What happens to the musical interactions and meanings when the context of the music is dramatically altered through random reorganisation? CHOP. RANDOMISE. RECOMPILE. DISCARD. (C.R.R.D.) is one of several Lugubrious 78 Core Compositional Concepts. It has origins in the desire to chop ‘Dada Performance 69’ up by bars and use a random number generator to abstract human choice from the process of rebuilding the album in a random order. As noted in the EARLY EXPLORATIONS SERIES notes, this was never realised until recently, when it was applied to a different piece. The approach has been codified so that any collection of audio (specifically, WAV format) files can be imported, chopped, randomised, and recompiled.
The ‘Discard’ step of the process can take many forms, but the two main choices in the full workflow concern whether to preserve duplicate snippets. In the first form, any chopped snippet can be reused as often as random chance decides, resulting in the potential for significant numbers of snippets to be removed (depending on the length of the source material and the chosen length of the material to be recompiled). Where the analysis ensures no duplicates are used, each and every snippet is uniquely pulled from the pool of chopped material. Again, depending on the length of the source and recompilation materials, many of the snippets may be discarded. Variations of ‘Discard’ range from rejecting specific musical elements to rejecting entire musical pieces (much like any standard choice around which material makes the final cut).
In 2026, the entire pre-existing corpus of Lugubrious 78 releases (fifty-six tracks) from 2024 and 2025 was collated. The CRRD code was run to produce sixteen tracks (each twenty-two minutes long) from the roughly 374 minutes of music. The track length was chosen to ensure a comfortable fit on one side of a vinyl record. The sixteen tracks were released as an eight-volume series. Using the no-duplicate rule, roughly twenty-two minutes of the original material were discarded.
This concept has also been applied to visual and written material. For example, the album covers of the previous releases from 2024 and 2025 were used to produce randomised, pixelated, scalar images for the CRRD releases. In contrast to the musical element of this project, the visuals allowed duplicates to be used in the resulting images. A forthcoming written project applies the concept to several hundred paragraphs of non-musical writings. The disparate ideas were compiled into a single document, arranged into coherent paragraphs, and then reordered at random. Watch this space.
Is this just another way to generate content with minimal effort (AI?)? Does it just produce stuff from existing stuff that is ultimately the same? Is it music spamming or a subtle critique of current trends in music spamming? Or does it genuinely lead to new musical experiences and insights using recontextualisation of existing material?
NOTE: This text is a draft from the forthcoming Sketches of Musical Thought book, which provides an overview of the evolution of the compositional approaches of Lugubrious 78.