'On the Edge of Nowhere' was composed for a film collaboration with Ron Eagle and is dedicated to his memory.
The album states eight tracks, yet there is a nineth and tenth track. Track nine is complete silence while track ten sounds to be of experimental material. Here's what Kurt Riemann had to say about track ten:
"It was programmed on the now disconnected CCRMA artificial intelligence labs computer at Stanford in 1990.
The piece was composed that summer with the knowledge that the computer system (Sambox) was going to be disconnected. The system had a personality because of the years of insight that it gave when you worked with it, so the question came up, "Will Sambox Dream?" Stanislaw was one of the instructors who helped with the arcane equations that it required to operate.
The piece goes through some rudimentary vocal awakenings at the opening and progresses through most of the available modes of synthesis and musically mathematical composition that Sambox could do (and I could program with such a limited window of time) and then pitches off into the sound of Sambox shutting down and blissfully evaporating..
At least that's what I tried to do. I got some applause there when it premiered, so at least the instructors knew what I was trying to do. It's a strange bit of music to include on the CD, so I determined that 1:47 of time from the "last" cut was enough time to forget what you had just heard and for "Sambox" to arrive. It's startling to a lot of people."