K
Kim Cascone
Petar Jandrić
Department of Informatics and Computing,
Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Zagreb,
Croatia
Abstract
This entry describes the life and works of Kim
Cascone.
Keywords
Kim Cascone · Postdigital · Glitch · Aesthetic ·
Electronic music · Sound art · Silent Records
Biography
Kim Cascone was born on 21 December 1955 in
Albion, Michigan, to Remo and Phoebe (nee
Smyser) Cascone. Remo worked as a radio disc
jockey before going to work in the insurance
industry. Phoebe worked as a clothing model and
a librarian prior to starting a family. The Cascones
soon moved to New York, where Cascone gradu-
ated high school in 1973.
The explosion of rock music in the 1960s
inspired Cascone to study guitar at the Febbraio
Music School in Mount Vernon, and later on at the
Music Conservatory of Westchester in White
Plains. After graduating high school, Cascone
attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston,
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
P. Jandrić (ed.), Encyclopedia of Postdigital Science and Education,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35469-4_30-1
Massachusetts, from 1973–1976, where he
received formal training in composition and
arranging with a focus on guitar and electronic
music.
In 1976 Cascone moved back to New York to
study privately with synthesist Dana McCurdy,
half of the electronic music duo Ear Food with
Brian Flahive. McCurdy taught Electronic Music
at the New School for Social Research, and it was
here that Cascone recorded his first piece of elec-
tronic music. Wanting to learn more about audio
engineering, Cascone attended the Institute of
Audio Research in Greenwich Village and
interned at the Secret Sound Studios co-owned
by Todd Rundgren and Moogy Klingman.
Cascone’s studies in audio and electronics
landed him work at Electronics for Medicine in
Pleasantville, New York, while studying elec-
tronic circuit theory at the Technical Career Insti-
tute (formerly the RCA Institutes). Working as an
Engineering Technician, he developed an interest
in computer music. Purchasing a KIM-1 single
board microcomputer in 1978, Cascone taught
himself 6502 assembly language and pro-
grammed a simple 16-stage sequencer that
connected to a digital-to-analog converter (built
from a schematic in Byte Magazine) that output
control voltages to a modular synthesiser.
After moving from Westchester to a Manhattan
loft in 1980, Cascone worked in Bellevue Hospi-
tal’s Biomedical Engineering Department as an
electronic technician. Wanting to pursue a career
in audio, Cascone went to work as an electronic
2 Kim Cascone
technician for Crumar Keyboards, where he
voiced and repaired synthesizers, and later for
Eventide Clockworks, as a technician. In 1983
he also worked for composer Max Neuhaus, sol-
dering and assembling electronic sound objects
for his sound installation ARC 2, at the Musée
d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris.
In 1983 Cascone moved to San Francisco
where he formed electronic music projects Lan-
guage Lab, PGR, and Thessalonians. From 1984
to 1993, Cascone recorded albums as PGR and
Thessalonians at Poolside Studios in San
Francisco and at Sergey’s Recording Emporium
in Berkeley. Cascone organised a concert series at
the ATA Gallery called Noise Nacht that show-
cased many San Francisco ambient-industrial and
noise bands. Cascone founded Silent Records in
1986.1
Cascone married Kathleen Parker in 1988 at
the Haringey General Registry in London while
recording an album with Keith Rowe of AMM.
In 1989, Cascone worked as Assistant Music
Editor on Twin Peaks (Lynch 1989) and Wild at
Heart (Lynch 1990) and as an Assistant Foley
Engineer on the films Driving Miss Daisy
(Beresford 1989) and Cold Dog Soup (Metter
1990) at Skywalker Ranch. He left the film indus-
try in 1991 to concentrate on Silent Records and
Pulse Soniq Distribution, a distribution arm of
Silent that brought a variety of experimental,
noise, ambient and underground music from
around the globe to record stores throughout
the U.S.
