The artists had accidentally “stumbled upon the creative technique of glitch… borrowed a scratched jazz CD from a local library…” The stuttering effect of the defective CD became the impetus for a new aesthetic and ultimately the genre known as Glitch and later, the sub-genre Glitch-hop (late 90’s). The German experimental group known as Oval first explored the possibilities of failure with the release of Oktober 91 (1991).

But more specifically, it is from the ‘failure’ of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise…” (Cascone) “… aesthetic was developed in part as a result of the immersive experience of working in environments suffused with digital technology: computer fans whirring, laser printers churning out documents, the sonification of user interfaces, and the muffled noise of hard drives. He proposes that Marshall McLuhan’s well-known phrase, “The medium is the message” is no longer valid and that “… specific tools themselves have become the message”. Kim Cascone identifies these trends as “Post-digital”. These changes were revolutionary at the time, but as these new technologies became commonplace and banal, composers began to look to the error as a new source of the material. With the digital age came unprecedented levels of accuracy and audio fidelity not possible in analog systems. (Klotz) And there’s an old saying in jazz: “If you play a mistake, play it again.” In Kelsey Klotz’s essay, The Art of the Mistake, she suggests that “wrong notes in jazz are often considered to be opportunities for improvisatory exploration a note is only wrong if the performer does not know what to do with it.” She quotes Art Tatum as saying, “There’s no such thing as a wrong note” and Bill Evans responding, “There are no wrong notes, only wrong resolutions”. Mistakes have long been embraced, especially in jazz. I suspect that the search for and the acceptance of the unexpected in a musical context has been around as long as there have been musicians.

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