pemungkah.com

pe•mung•kah: noun

1. music for Balinese shadow plays
2. Joe McMahon, a musician, programmer, and photographer from Silicon Valley 

 

music

I write, record and perform music deriving from many forms, particularly jazz, "classical" electronic music, ambient music, and Indonesian gamelan, with influences from a wide variety of artists: Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa, Wendy Carlos, Pat Metheny, Brian Eno, and even John Cage - lyrical pieces with unique timbres and harmonies. 

My esthetic could be best summarized as exploring the fractal edge of planning and coincidence. I like to assemble a situation in which I've got the basic outline of things under control, but then improvise inside them, allowing the uncontrolled and unplanned portions to inspire and surprise me, both in my music and my photography.

programming

Im primarily a Perl iprogrammer (it's kind of my second language by now), and have branched out into Cocoa (mostly Cocoa Touch) for my own projects. I've been doing a little bit of Python and Ruby as well lately, and a boatload of shell scripting. Getting back into Java again; 1.6 has really improved the language a lot!

News

StillStream Radio, an iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch app for listening to stillstream.com's streaming audio feed, is available on the App Store. Free.

My most recent release, Decoherence is available. An experiment in just how far I'm willing to go to turn a mediocre recording into something worth listening to. Includes both a FLAC and MP3 version of the 30-minute track.

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