11.1.19 by Ryan Masteller

This could be a really big deal for the future of Tabs Out: Antony Widoff is an “insider’s outsider,” meaning that, although he’s truly making music for the TO crowd, he has also rubbed elbows with honest-to-goodness music celebrities – icons even – such as U2, Frank Zappa, Matthew Barney, and Bill Bruford, working with them in various forms as producer, keyboardist, technical artist, composer, and sound designer. I can almost hear Mike, Dave, and Joe B salivating at the prospect of this sort of attention. It’s the kind of thing entire podcast episodes are crafted around.

But Widoff’s not only skilled in all these areas – he’s also somewhat of a tech whiz, “implementing cutting edge music technologies for artists operating across an insanely broad range of genres and creative disciplines.” I’m not sure how you quantify “insanely broad,” but consider my interest super piqued! Fortunately, “Disposition” is a collection of Widoff’s work as he built demos of the software, which he did under the auspices of Intelligent Music, his employer. You know this is gonna be good – “Intelligent Music” is right there in the name, no guessing required!

“Disposition” is a combination of software output and Widoff’s own performances with it, a hybrid of sorts that allows us to really peek into the future and get an early understanding of what music will sound like when we’re all cyborgs. Of course Widoff’s focused on the programming here, exploring as we are the sounds and idiosyncrasies expulsed by whatever supercomputer whose tubes and junk he adjusted (like HAL9000, except not in space). The result is a fast-paced MIDI delight, a moody prog trip where the future is bright and, sure, we don’t even have to be bothered to make music anymore now that the machines are doing it for us. Regardless of whether or not Widoff’s even a real person or just a “ghost” in some “machine” pinging diodes and reading binary, we are graced with “Widoff’s” or “HAL’s” or “Intelligent Music’s” “Disposition,” a peek inside the glowing, pulsing, electrified mind of a living mechanism.

PS: U2 are also computer simulations; in addition, I can’t be 100 percent sure Mike Haley himself is not made of wires and floppy disks.

Cassette available in an edition of 100 from Full Spectrum Records.