© Copyright Kirk Rader 2023. All rights reserved.

Musicography

• Amazon Music
• Apple Music
• Bandcamp
• Spotify
• Youtube Music

Or search for "Kirk Rader" on the music service you prefer

I started creating electronic music on the West Coast, in the "West Coast Style," long before I knew that there was such a thing. My musical tastes have always been outside the mainstream. The first album I purchased with my "own" money was a vinyl recording (there were no other commercially significant recording media for sale in the mid 1960's) of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony which I had worn the grooves out of by the time I turned 7 years old. When I was studying formal linguistics and teaching myself to program computers in my late teens and early twenties, I did so to a personal soundtrack that featured Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (yes, the album consisting of 4 LP sides of electric guitar feedback and effects pedal noise that literally ended his career just as it was beginning to take off in the mid 70's and then went on to become the stuff of legends decades later).

My favorite composers include Tallis, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Glass and Byrne as well as hard-core mid-century experimentalists like Stockhausen and Subotnick. If you have never heard any of my own stuff, consider the combination of those influences as fair warning.

Ringtones

Tone in C Major

UPC: 859777027563

ISRC: QZ-XKT-23-00101

Released: 2023

Singles

Undine

UPC: TBD

ISRC: QZ-XKT-23-00100

Released: 2023

Albums

Undecidable^*

UPC: 885767506688

Released: 2011 (recorded 1978 - 1985)

Dum Vivimus

UPC: 198015910503

Released: 2023

Untitled

UPC: 198015912095

Released: 2023

Songs Not Yet and No Longer Sung

UPC: 198015955498

Released: 2023

March

UPC: 198025013270

Released: 2023

April

UPC: 198025078903

Released: 2023

No Chatbots Were Harmed in the Making of This Album

UPC: 198025252013

Released: 2023

Ambivalence

UPC: 198025421488

Released: 2023

The Modern Temple of Amusement

UPC: 198025591679

Released: 2023

Volume 1

Volume 2

Album 10

UPC: 198025739965

Released: 2023

Rhythms

UPC: 198025759802

Released: 2023

• Sonic Pi source for Fanrandole in Tempore Belli

Digitalis

UPC: 198025865497

Released: 2023

XIII

UPC: 198053826262

Released: 2023

Empyrean

UPC: 198027297876

Released: 2023

^* Even though you didn't ask and probably weren't wondering, the title Undecidable and its cover art featuring a formula of the lambda calculus is an inside joke with myself in reference to my studying formal linguistics and symbolic logic at UCLA — including taking classes from Alonzo Church, himself — during the period when many of those tracks were recorded.

Given:

\[ \begin{align*} \text{Let } \Omega & = \omega \hskip0.25em \omega \\ \text{where } \omega & = \lambda x.x \hskip0.25em x \end{align*} \]

The value of \(\Omega\) is "undecidable" according to the rules of the lambda calculus because the calculation of \(\lambda x.x \hskip0.25em x\) never terminates when applied to itself. I experimented a lot with feedback from the signal path back into the control path (the sort of thing you can really only do with modular analog synthesizers) so I adopted this self-referential mathematical formula as a logo. This resonated (pun intended) with me because undecidability due to self-reference is the key not only to the ancient liar's paradox, it is also the basis of Goedel's incompleteness proof in formal linguistics, the explanation of why there is no general solution to the halting problem in computer science and underlies many other similarly consequential results in math and science, while feedback (a physical manifestation of "self reference") is a way to produce complex (and often catastrophic) results from simple mechanical or electronic systems.

As an even less relevant aside, I chose \(\Omega\) (the last letter of the Greek alphabet) as the name of the undecidable result because it is easier to render using computer keyboards than \(\aleph_{0}\) that is the name traditionally used when referring to the cardinality of the set of natural numbers and that, according to accepted wisdom, is the smallest infinite magnitude. It also happens to be the "stack depth" of an infinitely recursive function. Why is that amusing? Well, I was also teaching myself computer programming later in the same period that I was creating those tracks, so... maybe it isn't all that amusing. But it makes me smile to think that the most abstruse branches of "pure" mathematics like computability theory can inadvertently produce literally world-changing effects such as the post-industrial "Information Age." According to common terminology, \(\Omega\) more properly should refer to \(\aleph_{1}\) rather than \(\aleph_{0}\), the former being the cardinality of the set of all countable numbers. Since the cardinality of a set's power set must be larger than that set's own cardinality, \(\aleph_{0} < \aleph_{1}\) so \(\aleph_{0} \neq \Omega\). So if I'd had access to better graphical tools at the time I would have used this as the logo:

\[ \begin{align*} \text{Let } \aleph_{0} & = \omega_{0} \hskip0.25em \omega_{0} \\ \text{where } \omega_{0} & = \lambda x.x \hskip0.25em x \end{align*} \]

If I ever publish a re-issue or remixes of any of the tracks on Undecidable, you will already be in on the joke of the logo I plan to use.