We live in an electronic world. Electronic sounds and electronic music have long permeated our sonic landscape. What began as the otherworldly sounds of the film score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and the rarefied, new timbres of Stockhausen's Kontakte a few years later, is now a common soundscape in technology, media and an array of musical genres and subgenres.
More people than ever before can produce and listen to electronic music, from isolated experimenters, classical and jazz musicians, to rock musicians, sound recordists and the newer generations of electronic musicians making hip-hop, house, techno and ambient music. Increasingly we are listening to electronic sounds, finding new meanings in them, experimenting with them and rehearing them as listeners and makers.
Live Wires explores how the five key electronic technologies - the tape recorder, circuit, computer, microphone and turntable - revolutionized musical thought.Featuring the work of major figures from Schaeffer, Varese, Xenakis, Babbitt and Oliveros to Eno, Keith Emerson, Grandmaster Flash, Juan Atkins and Holly Herndon, Live Wires presents many of the powerful musical ideas that are being recycled, rethought and remixed by some of the most electrifying composers and musicians today.
About the Author
Dan Warner is Professor of Music at Hampshire College, Massachusetts. He is a composer and electronic artist whose sound and installation work has been presented at festivals around the world, and is co-author of the seminal Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (2004).
Industry Reviews
"The key to success with a book of this type is balance; too much detail and the layman is left baffled, but too little leaves more informed readers with a craving for chewy morsels of depth. Where authors such as Simon Reynolds employed a sociological approach in Energy Flash and David Toop's Ocean Of Sound was one of philosophy, Warner examines technology in order to analyze the music. He gets it just about right. . . . Where the author succeeds is by injecting a real sense of his own passion into the text. . . . Where descriptive sections could have been burdened with the dryness of unnecessary academic heft, they are lightened here by an authorial style that indicates a love of the music alongside a wealth of knowledge. Definitely best consumed whilst imbibing his excellent chapter of recommended listening."-- "Shindig!"
"There are big books, and little books. Books that are large because they collect myriad examples of 'the exact thing you need to know' about a given subject--the volume to which you have gone a hundred times for a hundred different answers. But there are also volumes that, like the Tardis, are bigger on the inside--books that read well, make their point, and then send you elsewhere--they encapsulate how you think of something. Books you circle around and back to as you continue to chase down the ideas they contain. Warner's Live Wires is one of those books."--Gregory Taylor "Cycling '74"
"There can't really be two ways to say this: Warner's Live Wires is a good book. Warner's intimately experiential/technical descriptions of his favorite instances of every kind and genre of electronic music in the experimental culture--a culture that almost obliterated the boundaries between 'classical' and 'pop'--will get you right inside of his sensitively perceptive ear and his deep knowledge and understanding of the sense and implication of what he has, and you will, come to hear."--Benjamin Boretz, composer "Record Collector"
"When broken down into pieces, the larger picture of what 'electronic' means becomes clear. Warner's book, Live Wires, rips open the term to tell the wider story of the how those tapes and wires and transistors came to transform music into what we take for granted today. . . . A good nerd will have a computer close by with some search tabs open and they will hear a bunch of cool sounds made by the lesser known pioneers of the electronic, the true legends of our current musical landscape."--Christopher Laird "PopMatters"
