ost_piano is three unique yet interconnected works in one. The first is a simple, one-second, 22 kHz sample of a single strike of a piano key. The second is musician Kenneth Kirschner's abstract, piano compositions created entirely out of that initial sample. The third is electronic artist Taylor Deupree's electronic reworking of Kirschner's compositions.


The music is very good—interesting, engaging, even beautiful. Kirschner's compositions are lilting, effervescent creations that seem lifted straight out of some of the creepier scenes in Stanley Kubrick movies. Meanwhile, Deupree does a wonderful job taking these deeply simple yet deeply weird compositions and examining them down to their component parts before he, then, crafts his own distorted, fragmented reworking out of the debris.


The music, however, is only part of the story. The other part is the fact that each of the three elements is encoded onto the CD differently: the piano sample in AIFF, the Kirschner compositions in mp3, and the Deupree reworkings in Red Book.


As Kirschner's liner notes suggest, the hope for this release is that you will listen to Deupree's tracks, get inspired, and then take Kirschner's original sample and his piano compositions and create something of your own out of them. In other words, they (or, more specifically, Kirschner) offers this work up to the world, in the hopes that the world will not only listen but react and reimagine this work in a new form. This simple offering is an indication of how digital technology is changing the rules for music production. Yes, Kirschner's work is avant-garde, and avant-garde music has always had a political component to it. In this case, the political act is to give away music in order to encourage collaboration and to spread imagination.


Of course, Kirschner isn't giving this CD away (though you can download mp3 tracks on Kirschner's web site). He is, however, authorizing free use of his music, and that's a development that's starting to gain ground among the more political elements of the music industry. The Electronic Frontier Foundation have set forward tenets for what they call "Open Audio License," which, as they note, " allows artists to grant the public permission to copy, distribute, adapt, and publicly perform their works royalty-free as long as credit is given to the creator as the Original Author." Software programs like Cubase and Logic have built-in file-sharing programs that allow artists to collaborate on compositions, and as these programs (and others, including free ones) become more pervasive, open licensing will begin to play a key role in the music industry.


Post_piano is a hybrid album. It offers a choice: to listen or to listen and react. It suggests a change in the way music will eventually be created, but putting that change within the context of a listening album (one that I had to buy) suggests that this digital transformation of how musicians work with each other will spill out to non-musicians, too. After all, music inspires us in innumerable ways: to think, to learn, to dance, to talk, to fuck, to bathe, and, yes, to create more music. Because technology is getting to the point where just about anyone with the inclination can create professional-quality music with very little training, I can imagine a time not too long from now when remixing other people's songs is as common as mix tapes are today. Of course, I can also imagine a time when owning an mp3 is a criminal offense. I guess which future wins out will depend in part upon whether works like Post_piano aren't simply listened to but acted upon.


And what, you might ask, am I going to do with my AIFF sample? Why, throw it into a Reaktor instrument, dick around, and see what happens, of course. Isn't that what music's all about?