Well, Chris Hobbs’s CD of Sudoku Music is out.  This CD is a big step for the EMC, as it’s the first totally digital production.  It comes from a little home obsession we’ve had for the last couple years with the big, ‘super’ sudoku puzzles that appear each week in The Independent newspaper in London (and elsewhere online - they’re sometimes called ‘mega’ sudoku).

The point of sudoku is to get different numbers (and/or letters, football players or whatever) from a range in rows, columns and boxes within a grid (okay, I’m lying - the point of sudoku is really to waste your time instead of doing more useful stuff).  With normal sudoku, the range is 0-9; with super sudoku, the grid is 16 x 16 and the range is hexadecimal (so 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F).  Chris got interested in combining sudoku grids to create indications of musical material, repetitions, time shifts, and silence within a piece.  These indications were essentially ‘found’ systems, like Marcel Duchamp’s ‘found’ works or readymades.  Chris has some small skill in this art - he invented the ‘found’ system or readymade.  His best-known work, Aran, is a found system based on a knitting pattern for an Aran sweater.

The next ingredient in the Sudoku mix was Apple’s Garageband software, which Chris had begun playing with at around the same time.  This software is rather sophisticated, but it is designed to be user-friendly, at the home-use end of the market.  This is another big preference for experimental composers: Chris is one of the founding members of the Promenade Theatre Orchestra, a quartet of professional pianists who, by choice, played work of great charm and occasionally great virtuosity on toy pianos and reed organs.  The charms of Apple’s supplied Garageband loops drew Chris to the medium, particularly as it could result in a good quality recording.

We then took the digital recording to Srt Recording, who made a digital master and pressing, so this is the first EMC recording that is entirely digital.  Is it good?  Well, you can hear some samples from the CD on the EMC Sounds page.  And if you think that this is really cool, Sudoku Music will be available through distributors eventually, and always through the EMC’s own web site.  I think it’s dead cool.

Virginia Anderson