Glitch music treats digital errors as compositional material rather than problems to eliminate

Glitch is an experimental electronic aesthetic that inverts the conventional engineering attitude to failure: instead of hiding digital artifacts — clicks, skips, corrupted data, clipping, aliasing, quantization noise, crashes, buffer errors — practitioners foreground them as the primary sonic material. Kim Cascone formalized this stance in Computer Music Journal as ‘post-digital’: failure carries expressive value, and the key move is a shift of attention from the intended foreground signal to the noise/error layer. It emerged in the 1990s (the clicks-and-cuts scene around the Mille Plateaux label) at a cultural moment when digital technology had become pervasive enough that artists stopped marveling at it and began hacking it. It draws on 20th-century precedents — Cage’s 4’33” elevating ambient noise, the Futurists celebrating industrial noise — and recurs across circuit bending, no-input mixing, and laptop music. It is a stance more than a fixed sound palette.

Examples

Oval’s Markus Popp damaged CD surfaces (knives, paint, tape) then reconstructed the skips into loops. Yasunao Tone taped CDs to interrupt data reading, turning read errors into pitched artifacts. Pan Sonic built pieces from test-tone distortion. Contemporary tools use bit-crushing, buffer overruns, and sample-rate mismatches as timbral events.

Assessment

Given two production descriptions, identify which treats noise as a problem to remove and which treats it as material, and name one production decision that marks the difference. In one sentence, explain what Cascone meant by ‘post-digital’. Name three specific digital failure modes glitch composers use and the sound each produces.