Silent Records became recognized as the pre-
mier ambient music label in the US. At the height
of its success, Silent had nearly 100 releases and a
list of notable ambient artists. Silent was distrib-
uted by Caroline Records and Distribution and
later by AEC Music Distribution. Cascone sold
Silent Records in 1996 and went to work as a
sound designer for Thomas Dolby’s company
Headspace, which was doing the sound design
and writing the music for the video game Obsid-
ian, produced by Rocket Science Games. He also
worked with the team that designed the Beatnik
1
See https://silentrecords.us/. Accessed 9 February 2023.
Sound Bank used in the sonification of web sites
and music production.
After a two-year stint at Headspace, Cascone
went to work for Silicon Valley startup Staccato
Systems, a Stanford University spinoff that devel-
oped a software-based synthesiser called Synth
Builder that was used for developing algorithmic
synthesis for video games. After being hired as a
Voicing Engineer Cascone went on to manage the
Content Department. He is listed as a co-inventor
of Event Modelling (US Patent US7310604B1),
an algorithm that created realistic, non-repeating
sound effects and backgrounds for video games.
From 2001 to 2015, Cascone toured Europe
performing electro-acoustic laptop music,
conducting workshops, and speaking about post-
digital aesthetics in sound art. Cascone has
performed with Merzbow, Keith Rowe, Tony
Conrad, Scanner, John Tilbury, and Pauline
Oliveros among others.
In 2009, Cascone founded the Hydrophonia
Festival which focused on anthropogenic noise
pollution in our oceans, in 2010 he developed
the Subtle Listening Workshop that helped artists
develop suprasensory skills via meditation and
exercises, and in 2015 he founded the Drone
Cinema Film Festival, a festival of video art
inspired by drone music.
Cascone has dual citizenship in the USA and
Italy and lives on the coast south of San Francisco
with his wife Kathleen and son Cage. Cascone
continues to release experimental guitar music
on Silent Records under the project name Khem
One.
Influences
Cascone found his musical calling as a child while
watching the sci-fi classic movie Forbidden
Planet (Wilcox 1956). It was Bebe and Louis
Barron’s soundtrack that pointed him in the direc-
tion he would eventually follow professionally.
Coming of age in the sixties, Cascone was
exposed to many new instrumental sounds in
pop music, the most prevalent were the sounds
of the Moog synthesizer. His music studies
exposed him to a lot of American and European
Kim Cascone
experimental music composers such as John
Cage, David Berhman, Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Iannis Xenakis, Gordon Mumma, and many
others. Other musical influences were artists
working in hybrid genres such as Frank Zappa,
Captain Beefheart, AMM, Brian Eno, Miles
Davis, John Coltrane, and Sonny Sharrock to
name a few.
A good portion of Cascone’s influences come
from non-musical sources such as film theory,
modern art, critical theory, western esotericism,
semiotics, continental philosophy, fiction, and
surrealist literature. Additionally, Cascone has
found much inspiration from his studies in Neo-
platonism and the writings of Rudolf Steiner and
Carl Jung.
Notable Ideas
Cascone’s most notable idea is his development of
the concept of the postdigital. In 2000, Cascone
used the word postdigital in his influential paper
‘The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-digital’ Tenden-
cies in Contemporary Computer Music’ (Cascone
2000). While it is widely claimed that Cascone
was the first person to use the term ‘postdigital’
(e.g., Cramer 2015), his paper was published
roughly at the same time with Robert Pepperell
and Michael Punt’s book The Postdigital Mem-
brane: Imagination, Technology and Desire
(2000), and it is impossible to establish primacy
(Cascone and Jandrić 2021: 567).
