_Kim Cascone]

Kim Cascone studied Arranging & Composition at the Berklee College of Music in the 1970s then studied privately with Dana McCurdy at the New School in Manhattan. In 1978 he programmed a sequencer on a KIM-1 microcomputer in Assembly Language. In 1983 he worked with Max Neuhaus on the sound installation “ARC 2” for the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.

He moved to San Francisco in 1983 and founded Silent Records in 1986. The label released nearly 100 titles and launched Pulse Soniq Distribution which imported underground music from Europe, Japan and the US. From 1989 to 1991 he worked as assistant music editor on David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart, then as an assistant foley engineer at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County.

In 1996 he sold Silent and joined Thomas Dolby’s Headspace as a sound editor, then worked at Staccato Systems where he co-invented Event Modeling, an algorithm for realistic game audio. In 1999 he founded the .microsound email list, a community for post-digital music.

Working with audio software in Silicon Valley, he began using failure, i.e. glitch, as a compositional schema. His 2000 essay “The Aesthetics of Failure,” for the Computer Music Journal, introduced the term “post-digital” for music that explores the edge-boundaries of audio software. The concept of glitch later spread to the visual arts, cinema and critical theory.

From 2001 to 2015 Cascone toured Europe performing laptop music, conducting workshops and speaking on post-digital aesthetics. He has performed with Merzbow, Keith Rowe, Tony Conrad, Scanner, John Tilbury, Pauline Oliveros and others.

in 2016 Cascone stopped touring and resurrected Silent Records. He returned to electric guitar releasing music as Khem One. His writings on post-digital aesthetics have appeared in Computer Music Journal, Artbyte, Contemporary Music Review and books on Sound Art. He holds dual citizenship, USA and Italy, and lives on the coast near San Francisco with his wife and son.

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