Daniel WJ Mackenzie – Daniel WJ Mackenzie
Artist: Daniel WJ Mackenzie
Title: Daniel WJ Mackenzier
Label: Running On Air
The mathematician and philosopher Leibniz once said that ‘the pleasure we gain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.’ Leibniz was writing in the late 17th century, of course, and about a far more rudimentary set of musical and rhythmical rules, but I think the statement holds, and I’ve always been intrigued by the idea that the intense, elaborate, plural pleasure music provides is merely a function of numbers, of counting. With two long exploratory tracks on Return Written Arrange (and an ‘Anneterlude’), Daniel WJ Mackenzie has explicitly approached this subject by partly basing the structural makeup of the tracks on the Fibonacci sequence – that simple, elegant sequence in which subsequent numbers are based on the sum of the previous two (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 etc); but rather than simply leave his investigations there, he’s chosen to complicate matters by introducing the chaos of chance in the form of a nod towards aleatory music.
Read the rest of the review at the Liminal.