas of activity. And the more time people have on their hands, the more they commit it to those areas.
The texture suggests some kind of mood, and the mood suggests some kind of lyric. That’s like working in reverse, often quite the other way around, from sound to song. Although often they stop before they get to the song stage.
Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish.
But now you see the results of that in people who are completely crippled unless they know that they have the possibility of “cut and paste” and “undo.” And “undo” and “undo” and “undo” and “undo” and “undo” again.
I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
In terms of what has been happening recently, there have been, I think, some really interesting new instruments that have come out that sort of show me the direction of the future. Korg has introduced the – they’ve had a whole series now of these things called Kaoss Pads.
When I was working with Talking Heads what would happen typically is that they would go out and start playing a track, and I would always run the tape.
