Somewhere there’s a mega-traditionalist who views the birth of polyphony in Western music as the start of its downfall, not just of Western music but of the West. With the mixing of voices came the opportunity for confusion, chaos and …
I’m taking the next week off for a little vacation. There’s one thing I might upload at some point, but otherwise the site will be silent until July 9 or 10.
In a slight variation on the old pop-Zen koan, what is the sound of three electronic musicians group-improvising? The query arises from a listen to a recently posted live trio set by Matmos (aka Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt) and …
Brian Eno named the Long Now Foundation, the San Francisco-based organization that promotes long-term thinking. How long term? The Foundation writes years as a series of five digits, thus suggesting a continuity well beyond the sort imposed by a mere …
The computer-enabled musician Christopher Bissonnette doubly subsumed his source material last year. In the production of Periphery, on the Kranky record label, he employed recordings of instrumentation associated with the classical symphony orchestra, including strings and piano.
But by the time …
Musician William Fowler Collins is relocating from San Francisco, California, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and judging from some recent music, his ears were there before he himself was. Collins produced two five-minute pieces as part of the “call for soundart” …
In a photo taken at their debut performance, the duo known as 2&, consisting of Heather Heise (musewings.blogspot.com) and Roddy Schrock (fundamentallysound.org), are seen standing side by side, eight eyes between ‘em, looking off camera, all smiles. She’s …
Once upon a time, the San Francisco performance space run by Naut Humon was essentially a trailer in the middle of a field, far from the city’s center. The mixing equipment at the Compound, as it was called, sat in …
People rush the stage at a Matmos concert. They just wait until the concert is over. Then they head studiously to the front of the room, as they did after the duo’s set on Wednesday, June 21, at the San …
The Echo de Pensees Sound Series, an ongoing series of events and installations at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, hosted two performances on Friday, June 23, that provided an interesting study in contrasts. Aaron Ximm’s “Guantanamo …