Dysnomia is a 2013 recording by the jazz trio Dawn of Midi scored for acoustic piano, bass and drums. Eschewing jazz chords, improvisation, swing rhythms and theme and variations, the music is instead organised around repeating rhythmic loops and interlocking melo-harmonic fragments, as one groove assemblage segues into the next like an evolving DJ set. The music sounds equal parts minimal process, electronically sequenced and traditional African. This article engages the musical and philosophical concepts at play in Dysnomia to think through writing about music via three paths of speculative inquiry. The first part of the article considers works by Kodwo Eshun, Paul Morley and David Sudnow, idiosyncratic thinkers outside of the mainstream of academic music discourse who vividly approach writing about music through defamiliarising language and inventing concepts, generating associations based on comparative listening and describing the dynamics of musical process. In the second part of the article I draw on these writing techniques to direct my repeated listening encounters with Dysnomia and construct a prose interpretation modelled on the polyrhythms of the music. I conclude with a brief discussion of the phenomenological perspective on musical essences and suggest that music is a model for thinking through writing about music.

This article argues that the production and reception of certain recent electronic musics has resonated with criticisms of the perceived degenerative effects of digital technology on culture and ‘humanity’ – such as the lack of attention it promotes or the ‘information overload’ it causes – in an at least partially positive way. The resulting ambivalent aesthetics, sometimes thought of as one of ‘Internet music’, embraces particular negative notions of digital mediation in ways that can and have been thought of as satirical, exploratory or ‘accelerationist’. I examine three facets of this aesthetics: maximalism, kitsch and the uncanny valley. I also question the legitimacy of dramatising, even positively, digital media and culture as effectively ‘degenerate’.

This article focuses on two of Kate Bush's post-Aerial (2005) albums: Director's Cut (2011) and 50 Words for Snow (2011). In these albums Bush plays with the temporal qualities of recorded music to create the conditions for self-reflexive internal time consciousness to emerge within the listener. I argue that self-reflexive internal time consciousness is a process that enables a listener to gain some understanding that they are embroiled in an act of perception forged via active engagement with recorded music. Bush creates these conditions in two principle ways: In Director's Cut she disturbs the memory of previous recorded versions that are re-visited on the album so they can be mobilised as new, interpretative-perceptive acts. In 50 Words for Snow she uses duration as a structure to support the construction of extensive perception. Bush plays with time on these albums because her conceptual music relies upon the uninterrupted unfolding of consciousness as it becomes interlaced with her recordings, understood in the Husserlian sense of temporal objects. Implicit to her temporal strategies is a critique of contemporary listening conditions and how they undermine the very forging of the perceptual act.