The Wire 307

Regular readers may have noticed that I don’t contribute that much to The Wire these days: after almost ten years of writing for the same magazine every month you find that you have to step back and focus on something else for a while. Just recently, however, they have been passing on to me a few items that I’ve found impossible to resist. As a result the September issue – number 307 for those who are counting – contains reviews of a CD release of pieces for onde Martenot and piano by Olivier Messiaen and some of his acolytes, beautifully performed by Nadia Ratsimandresy and Matteo Ramon Arevalos; the catalogue for the Susan Stenger project Soundtrack for an Exhibition; and reissues of three albums recorded in 1970s by Brian Eno with various members of Cluster and Harmonia. This last piece is an overview of projects so well known that they really don’t require any further linking from this blog.

As music provides the perfect environment for a growing number of interdisciplinary methods and approaches, The Wire offers some of the most useful points of access to activities that have less to do with music than with the development of new approaches to information design. Perhaps one day music will finally emerge as a new form of thinking, a series of propositions and precepts, or even something as simple and generous as an ever-evolving set of services. Until then I shall continue to support The Wire while at the same time quietly looking forward to an issue that doesn’t need to mention the word ‘music’ at all.