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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

Generative music comes full circle. This side of Aphex Twin is more or less directly inspired by Brian Eno's Music for Aiports. Which itself comes out of Eno's generative music experiments.

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Are you sure it was so insprired? Early IDM artists have sometimes admitted never hearing their forebears (Stockhausen, Steve Reich, etc.); they just reached similar concerns independently by noodling with electronics.

Aphex Twin actually listened to Stockhausen (and vice versa): http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2010/10/15/karlheinz-stock...

and they probably met https://www.reddit.com/r/aphextwin/comments/8vyrbf/aphex_twi...

Richard D. James only heard Stockhausen for the first time after the press had been claiming his early works were influenced by Stockhausen. It turns out they weren't.

I don't think it's possible to make electronic music and not be influenced by Stockhausen. If not directly, then indirectly through diffusion.

By the 1980s most Stockhausen recordings were out of print (as Stockhausen had bought the rights back from Deutsche Grammophon), and Stockhausen was no longer traveling widely to promote his works and he had become rather reclusive as he focused on writing the LICHT operas. So, there was limited opportunity to hear his work and his influence on electronic musicians of that decade is overstated. The advent of drum machines and then PCs that, as people discovered, could be modified to produce unusual sounds is really what sparked electronic experimentation for most producers of that generation.

And you could argue Eno's proceduralism was influenced by Cage, and Cage's proceduralism from Nancarrow... and on and on the family graph of influence goes. Not sure where the full circle is, but there's plenty of thread to tug on here.

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