Pitchwise, imagine taking a 60-voice mixed choir (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) – each member of which had mastered the art of extended circular singing: being able to sing a long continuous steady tone while exhaling and inhaling – and having them all circular-sing the same pitch (vibrato-less of course) for 24 straight hours.

Minimalists often work with very low volume. But they only go so far. How about a piece that was so soft it could only (barely!) be heard by a person with perfect hearing leaning in right next to the sound source in an anechoic chamber?

Timbrally, imagine an orchestra made entirely of flutes, the acoustic instrument that sounds most like the harmonics-free sine wave. Picture, in your mind’s ear, Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries played by 100 flutes at 20 bpm with a volume that never crept above pianissimo. Now that’s a concert I wouldn’t want to miss!

By way of example, consider a pitch scale that does not have the standard chromatic 12 tones per octave – or the conventional microtonal variants of 19 (19-EDO), 22 (Indian shrutis), 24 (quarter tone), 43 (Harry Partch), etc. – but a whopping 1200 notes per octave. That’s 100 ‘centitones’ per chromatic semitone. You could fit Bach’s entire B Minor Mass (pitchwise) in the space between C and C# with plenty of room to spare. It would probably sound like single long chorused note with gobs of highly ornate internal activity. Alternately, if you got each member of a 5000-person choir to take a different note within a four octave-block (C2 to C6), you’d end up with the densest vocal cluster of all time. Now that’s extreme maximalism!

If everyone on the planet makes “competent” (thanks to technology) music, does new music become just another ho-hum consumable?

Guess I’m a modernist at heart … still believing (hoping) that personal/idiosyncratic masterpieces can be written. Singularities, rather than just another blip on the endless online playlist.

Imitation is the first step to competence, which is a good thing, a glue that holds the world together. But most artists are not satisfied with just being competent. The desire to transcend, to make something “more than, different from” lies at the very heart of the creative drive. (And drive it is! As much as eating, breathing, and reproducing.)

Once an artist has attained competence in a chosen medium, does imitation still serve a useful purpose?

Well, if you want to sound like a famous musician or band then imitation is definitely the way to go: assimilate recordings, learn licks by heart, copy musical styles. Cover bands take this route, often with great worldly success.

But there is another, more satisying way to open yourself to the influence of others: emulation.

Imitation is like cloning: a clinical process that yields an almost exact copy of the original. Boo! Emulation is like conception: sexy and creative, with two partners and plenty of passion – an explosive intermingling of DNA that brings about unpredictable results. Yeah, baybey!

To successfully emulate an artist, band, genre, or style you need to dig down to its essence and merge it with your own. It’s a true meeting of minds/spirits, a collaboration in which both musical personas take part. Imitating Bach is an academic exercise; emulating Bach by divining his musical essence and merging it with yours can be an act of transcendent personal expression.

I’m a huge fan of Frank Zappa. I’ve learned a great deal from his music, particularly the early stuff. Imitation was a big part of the process; without it I wouldn’t have had acquired the compositional know-how to create Zappa-esque melodies, rhythms, and harmonies. But if I had stopped there I would have ended up just another Zappa clone; there are plenty of them out there! No doubt Frank would have despised this, seeing as how such a large chunk of his genius derived from emulating (not imitating!) a compositional smorgasbord of different styles and artists: rock, blues, Edgar Varèse, jazz, avant garde, serialism, and Las Vegas cocktail schlock, to name but a few.

The moral of the story? Use what’s out there – everything! – not to copy what others have discovered, rather to discover and compose your SELF. There’s only ever going to be one of you in the entire history of all possible universes, right? Might as well celebrate your uniqueness. :-)

Now I’m landlocked, 350 miles from the ocean. So I do my scavenging in the audio arena: soundcombing. I fire up one of my favourite sound generators – Reaktor, Max/MSP, Absynth, you know the drill – and go hunting for sounds. I proceed in pure exploration mode, open for anything, my ears my guide. If a sonic object intrigues me, I file it away; if not, I toss it back in the ocean. Just me and my canvas sack combing the beach for cool sounds.

When you work this way, you end up with a slew of random audio files: beats, pads, melodies, chords, fx, noises, some usable, some not. The next step is to hone these files, extract the excerpts that are musically satisfying and edit them into clean loops, fragments, phrases, sections. This becomes your toolbox, the sonic repository you draw from to make music.

