Among the musical highlights of 2003 were the whimsical title characters of Triplets of Belleville, the animated French film. Midway through the movie, the three women, along with a guest, performed a piece of ersatz musique-concrete, the instrumentation of which …
From a review of three books on bio-ethics in the March 2004 issue of Harper’s.
Before we can fashion our technological devices, we must alienate ourselves from the world around us and see it as something standing by for our …
Given that it’s Mardi Gras today, one might be on the lookout for a whistle-capped street anthem. One could do worse than Håkan Lidbo’s “Ultrachrome,” even though it’s more Berlin Love Parade than New Orleans Krewe spectacle. “Ultrachrome” is the …
Raemus’s superb Nine Days is that many tracks of deceptively simple music, raw percussive-oriented songs that leave plenty of room for the mind to wander about in. The individual instrumentals are, for the most part, as spare as minimal techno, …
When the batch of seven free Ninja Tune offerings went up on the Disquiet Downstream yesterday (four MP3s, three videos — see here), an eighth wasn’t functioning. Fortunately it is now, because it’s the best of the batch, a …
The longtime British label Ninja Tune is promoting a new set of Zen retrospective collections, consisting of a DVD, a full-length hits album, and a remix set. The Disquiet.com Downstream presents, in conjunction with Ninja’s ninjatune.net portal site, four …
OK, so the new stream from Warp Records isn’t exactly user-friendly, and the MP3 isn’t free, but the arrival of Plaid’s Dialp (a one-hour mix of “back catalogue, unreleased live tracks and edits”) is a good opportunity to remind Downstream …