Highly recommended: this episode of the UK’s South Bank Show on composer Steve Reich. Reich talks about the development of his work and process in the most casual but fascinating way, it’s well worth a look. Also interviewed are composers like Michael Nyman and Brian Eno. Eno describes Reich’s tape pieces (like “It’s Gonna Rain”) as “aural moiré patterns.” He goes on, “[The pieces] take advantage of the fact that your brain is very creative. [Reich’s] tranferring the job of being the composer into the brain of the listener, saying to the listener, ‘Your brain is actually making this piece of music,’ because you knew what ingredients were, there’s nothing mysterious about how the piece works.” Perhaps that explains my love for Bruno Munari’s Original Xerographies.

An absolutely fascinating interview with ECM founder Manfred Eicher on the occasion of the label’s 40th anniversary last November is now online. Though he downplays the importance of the label’s cover designs, they were tremendously influential in shaping my initial interest in graphic design. Lars Müller’s book of ECM covers Sleeves of Desire is almost always in reach of my desk, and another, Windfall Light, is soon on the way.

In answering jazz critic Gary Giddins’s question about the sleeve designs, Eichner cites Gertrude Stein’s maxim to “think of your ears as eyes.” ECM often uses the quote in its materials, but Eichner says it was used first in liner notes for the elegantly understated design of Keith Jarrett’s 10-LP box set The Sun Bear Concerts. (Eichner also playfully describes designer Barbara Wojirsch’s choice for the box binding material as “trash paper.”) The Tokyo concert’s meditative second section continues to be one of the most remarkably evocative things I’ve ever heard on the piano—play it, and you’ll no doubt see the rain falling.

Cory Arcangel took an MP3 of Iron Maiden’s song “The Number of the Beast” and compressed it 666 times. For more background on compression artifacts and artmaking, read Arcangel’s excellent essay “On Compression” [PDF]. I keep revisiting his ideas about “lossy vs lossless” and find them enormously useful. I also think one of the most infectious things about Arcangel’s art is its wit; I never seem to tire of the funny-smart one-two punch his work creates. Speaking of which, did you see the one with Springsteen and the glockenspeil?

Slate’s Fred Kaplan explains why Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue is so great. (Maybe he should’ve said so cool? So what.) Here’s a hint: it’s modal. More on the history of Kind of Blue here on Kurt Anderson’s Studio 360’s American Icons series. Flaminco Sketches—consisting of only five scales, played for “as long as the soloist wishes until he has completed the series”—continues to be one of the most hauntingly beautiful things I’ve ever heard.

MJ (1958–2009)

Above: 1970s TDK cassette tray packaging. Cited as influential by Graphic Thought Facility’s Andy Stevens in an interview with the Design Museum, London.

This Saturday I took part in a panel discussion at the New Museum along with Marco Roth, Astra Taylor, and the panel’s organizer, Brian Sholis. We were asked to give a short lecture at the start of the discussion to outline some of our views on “generational coherence, generational self-consciousness, peer networks,” and other themes related to the museum’s Generational show. While I don’t usually script my talks, preferring instead to discuss images casually as I display them, I decided that this panel was a good opportunity to set images aside for a moment and get my thoughts together on this subject. My remarks follow below, and I hope they’ll be of interest. —RG

Most graphic design is easy to make, quick to produce, and not expected to last that long. If it lasts awhile, great, but it makes no claim to permanence. About the most permanent thing a designer can make is a book, and those often get reeditioned or go out of print. So graphic design’s relationship to duration is different than that of a painting or a building. I’m working on several projects right now that involve redesigning things that were just designed or redesigned in the last five years. Magazines come out and are thrown away, posters are put up and torn down, websites are built to change everyday. A new CEO takes over and wants to put a new stamp on something, so the logo’s changed once again.

In fact, the duration of most graphic design is closer to that of a song. I’ve heard that for awhile Stevie Wonder wrote a song every day. He’s a lot like a designer in that regard. It’s practiced creativity. And, after a few months, he selected a dozen songs or so to release as an album. That’s his portfolio, an edit of songs for the world to share.

There has been a lot of thinking done about design and art. Today, I’d like to do a bit of thinking about contemporary graphic design and music. In terms of our conversation here, music is a useful tool for talking about generations because it’s so defining for generations. I think design is defining, too. We identify ourselves with the songs we listen to but also the brands we buy, the organizations we support, the websites we contribute to, and the media we collect.

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Mr Muxtape himself, Justin Ouellette, will be joining us in April for AIGA/NY’s Design Remixed. Details here.

An oldie but goodie, here’s Michel Gondry’s video for Gary Jules’s Donnie-Darko era cover of the Tears for Fears song Mad World. (Whew, that was a mouthful…)

“Built by a team of engineers responsible for services like Yahoo!, eBay, Blogger and AOL,” the new web-centered music service Lala.com boasts a selection of 6 million songs. Here’s the pitch: play songs once for free. Play them online as much as you like for 10 cents each, or download them as non-DRM MP3s for 79 cents each. Like it or not, I think this might be the future of digital music. Music is backed up in the cloud automatically (it’s almost like Gmail for music), and the songs you need locally are only what your iPod is capable of storing or what you really need to have when you’re not online, which, in the age of 3G smartphones, is increasingly rare. Instead of restricting ownership with software like DRM, limited ownership is incentivized with price. Better still, the service eliminates digital redundancy by transcluding data: instead of every user having their own track, it’s one track for every user.

To quote the sagacious Kevin Kelly: “Ownership is not as important as it once was.” Lala.com is proof positive of this trend.

Update: Apple saw Lala’s value as well, purchasing the company in December 2009.

Via Tagbanger comes this phenomenal slideshow of an upcoming auction of Michael Jackson’s “private art collection as well as fittings and furnishings from his Neverland ranch.” The rhinestone socks look surprisingly comfortable.