When it comes time to compose a piece from your soundcombings (you’ll know), work bottom up and let your sonic objects guide you. Rather than fitting them into a preconceived compositional template – verse/chorus song, 4/4-ish electronica track, ambient soundscape – let the sounds and shapes of the individual objects give rise to their own form. Think: sculptor enabling a slab of marble to reveal its intrinsic shape.

One of the great things about soundcombing is that it can broaden – sometimes dramatically – your sonic palette. If you think of yourself as an explorer open to whatever may come your way, you’ll end up with material you never would have otherwise chosen to use in your tracks. You’ll surprise yourself, and in the process, make music that will surprise your listeners.

Escherilia is an example of a piece I composed – or perhaps more accurately: montaged – from a set of random soundcombed objects. The form is like an nine-course symmetric meal: I serve up nine objects, then unserve them in reverse order. Enjoy!

Conyach, a term used by the Scottish travellers, is a quality of music that inspires strong emotional response in listeners. Salsa, as in salsa music, is used to describe musical wildness and ecstatic frenzy. Duende is a mysterious and difficult-to-translate term from Spanish music (especially the flamenco tradition), implying primal force, struggle, emotion, expression, fierceness and authenticity. Ma, from Japan, refers to the sensual beauty that derives from the space between events.

Many cultures ascribe great beauty to the evocation of melancholy in music. Sakit Hati is an Indonesian term that denotes a sense of wistful longing and sadness. Dor, associated with the doina music of Romania, is a “pleasant feeling of melancholy”. Blues is an African American quality of music that expresses melancholy, loneliness, and tragedy. Tezeta is an Ethiopian musical term, evocative of melancholy, nostalgia, and bittersweet longing.

Saudade is a Portuguese term that refers to a mood: “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness, but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.”

Which is why electronistes would be well served by heeding the maxim: less is more.

In synthesis terms, this means limiting your instrumentarium. If you work with 20 programs, put 19 of them aside and focus in on just one. If you are presented with a bank of 80 patches, get to know a select few intimately, instead of jumping giddily from one to the next. If you pump your signals through a dozen effects plugins, force yourself to use just one or two.

Compositionally, “less is more” means simplifying your materials, structures, ideas. Rather than cramming a piece with 147 loops arranged in dense fractal overlaps (resulting in ugly musical overkill), try working with just a handful of exquisite loops served up simply and elegantly. If you’re a groovester, go sparse instead of dense, allowing your listeners to savor the beauty of each individual pattern.

Resist the temptation to overstate, bombard, show off. Leave space, formal and sonic, in your music and trust your listeners to fill in the blanks.

John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, which had its heyday in the early 70s, was the most ecstatically loud and musically dense band of its era, perhaps any era. (When I heard them live I became physically sick from the assault, but it was a good sickness, an exquisite pain.) Who can listen to the sonic vortex that is Birds of Fire without feeling transported, wrenched upward?

Squarepusher’s Go Plastic is my favorite avant-d’n'b(ish) album. Some tracks are quite pedestrian, others so astonishingly dense and out-there that listening to them feels like eavesdropping in on the internal stream of consciousness of a brain in the throes of a ecstatically virtuosic musical convulsion. To wit: Check out Go! Spastic and My Fucking Sound (especially from about 4:00 onward).

Excess can also work brilliantly in the equipment arena. If you are a composer who thrives on multiplicity, then by all means embrace the surfeit of DSP programs and plugins out there. Money is no obstacle, since many of these programs are cheap or free.

Embrace the temptation to overstate, bombard, densify! Assault your listeners (lovingly) and trust them to come back, hungry for more.

I’d like to expand the definition of groove to include any rhythm that “swings” – that has vitality, complexity, intelligence, musicality, beauty. For example: the rhythm of spoken language (conversation and recitation), the rhythm of abstract electronica (think: Ryuji Ikeda), the rhythm of freeform improvisation (free jazz), the rhythm of natural phenomena (a forest, thunderstorm, city street), and so on.

For clarity, let’s call rhythms that adhere to a periodic grid, pulse, meter, etc. grooves and rhythms that don’t free grooves. And, rather than thinking of these two rhythmic species as mutually exclusive, let’s think of them as two poles of a groove continuum, with an infinite set of groove gradations in-between.