Downsampled animated gif by Rafael Fajardo from Brown’s original hi-res images
Collected album art from Music for Shuffle by Matthew Irvine Brown
Matthew Irvine Brown has created a set of 18 short tracks composed—designed—to be played in shuffle mode on an MP3 player, as an exploration of the contemporary contexts for music.
Brown is exploring temporal geometry, or the geometry of time, with his Music for Shuffle project. I have been living with it for several months, on heavy rotation on a variety of my personal music devices. Brown has set up a problem for himself to create, with minimal means, a suite of brief compositions that combine and recombine, by the randomizing algorithms present in contemporary playback hardware and software, to yield novel relationships among and between them. He’s accomplished an acoustic experience of great beauty.
Brown demonstrates a sensitivity to the context of contemporary musical experience and composes for, designs for, those contexts. Music for Shuffle embraces the glitch and renders it beautiful and rhythmic. He leaves whether this is “generative music” as an open question on his website, and he asks, Can the skip button count as a musical instrument? These are very contemporary questions, and important ones to explore.
Music for Shuffle can be found at Brown’s website where he also shares his thought process on the project. It needs to be experienced before passing judgment. It has taken me some time to appreciate what he has done.
Brown demonstrates a sensitivity to the context of contemporary musical experience and composes for, designs for, those contexts. Music for Shuffle embraces the glitch and renders it beautiful and rhythmic. He leaves whether this is “generative music” as an open question on his website, and he asks, Can the skip button count as a musical instrument? These are very contemporary questions, and important ones to explore.
Music for Shuffle can be found at Brown’s website where he also shares his thought process on the project. It needs to be experienced before passing judgment. It has taken me some time to appreciate what he has done.