Cascone (2000) refers to Nicholas
Negroponte’s seminal Wired article ‘Beyond dig-
ital’ (1998), saying it inspired him ‘to refer to this
emergent genre as “post-digital” because the rev-
olutionary period of the digital information age
has surely passed’ (Cascone 2000: 12). He
describes the development of the postdigital aes-
thetic as follows:
The ‘post-digital’ aesthetic was developed in part as
a result of the immersive experience of working in
environments suffused with digital technology:
computer fans whirring, laser printers churning out
documents, the sonification of user-interfaces, and
the muffled noise of hard drives. But more specifi-
cally, it is from the ‘failure’ of digital technology
that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs,
3
application errors, system crashes, clipping,
aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even
the noise floor of computer sound cards are the
raw materials composers seek to incorporate into
their music. (Cascone 2000: 12–13)
In later works, Cascone inquires topics in post-
digital aesthetics such as the perception of music
(Cascone 2003) and develops the concept of sub-
tle listening (Cascone 2014).
Reception
After its publication, Cascone’s (2000) definition
of the postdigital almost immediately gained a lot
of traction in a wide range of artistic fields includ-
ing visual arts, architecture, and so on (Berry and
Dieter 2015; Bishop et al. 2017). In ‘What is
“post-digital”?’, Florian Cramer (2015: 16) inter-
prets Cascone’s theory as ‘an antidote to techno-
Hegelianism’. Cramer also points to underlying
contradictions and argues: ‘Ironically, the use of
the term ‘post-digital’ was somewhat confusing in
the context of Cascone’s paper, since the glitch
music defined and advocated here actually was
digital, and even based on specifically digital
sound-processing artefacts.’ (Cramer 2015: 17)
(emphasis original) This, however, is not
interpreted as a weakness in Cascone’s work but
as an inherent feature of the postdigital reality.
Cascone’s work on the postdigital has also
strongly influenced the analyses of transforma-
tions in publishing industry (Ludovico 2012)
and, more generally, the then-emerging approach
of (post)digital humanities (Hall 2013).
The beginning of Postdigital Science and Edu-
cation journal2 (incepted in 2019) and book
series3 (incepted in 2021) brought Cascone’s
work to mainstream humanities and social sci-
ences (Jandrić et al. 2018; Jandrić 2022).
2
See https://www.springer.com/journal/42438. Accessed
9 February 2023.
3
See https://www.springer.com/series/16439. Accessed
9 February 2023.
4 Kim Cascone
Legacy
In the third decade of twenty-first century, post-
digital theory has lost some of its currency in
music and visual arts. In a 2021 interview, answer-
ing a question, ‘Which postdigital lessons from
the arts can be generalized into humanities and
social sciences?’, Cascone replied: ‘The ideas
I put forth in ‘Aesthetics of Failure’ (Cascone
2000a) seem quaint today.’ (Cascone and Jandrić
2021: 573) In the same year, answering a question
on ‘the relevance of the concept of the postdigital
for today’s arts’, Cramer responded: ‘I think that,
in the meantime, the term postdigital has become
rather useless in the arts, because it is constantly
being conflated and confused with the too-similar-
sounding and much better-known ‘Post-Internet’.
(Cramer and Jandrić 2021: 977) Despite these
strong words, both Cascone and Cramer identify
areas for future development of postdigital work
in their fields.
In the humanities and the social sciences,
Cascone’s (2000) concept of the postdigital is
now routinely used in various contexts and
expanded in many directions. Here, Cascone’s
work serves as continuous inspiration in diverse
fields such as philosophy of technology (Feenberg
2019; MacKenzie 2022), religion (Savin-Baden
and Reader 2022), critical pedagogy (McLaren
2019), and others. Probably the main develop-
ment of Cascone’s work in this context is its
politicization and usage in a wide range of areas
related to emancipation and social justice such as
gender (Hurley and Al-Ali 2021), race (Matias
and Aldern 2020), post-truth (MacKenzie et al.
2021), and so on.
