Reaktions - Composers

PARASME

The guitarist Julian Bream explains it so much better than I ever could; in my case, substitute guitar for computer generated music:

"The basic thing about playing the guitar is the pleasure you get from it. There's nothing wrong with pleasure is there? There are so many awful things going on in this world, every second of every day, that perhaps playing the guitar is one of the more harmless activities. That just about sums it all up. Nothing more complicated than that. If Mr Reagan and Mr Brezhnev, two rather dreary men, played the guitar for a bit of relaxation, and once a year gave a duet concert for the benefit of the United Nations, perhaps the world would be a little more peaceful, a little more enchanting. Know what I mean?" - Julian Bream, Miesbach, 14 February 1982

I use cSound, Reaktor (recently upgraded to Komplete 2), Symbolic Composer, any software that makes sound and mix/master in Logic Pro on a laptop and a minidisk to record sounds in the 'real' world. Out of all the software I have tried over the past 15 years, Reaktor is the most beautifully conceived.

Reptantia (14.5 mb) - With this piece I set everything up and left the piece to write itself whist I sat by the sea and drank a coffee. When I came back I uploaded it to my website. The idea of this piece was to create something that I would never personally ever listen to. Unfortunately, I was being featured on an internet radio station and they played it so I had to listen to it.

Who Keeps a Pekinese? (8 mb) - I build Reaktor ensembles on the fly to create sounds, or copy and paste parts from other ensembles from the user and NI's library to such an extent that its virtually impossible to keep track of what Ive used and what came from where.