Album Notes

I have been a composer of instrumental music since 1974 and of computer music since 1983. I was first very inspired by the music of Hindemith, Varese, and Elliott Carter. Later I discovered punk music, electronic music by Stockhausen and Xenakis, and pop music experimentation by the Beatles and Sonic Youth. Alternative rock artists such as Minutemen, Per Ubu, The Shaggs, GG Allin, and many others have been a great source of inspiration, despite the fact that they may have had little apparent stylistic impact on my music.

The focus of my computer music has been on processing sounds to extremes and creating musical continuities that could not exist in the live acoustic world. I want the electronic, virtual musical experience to be a world where any sound could occur at any time. The experience should be dense, intense, and should block off outside reality for the duration.

As a computer musician who began work in the mid-1980s, it has been necessary and natural for me to develop software tools to achieve my musical goals. Even today with an incredible amount of inexpensive or freely available music software, I still need to write software to make some musical things happen that could not be done, or at least not done easily, with other people's software. The main areas where I have developed audio processing software are virtual drum machines, such as BashFest, algorithmic signal processing design, such as the oracular processor Mushroom, and spectral processing, with programs such as powerPV and the Max/MSP toolset FFTease. Most recently, during a residency at STEIM, I have begun work on live spatial processing software.

In addition to composing, I have been involved in the Bonk Festival of New Music since its inception in 1992, and organized the Electric Rainbow Coalition Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music in the summer of 2003. I have taught computer music at Keio University (Fujisawa, Japan), the International Academy of Media Arts and Science (Gifu, Japan) and Dartmouth College.

Please check out David Manson's CD elsewhere on this site: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/manson which contains my piece Confessions of a Virtue Addict for Trombone and Computer Generated Tape.