After the Covid-19 pandemic, another impor-
tant course of development of Cascone’s work is
towards bioinformation (Peters et al. 2022), envi-
ronment, (eco)pedagogy (Jandrić and Ford 2022),
and other issues. There is also an insurrection of
Cascone’s original interest in sound studies,
exemplified in the Special Issue of Postdigital
Science and Education ‘Postdigital Soundscapes:
Sonics, Pedagogies, Technologies’ (Ford 2023).
Major Works
Major Writings
Cascone’s writing has appeared in Computer
Music Journal, Artbyte, Soundcultures, Para-
chute Journal, Junk Jet, Geometer, Postdigital
Science and Education, among others. He has
guest edited and written for Contemporary
Music Review and acts as an advisor to the
sound art journal Interference. He is the founder
of the .microsound list which focuses on post-
digital music and laptop performance.4
Cascone, K. (2000). The aesthetics of failure:
‘Post-digital’ tendencies in contemporary com-
puter music. Computer Music Journal, 24(4),
12–18. https://doi.org/10.1162/
014892600559489.
Cascone, K. (2003). Grain, sequence, system: Three
levels of reception in the performance of laptop
music. Contemporary Music Review, 22(4), 10
1–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/0749446032000
156900.
Cascone, K. (2011). The Use of Density Groups in
Electroacoustic Music. Contemporary Music
Review, 30(2), 143–153. https://doi.org/10.
1080/07494467.2011.636201.
Cascone, K. (2014). Transcendigital Imagination:
Developing Organs of Subtle Perception. Inter-
ference, 4. http://www.interferencejournal.org/
transcendigital-imagination-developing-organs-
of-subtle-perception/. Accessed 1 January 2023.
Cascone, K. (2015). Evolving the Emergent Content
Workshop. In C. Sommerer, L. Mignonneau, &
D. King (Eds.), Interface Cultures: Artistic
Aspects of Interaction (pp. 317–324). Bielefeld:
transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/97838
39408841-031.
Major Records
Since 1984, Cascone has released more than
50 albums of electronic music and has recorded/
performed with Merzbow, Keith Rowe, Tony
Conrad, Scanner, John Tilbury, and Pauline
4
See http://www.microsound.org/. Accessed 9 February
2023.
Kim Cascone
Oliveros, among others. Selected albums (under
his own name and various pseudonyms):
As Kim Cascone
Blue Cube (Raster-Noton 1998)
Pulsar Studies (anechoic 2004)
anti-musical celestial forces (Storung 2009)
The Knotted Constellation (fourteen rotted
coordinates) (Monotype 2011)
As PGR
Silence (PGR, self-published 1985)
The Chemical Bride (Silent Records 1992)
The Morning Book of Serpents (Silent Records
1995)
As Heavenly Music Corporation
Consciousness III (Silent Records 1994)
Lunar Phase (Silent Records 1995/Astral
Industries 2017)
In a Garden of Eden (Silent Records 1993/
Astral Industries 2018)
As Khem One
Threshold of Eastern Octaves (Silent Records
2022)
Major Films
Cascone has worked in various capacities in post-
production on the following films:
Blood of the Heros (Peoples 1989) – Intern Sound
Editor
Driving Miss Daisy (Beresford 1989) – Assistant
Foley Editor
Twin Peaks (Lynch 1989) – Assistant Sound
Editor
Cold Dog Soup (Metter 1990) – Assistant Foley
Editor
Wild at Heart (Lynch 1990) – Assistant Sound
Editor
Summary
Kim Cascone is a composer, writer, researcher of
sound, and electric guitarist. His main theoretical
contribution is the development of the concept of
the postdigital. Developed within the context of
music, Cascone’s work has inspired research in
diverse fields such as arts, aesthetics, humanities,
5
social sciences, philosophy of technology, educa-
tion studies, and others.
Cross-References
▶ Postdigital
▶ Postdigital Aesthetics
▶ Postdigital Cultural Studies
▶ Postdigital Music
▶ Postdigital Publishing
▶ Postdigital Science and Education
▶ Postdigital Sensibility
▶ Postdigital Visual Arts
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