Tom Moody offers "Some thoughts on the amorphous middle ground between between the hissing, honking, and chittering of academic electronic music and the clicks, stabs, and skronks of its club-based variants." [link]. Tom mentions Paul Lansky's The Importance of Being Digital lecture as something of a starting point for observing the convergence between "club" or "techno" music and the equally-needing-qualifying-quotes world of "academic electronic music".

I decided it would be worth the effort to try to dig up my interview with Paul, (now eleven years old!), and get that back on there through the tubes of the internet. Thanks to the Wayback Machine for saving files that my old computers, hard-drive and laziness about backing up stuff couldn't solve. Here's the article, and it includes the transcript from our hour long chat, too.

I spent more than my fair share of time at the old electronic music studios that were once the Columbia-Princeton studios, in it's final years. And it was truly an amazing experience, not only for the historical significance of cutting tape on the same blocks and tweaking the same oscillators that made those early "masterworks" of electronic music, but for the influence that it had on all my instrumental compositions as well (a fondness for timbral manipulation, an attention to envelope generation as a facet of phrasing, perhaps?).

But down the hall the revolution had already been well underway towards a purely digital creation -- even past the doors of the bastard step-child that was FM synthesis and MIDI. Even now, I fear, I'm still enough of a academic pitch snob (or, as Davy would say, I still retain the buttstix) to find too little to enjoy of the auto-composed music from either "serious" composers or whatever you'd want to call the "techno" kids (I wouldn't know what to call them, but by simply trying to distinguish "techno" as something "other than serious" I do everyone a great injustice).

But composition, like everything else, is shaken by the digital revolution, by the power of the personal computer, and now -- hopefully -- by the real gains brought about by the internet and the Long Tail. The machines of music are always changing, thankfully, and the ears that consume the ouput are as well -- and at the end of the day, the gains of digital productivity hit not only the office, but the parlor room that housed the player piano, too.

Who but the biggest curmudgeons (and lord knows, there are many academic composers who fit the bill) can resist the joy of Electroplankton?