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Curtis Roads wrote his own software called Cloud Generator for churning out the tiny sonic fragments which he painstakingly assembles into electronic compositions. Unlike the rave music that was just being popularized when he embarked on this project, Roads tries to inject his music with a narrative structure — more in the style of Mozart than The Prodigy.
Wired’s Joshua Davis sat down with Roads, currently a professor of media arts and technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to listen to the musician’s latest compositions on $8K speakers and discuss the theory behind it.
If the article made you as curious about what Roads’ compositions sound like as it made me, you’ll want to take a listen to the following audio samples (from his website):
"Now" (2003):
"Sculptor" (2001, created using acoustic materials provided by John McEntire of Tortoise):
"Half Life":
