Extraneous

We don’t live in the information age. We live in the extraneous information age. The era of information overload is upon us, and the reason isn’t because of how much information there is. It’s because of how music irrelevant information we have to process each day. Extraneous information: the noise […]

Salting

Chefs often say that properly salting food as you cook it doesn’t make it taste salty – it makes it taste more like itself. Meats taste meatier, breads taste bread-ier, veggies taste more like themselves. A cake doesn’t taste salty, but if you leave the salt out of your cake […]

Advice from Lynda

I sometimes think that the best advice for a musician doesn’t come from other musicians. It comes from other creative fields – from other creators who work in different media. For me, one example is the marvelous “cartoonist, teacher, and blank scrabble square”, Lynda Barry. (That’s her Instgram bio.) Consider […]

Overton

Can we apply the idea of the Overton Window to music-making? The Overton Window, according to Wikipedia, is “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.” The typical range is Unthinkable • Radical • Acceptable • Sensible • Popular • Policy. There are certainly […]