As a sound artist abandoning bar-by-bar meter, you’re presented with a daunting opening up of temporal possibilities - to plot your work without that framework that is so inherent in so much music.

The trouble with looking for external numerical inspiration to ‘meter’ your work, to create a completely different framework, is that most external stimulus will lead to a phased sort of music - if your numerical bases aren’t co-prime, they’ll end up synching again. I’ve used irrational numbers before (in my serialist piano piece Stjepan + Natalia) - taking the square roots of numbers related to each tone row that I used.

MacKenzie apparently uses the Fibonacci sequence for each piece titled Return Written Arrange, which if you stagger each part, I guess leads to quite infrequent synchronisation. I’m always fascinated at the systems sound artists/composers use to move away from meter or tonality - there’s something really personal in each, I feel - the opportunity to design a unique structure.

I can’t find anything on how the interleaved tracks, each titled N.a.c.a.l. (Now all colours are lost), are constructed - possibly without any serialisation, in contrast to the Return Written Arrange movements.

Sources of information: The Liminal, Runningonair Music