O.k, I'll say it first. This is just like buses.

Bryn, you've gone off topic on the SECOND post on a thread. Is that some kind of record?

Seeing Richard's thread opener, I thought it was rather better than mine' so I deleted it. Otherwise, who knows WHERE we'd end up!

As you were, and back to buses. 

If anything, quite the opposite seems to be the case. Many DJs (and they don't come much more fashion-conscious than that) branch out into live, improvised performance (so I'm told... )

As Richard says, the technology can make it relatively easy these days...personally speaking, one of the problems I have now is that I don't know where to begin. Having been taught in the mid-90s from tape editing up to editing and processing in Logic, and mapping samplers, and then having no access to a studio or any decent computer equipment until a couple of years ago, I feel terribly out of touch with all the technology available now - in fact, perhaps I'm just too fogeyish and not fashion-conscious enough to have kept up!

However I have been dabbling at home and will have the chance to try out the results this month (although I've avoided live electronics as there was no budget to hire the expertise required to get that right...).

I'm hoping that someone will mention some good kit/software as it's very hard to know what's better than what etc.

Well this thread seem to have gone quiet for the moment, so here's something that popped into my mind when reading of the BCMG in another thread. Does anybody here know any details of how the BEAST went about creating their realization of Varèse's "Poème Électronique"?

I've got to that stage (actually I got there at around 5 o'clock today) where I'm worn out.
My eyes are strained, my back aches (I'm tending towards the Feldman school of chairs and desks - one is broken, the other is too low) and my brain is just not firing.
So I thought I'd pop my head in here.

My problem for a long time was that I had ideas for what I wanted to do with electronics, but the level that I had been taught was designed to deal with a very specific model of electroacoustic composition, and not one that really interested me.
In order to do the things that I wanted to do, I would have had to invest some serious time and some serious money.
Also, electronic studios in most universities are often not the nicest places in the world. They tend to be either stuffy or freezing, have very little daylight, have strip lighting and magnolia walls (yum), have regulations that prevent you from drinking or eating, and an aggressively subscribed sign-up sheet. All of this meant that I ended up uncomfortable, SAD and dehydrated with the start of a migraine. I think that you need to be comfortable with the studio, just like you are with an instrument.

Now I'm a little bit older and more experienced, I'm much more comfortable in a studio. I ignore the rules about not drinking, take regular five minute breaks outside, use the studio outside of deadlines (even better outside of terms), and take down the lights when they start to flicker. I also have MaxMSP and ProTools on my laptop and have discovered just how much you can achieve simply by playing around with the software.

Where am I going with this? I've started using MaxMSP to improvise with, but it's also pushed me further towards a 'disposable music'. I remember Nigel Osborne talking about how we shouldn't worry so much about posterity; that we should just write the music and that maybe the music of today is 'disposable', rather like a temporary path through a jungle: we're still getting somewhere but it doesn't really matter how we got there. When I produce a score, I spend an awful lot of man-hours getting it to sound and look right. With today's technology, you can produce a beautiful (or ugly) piece in half the time. I've started to use electronics for improvisation but also to construct 'support systems' for solo instruments. I want to start producing some 'fixed' electronic pieces next that are deliberately 'disposable' and flawed.

If young composers see electronics as being geeky, that's partly down to how it's presented. We have these university studios, curated often by (erm, not sure how they'd feel about being called this) geeks. In this country, there is a tendency in composition teaching towards 'professional practice', and this tends to be rather geared towards producing dots on the page, a consistent flow of satisfactory dots, exhibiting secure technique. This steers composers away from risks and learning something new. The exciting and terrifying thing about today's technology is that so much is possible and that any idea of a repertoire has to be redefined on a really broad canvas to make any sense. The improvisation scene has lots of exciting young performers making some exciting noises, and this is why young composers are drawn to it.
If young electronic composers had a launchpad - a space devoted to performance of electronic music, improvised and fixed - airy, well-lit studio spaces that composers could book for weeks - I think that we'd be in a very different situation.

Mm, interesting thread. I have virtually no real experience with electronics, though I have been fiddling around on my computer for a couple of years with a programme called Goldwave, and, more recently, Audacity. On one occassion, I took my laptop to a free improv jam session and attempted to contribute, but, though some of the sounds I managed to produce (mainly through looping pre-exisiting tracks and recordings of what the other musicians were playing, then playing with volume levels) were quite interesting, overall I didn't really feel I was making much of an impact - these were pretty disposable sounds whose absence wouldn't have been noticed. However, I would be very interested to learn more and develop some skills: the problem is, I don't really have access to any materials and don't know where to start. For a start, I have a laptop running Windows rather than a Mac, and have no access to any studios, that I know of, at least. Possibly there is some stuff going on as regards this in Cambridge, where I'm studying a university course, but I'm home for the summer now which makes that not feasible for now. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to proceed?