Suren Seneviratne, performing as My Panda Shall Fly, is a London-based sound artist who has spent years tracking a specific category of software: music tools that ran, produced sounds, and then vanished—not through critical failure but through platform migration. His project Missing Music catalogs over 250 programs—VST plugins, Max/MSP patches, and Macintosh-specific audio tools from the 1990s and 2000s—that became inaccessible when Apple moved away from PowerPC and Mac OS 9. They were never archived by institutions, never entered the histories, they simply disappeared. But Suren doesn't only document. He performs: buying secondhand iBooks and PowerBooks, he plays these old machines live at venues like London's Café OTO, generating new improvised sounds from still-functional obsolete software. On July 31, 2026, Cycling '74 collaborated with him to release modernized versions of four beloved Max patches for current Max 9 as free downloads: Leafcutter John's CDMF (CD Mini F**k), jasch's erratica, jhno's looper, and Lewis Keller's punkin300_2026. The accompanying CDM feature is the most thorough public accounting of the project to date.

In SAE's chisel-construct framework, every remainder eventually gets named and hardens into construct. "Computer music" is a settled construct: from Stockhausen's early electronic studies to the institutionalization of Max/MSP in academic music departments, the lineage is clear, named, and institutionalized. Laptop music from 1990 to 2010 is a construct: IDM, microsound, glitch—the categories exist, the major figures are documented, the critical discourse has formed. But Suren's practice falls precisely into the gap between these settled territories. Missing Music is not preservation: he doesn't archive and shelve, he performs. It's not nostalgia: the old machines generate sounds they never generated before, not reenactments of past works. It's not archaeology: there's no "recovering the lost historical truth" narrative structure—only the direct contact between tool and now. The output is not recreation: his 2026 cassette 4.0 (on Margate Electronics) is genuinely new music. This gap—the exact shape of what his practice is but cannot be named—is where the remainder lives.

The patch that makes this most concrete is Leafcutter John's CDMF (CD Mini F**k), built in the early 2000s and rebuilt for gen~ in 2026. Its logic is disarmingly simple: four granular synthesis engines that randomly grab audio chunks from a folder, randomizing playback position, pitch, and speed on each grab. John originally conceived it as an "automatic remix machine"—not a remix work, but the automation of the remix gesture itself. He then extended the thought: why stop at one track? You could distill an entire album into a single remix. This logic is not granular synthesis in the academic sense (which emphasizes designed materials and controlled gesture). It is not AI generation (no model, no training corpus, no semantic inference layer). It is not remix (no intent to preserve the original's identity). The sounds it produces—an album repeatedly interrupted, grabbed, and restacked at random speeds and positions—occupy a territory that still has no name. When artist littlescale ran 35 networked computers as an orchestra of erratica patches—34 instances running simultaneously, a 35th conducting via OSC—the result was described as "both familiar and alien, with this strong sense of organic change through chaos." That feeling—familiar-but-unnameable—is what remainder feels like before it hardens into construct.

Why now? Because the surrounding territory is closing fast. AI music generation (Suno, Udio) is absorbing the word "generative": generative music now defaults to text prompt → audio model → output. Once that equation fully hardens, programmatic and random music generation without AI will have only two legible readings: historical computer music (museum), or electronic music composition (production). The zone CDMF inhabits—tool-driven, intentionless, random-material generation—will lose its footing. From the other side, "computer music preservation" is forming its own construct discourse (media archaeology, digital humanities), and once that discourse matures, Suren's practice will be absorbed into it, its performativity and generative aliveness flattened into archive. Right now, these patches have just re-entered the contemporary Max environment, are being picked up by a new generation of artists, and have not yet been named. The Cycling '74 article circles around without landing on a category. Peter Kirn on CDM writes "everything old is new again"—which is precisely what a remainder sounds like when the name is felt but hasn't landed. This is the last window for perceiving it as remainder.

The Missing Music archive is at missingmusic.medium.com; Suren's music as My Panda Shall Fly is at missingmusic.bandcamp.com; the patch downloads are available through Cycling '74's "Missing Music Modernization" article. If you download CDMF now, drop in an album, and listen to the randomly grabbed and randomly pitched fragments—you will hear something that has never been named. That is the beauty of the remainder: not a theoretical existence, but a file you can open, a logic still growing.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics