“Sudoku 82,” a spare, beautiful, spacious piece for eight pianos, was composed utilizing systems derived from sudoku puzzles and the GarageBand computer program.

The composer writes about the piece: “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.”

Performed by noted Los Angeles pianist Bryan Pezzone.

Sooner or later, everyone will relish chill-out relief from the holiday madness. Christopher Hobbs’ dreamy but random Sudoku 82 for eight pianos (all excellently played by Bryan Pezzone) is the perfect drug. Try it with eggnog.” — Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times (from Times critic Swed’s “Musical Gift Ideas” list for Xmas 2009)

“It’s clever stuff, part of a series of 125 pieces on which Hobbs used GarageBand software and the hexidecimal grids of sudoku puzzles to generate material. If it stopped there it might be dull, but Hobbs disposes his sounds with charateristic grace. The subhead “for eight pianos” suggest Steve Reich busyness, but it’s lighter and infinitely sparer than that. Bryan Pezzone works wonders, however many keyboards had to be juggled.” —Brian Morton, The Wire

“[Hobbs’] ‘sudoku’ pieces—125 by the composer’s count—take number sequences from the newspaper puzzles and online random number generators and uses them to structure his pre-determined sounds…. Sudoku 82, the first of these to be arranged for live performance (heard here in a multitrack piano performance), is quiet and contemplative, though not strictly minimalist, since it draws on a full range of post-impressionistic tone color. Through its quiet intensity—not unlike the music of Morton Feldman—the piece changes one’s entire perception of time. My watch said 20 minutes but it could have been anywhere from a moment to an hour.” —Ken Smith, Gramophone



Christopher 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. He also was a founder-member of the Promenade Theatre Orchestra (with John White, Alec Hill, and Hugh Shrapnel), a group of composer-performers who specialized in music for toy pianos and reed organs. On the breakup of the PTO, he and White formed the Hobbs-White Duo. Hobbs has also taken part in several momentous one-off concerts, most notably in a complete performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations with Gavin Bryars in Leicester. 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. His music has been recorded on the Obscure Records/Editions EG, Experimental Music Catalogue, Sonic Arts Network, Advance, Matchless, and Black Box labels. As a performer, he has appeared on the Matchless, Impetus, Les Temos Modernes and Deutsche Grammophon (in Cardew’s The Great Learning) labels.
“The ever-stylish Christopher Hobbs is a master of subtle surprise. This haunting music is both strange and familiar, and balm to an alert ear and keen intelligence.” —Howard Skempton

“Hobbs’s Sudoku pieces, based on the newspaper puzzle, are exotically listenable and remarkably varied.” —Kyle Gann, PostClassical

“[Hobbs’s] quietly alluring music possesses the seemingly incidental beauty that can arise in music composed under self-enforced restraints.” —Julian Cowley, The Wire magazine

“Hobbs stylistically seems to be the most intellectually intense and thorough of all the English Experimental composers” —Peter Garland, Pieces 3