Christopher Hobbs (1950)
Sudoku 82 (2008)

Bryan Pezzone

Sudoku 82 is a spare, beautiful, spacious 20 minutes for eight pianos. Hobbs is an English experimental composer, a pioneer of British systems music., founder of the Experimental Music Catalogue, and an early member of both the Scratch Orchestra and AMM. A combination of strict rigor and audience-friendly surfaces is typical of most of his work since 1970, as is his use of cheap (toy or amateur) electronics. Hobbs writes about this work: “Sudoku 82 is one of a series of pieces I have been working on since 2005. There are now over 125 of them that use Apple’s GarageBand software and random procedures culled from the numbers found initially in hexadecimal sudoku puzzles and latterly from online random number generators. I choose the sounds I want and the overall duration, but then let the numbers determine what goes where, how many times, how long, how much silence, and so on. Sudoku 82 used a number of piano loops played on eight pianos at an extremely slow tempo, the result being that the pianists seem to be frozen in time. It was Jim Fox who suggested that the piece might be performed ‘live’ rather than using samples as I had originally done. This is therefore the first of the series to come off the computer and into the recording studio, and I am delighted with the result, which is dedicated to Jim Fox, whose music and predisposition towards slow tempos I have admired for many years.” (20-minute DC single/EP, in digipak)