Officially I am here in the Hudson Valley to participate in the 
New Albion Festival that is taking place this week at Bard College,
but I’m also taking some time to catch up on various composing 
projects while partaking deeply of the good air and farmland in the 
area.

Any idea what the upper limit for your ears might be?

It goes without saying that we all often toil under circumstances that are less than ideal. Only the topmost artists can demand perfection from their hosts.

Whether you’re a confirmed laptopper or an otherwise unplugged instrumentalist, what are your own particular experiences combining instrumental and electronic sounds?

Carl Stone returns to our pages after a case of wanderlust. Followed by a kind of wander-bust.

It sometimes seems hard to use old ways to express new ideas; is it any easier finding new ways to express old ideas ?

I’ve always felt it was interesting that the vast majority of sounds in the Tokyo urban soundscape are all intentionally introduced, not just byproducts of some other activities.

A new version of a familiar piece of creativity software like Max/MSP 5 is the perfect vehicle for productive fooling around: plenty of comfort with the fundamentals, but lots of additions and reworked features that keep me poking, prodding, exploring, experimenting and creating.

The confluence of four major holidays over the course of seven days at the end of April/beginning of May leads many people in Japan to take the whole ten days off, the so-called Golden Week.

In Japan, some companies have de facto staff composers, who are called on to make music for their public spaces, commercials, etc.—a composer with a distinctive style becomes part of the “brand.”