On the flipside to Soft Cinema, try get your hands on the rare ‘minidisc’ from Gescom (Autechre side project) on Warp Records. The first ever minidisc only release, it was designed to take advantage of the format’s zero seek time: Minidisc contains 88 tracks which are intended to be played in shuffle mode, creating a quasi-unique, aleatoric arrangement every time it is played. Some of the 88 tracks have been specifically compiled to optimise functions, such as shuffle and loop, which are unique to the minidisc player.
Let’s remember too, Brisbane sound artist Andrew Kettle, who produced a mini CD for playing Lotto: “Place CD in player. Press Play, then Random. Choose your numbers to play or have random forecasts of your Lotto numbers. Track length average 15 seconds.” And for fans of the John Cage inspired explorations of chance and randomness in composition – try this free OS X software version inspired by one of his rule sets: http://www.essl.at/works/fontana-mixer/download.html