Get Your Bleep On

If you enjoy the work of Black Dice, autechre, Phoenecia, Eno, or others who build sound waves from scratch with electronic tools, here's a recommendation you aren't likely to get from Pandora or last.fm: pick up a copy of The Csound Book, just for the accompanying CD-ROM. Csound is a standard tool for digital synthesis--essentially a programming language for sound processing--and the book provides an excellent introduction to it. But if you just want to consume sound, not produce it, ignore the book. For a mere $60 you get almost 8 hours of mp3 music from masters of academic computer music and their students. Even if you find only 6 hours to be listenable (not everyone can appreciate pure sine waves), it's a bargain. If you've ever struggled to find computer-generated blurbles that are unpolluted by techno beats but still spicier than new-age ambient, this will be your mother lode. And who knows: if you find Csound itself intriguing and decide to start doing a little experimentation, you may even turn into one of those "laptop musicians" that the real musicians love to hate.