You can now listen to selections from “Music From Elsewhere” on Bandcamp. I recorded 32 brief pieces from the book, with voice, piano, electronic keyboard, psaltery, sopranino recorder, and chord zither. Brian Dewan was the engineer. Here it is!

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Music From Elsewhere is now available from Strange Attractor Press! This book collects and discusses music derived from unusual sources, including music attributed to fairies, trolls, trowies, banshees, aliens, angels, spirits, time slips, and dreams. You’ll also find chapters on speculative and cryptographic music, and on music from birds and other natural sounds. It’s 272 […]

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I’m happy to announce that my translation of Alphonse Allais’s My Rent Is Due! is now available from Black Scat Books. This collection, originally published in 1899, includes delightful stories about tapeworms, phantom limbs, floating brothels, and other interesting things. André Breton saluted Allais’s “terrorist activity of the mind”; maybe you will too.

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The Man Who Ate His House is now available from Black Scat Books and available on Amazon! For this curious little volume, Derek Pell and I selected plots from the cautionary writer’s manual 101 Plots Used and Abused (James N. Young, 1945), modified and combined them in various ways, and fed them to ChatGPT. The […]

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The new expanded edition of Merde à la Belle Époque is now available from Black Scat Books! I’ve selected, translated, annotated, and introduced scatological songs, stories, poems, and playlets from some of the most inventive and eccentric writers of the golden age of Parisian Bohemia: Alphonse Allais, George Auriol, Georges Courteline, Charles Cros, J. Eschbach, […]

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Three songs with words by Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Song of Shattering,” “Spring,” and “The True Encounter.” Here’s the beginning of “Song of Shattering.”

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A duet for two monochords, based on dividing the strings by Sophie Germain and safe primes. (A Sophie Germain prime is any prime for which 2p + 1 is another prime, and that second prime is the safe prime. So, 5 is a Sophie Germain prime, and the safe prime is 11.)

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Two monochords play a duet, using segments of the string that are divisible by eleven.

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Two monochords play a duet: one plays segments of the string that are divisible by six, the other segments that are divisible by seven. All ends harmoniously on 84.

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Seven pitches are used: 410, 420, 430, 440, 450, 460, and 470 Hz. I retuned a chord zither, but a digital keyboard would also work. Here’s the first page:

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