The inherrent difficulties with selling information become apparent when technology begins to allow the easy and convenient manipulation of data. Publishing companies in Japan are discovering this now, as they start losing business to punters who browse magazines and take snaps of the interesting bits with their camera phones. This is only a difference of degree to flipping through the pages in the first place. Without needing to resort to hypothetic situations about savants with photographic memories, there is a question as to when the information is actually consumed: when it is perceived, or when its physical carrier is purchased? And what does it mean when technology makes perception equivalent to copying?

On the antipode of Japanese publishers, Momus is making available an excerpt from his new collaboration with Anne Laplantine, a work currently in progress. Laplantine’s guitar playing has been cut-and-pasted almost haphazardly on Sound Forge, but the amount of happy harmonic “accidents” in there forces me to think that this is the result of days of effort. Whatever the method, the outcome can only be described as beautiful. Get it while it’s there.