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Baker's Dozen

Start The Riot! Alec Empire's Favourite Albums
Laurie Tuffrey , June 16th, 2014 07:50

Ahead of Atari Teenage Riot's set at Camden Crawl, the band's founder uses his rundown of favourite albums to issue a clarion call for creativity and puts together a three-hour mix of tracks from his top 13

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Jaron Lanier - Instruments Of Change
If you had a look at the other records on this list, then this makes total sense. I have been listening to it quite a lot over the past months. A friend of mine from New York hooked me up with the CD.  

I make mostly electronic music and develop new sounds, making synths and software do things that sound "unknown", so I often forget how many instruments from hundreds, even thousands, of years ago are out there and they were built by incredible people. There are some strange instruments on this album. And to me it sounds like the musicians are not trying to play them how they were supposed to be played, if that's even possible. I find that most classical music now has not much life. I often imagine how, let's say Bach, must have sounded, when the music was fresh and the musicians performed it with excitement and passion.

What is interesting is that when you check out Beatport for example, all this technology and the "perfect" platform to connect music with fans has become this boring cemetery of data. It's time to rethink. Albums like this can really help to look at music in a new way. Of course you can also just sit back and enjoy it but there is more about it.