[sdiy] OT: making "IDM"

[Richard Wentk]

At 13:48 20/06/2005, Metrophage wrote:
>I'd say that the music of Autechre is not so much random, but obtuse.
>Music which is complex often appears random to many people, who might
>be expecting melodies played in simple rhythm.

For me it has that kind of noodly quality that all algorithmic music has. 
It plays around an idea more or less randomly and never quite settles on it.

This is sort of interesting from a technical point of view, but musically a 
lot of it sounds like not very good jazz improv.

The problem with any algorithmic approach is that it's really, really, 
really hard to do well. It's not so hard to do random-ish sample cut-ups, 
but for satisfying music you need a sense of larger structure and 
development, and that means introducing large-scale control structures that 
correlate events at multiple levels. This is more of a challenge than a 
random walk through a constrained space, perhaps with some fairly 
simplistic Markov-chaining.

Richard