One thing that has slowly crept up on me though is that this type of attitude is starting to gain some real ground in the music world. Historically it would seem that sometime after the 60’s and the era of the power trio, musicians decided that adding more to bands was the way to go. Another guitar player here, a keyboard there, heck throw in another drummer and a triangle player for good measure! and even more so lately you have big bands like The Go Team (7+ members) and The Arcade Fire (5+ members).  Now I don’t have anything against any of these bands (in fact I love the go team and the arcade fire), but it seems like the culture of bigger is better is getting out of hand!

Now I know in recent history the popularity of electronic music has soared and often times is a single person mixing records or composing using a computer this doesn’t seem as revolutionary to me as the advent of small rock bands.

Lately, and especially with new rock type bands you are starting to see a lot of 3 and 2 person setups

• Death from above 1979 – bass and drums
• Rodrigo y Gabriela – 2 guitars (fantastic too btw)
• White stripes – Guitar and drums
• Yeah Yeah Yeah’s – singer, guitar, drums
• Muse – guitar, bass, drums

These bands are realizing that great music can be made with less, embracing the constraints (whether by choice or otherwise) and not only succeeding but excelling at what they do.

Where have you seen people embracing constraints? Or creating constraints to foster creativity? I think it’s a fascinating topic and would love to hear more about it.

Anyways, this is a fantastic video on the topic of “Humane Computing” and I think it’s well worth your time to sit down and watch it all the way through.

Away with applications, the death of the desktop

(from Jeff Lins blog)

Seems like he was inspired by this set of notes taken from SXSW in Austin, Texas