"What I do find a cause for concern, or at least it seems to be much more rare with all of this otherwise generally wonderful technology, results from the degree to which people now tend to start with a supplied sound, usually a loop, and then build in reaction to what they are hearing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing this of course. But I fear that music comes from inside us much less often than used to be the case. The experience of listening to your own mind in silence and forming, clarifying, holding in your mind a spontaneous evolving sonic vision, of listening to your own personal musical imagination as it processes what you are feeling within yourself, this is being drowned out of our musical culture by the ways the purveyors of today's music tech make it as easy as they can to start a new piece and keep it going so that you'll buy more of their stuff. I am hearing more and more editing, selection and juxtaposition in the new music I run across, and less of what feels like genuine self-expression from within the individual, though I certainly do hear that at times in new works too"-- Laurie Spiegel, interviewed by Tobias Fischer here  [via Justin Buckley]

A number of retromaniacal themes, and thinking re. the relationship between old and new in music (and all arts) figure in my Pitchfork profile of Laurie Spiegel.

Here's something else she said on the subject, after reading the bit on residual versus emergent:

"This complex interplay between "emergent" and "residual" = interesting. Brings up the question of universals in music, whatever transcends style and time and doesn't become obsolete, but may sometimes get discarded along with a particular fashion. What is most central and necessary to music, what do we want to get "back to" when it isn't nostalgia? Something primal and central and fundamental that's been elaborated on and varied and camouflaged in so many ways we aren't even aware we are seeking it?"