To celebrate French composer Erik Satie’s would-be 148th birthday, Wired’s Listening Post blog posted a great primer of Satie’s life and notable works.

Satie’s spare, sometimes hilariously titled pieces employed repetition as a means of finding new spaces for melody and exposition, which set the stage for everything from later developments like ambient, drone, shoegaze and trance while demythologizing the master narratives of classical music and art. He was an iconoclast whose impact is still being measured to this day. 

One of the absolute best things that happened to me last year was coming across Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s Satie: Complete Solo Piano Music. It’s a stretch even calling myself a classical music novice, but Satie’s distinct minimalist approach fit perfectly with my musical diet of that time: The Album Leaf, Four Tet, Isan, etc. I don’t know the composition word, but it’s an appreciation (and patience) for music’s equivalent to negative space.