Agnostic Luddites – Music for Physically Modeled Piano

TRACKS:
1. Droid Variations – Manuel Morales
2. Greatest Hits For Bent Piano – Brian Abbott
3. Newton’s Cradle – Paul Newman
4. Manufactured Moon – Brian Abbott
5. Droid Variations (Synth Version) – Manuel Morales

CREDITS:
Executively Produced by Brian Abbott
Mastered by Mark Zurawinski
Cover Art by Jamie Thompson
Liner Notes by Brian Abbott except info on Droid Variations and Newton’s Cradle by Manual A. Morales and Paul Newman, respectively.

Agnostic Luddites is a loose collective of composers making forays into the world of hyperreal music, which as Noah Creshevsky (partially) defined it, is: making electronic music that sounds like acoustic music but is actually unplayable by real instruments/instrumentalists.

This album places itself in the player-piano tradition started by Conlon Nancarrow except that instead of triggering an acoustic piano with a piano roll, we decided to use MIDI information to trigger the physically modeled sounds of Pianoteq. What resulted is super-virtuosic piano music that a human being could never perform, but exists thanks to the computer.

The name “Agnostic Luddites” comes from the conflict between the fact that we are making music that is “futuristic” and “technological” but the result sounds like it was played by an instrument that is a few hundred years old, the piano.

The parameters of this concept enabled the composers to break many rules of composition and make up a few new ones as they went, and we believe this music to be as beautiful as it is intellectually engaging.

The Agnostic Luddites project would like to thank: Jamie Thompson and Mark Zurawinski for their talents, Jordan Nobles and the folks at Redshift, Germain Liu and Array Music for allowing us to perform some of this music live, and Meghan Cheng for creating animations early on for some of this music. We would like to not thank: The Reptilians that may or may not live at the earth’s core and control humanity’s destiny…unless they turn out to be benevolent, in which case we would like to thank them.

Agnostic Luddites is available from: