Damek.

Now this is a shame. Well, I’m not going to complain about being in Oxford at the time, but I wish I could go hear this Sunday, July 24 Lincoln Center Festival performance by Alarm Will Sound. They’ve taken some works by the well-known (some might say infamous) electronic music artist Aphex Twin and arranged them for performance on traditional acoustic instruments. While this doesn’t initially sound all that interesting, the thing is that Aphex Twin’s music isn’t all that simple. Some of it is, but they haven’t restricted themselves to his simple compositions.

And the results are quite successful. They have an album out and you can hear short samples of all the tracks. You can also read a couple reviews of the album.

I’ve been an on-again off-again fan of Aphex Twin and electronic music in general for years, and this is very exciting. Not because it “legitimizes electronic music” (please, spare me) or “merges genres” or “juxtaposes” anything. No. It’s exciting first because it’s different and it sounds good, and second because I’ve often wondered about the transient nature of recorded music, especially electronic music.

Live music is transient because no performance is ever the same. Recording performances makes them “permanent.” Yet there is another permanent aspect to traditional acoustic music: if, say, all recordings of a given song are lost or destroyed, you can still recreate the song from the original score. Someone else can play it.

Electronic music tends to lack this permanent aspect. Sure, it’s recorded, but there’s no actual composition. The CD you buy is the music; it’s the only version, the “real” version. No one can take the notes and make a “cover” of the music like you can with a rock song. You can take the sounds and rearrange them or touch them up, but that’s not the same thing, and we have a word for it to signify that: remix.

If all the recordings are lost or destroyed, say, 500 years from now (CDs have a life expectancy of only about 10 years, you know) and the original artist, his equipment, and any master copies of his creations cease to exist, the music is lost. There’s no paper back-up that you can work from to recreate his compositions.

So it’s exciting to me to see some music, even if just a little, of just one of the good electronic artists given some momentum towards the permanence of musical scores. I don’t expect to see electronic music cover bands popping up all over the place anytime soon, but hey, the road there (if anyone wants to go) was just made a tiny bit smoother.