The tape work “Dreaming in Darkness” was performed at the Other Minds festival in San Francisco last month — and already at the festival’s audio catalog at archive.org there’s a downloadable MP3 (and OGG) of the piece, along with six other works performed that evening, March 7, 2008, plus a panel discussion, all as separate […]
How many cities on a Monday night can come close to selling out a chamber concert that’s built around a tape-music work dating from the Kennedy administration? Count San Francisco among them.
The performance earlier this week, on March 17, at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts by the San Francisco Contemporary Music […]
The biggest surprise in the music of Alireza Mashayekhi is that it hadn’t long ago planted itself in the sample repositories of illbient, dubstep, and adventurous hip-hop DJs. Last year the Sub Rosa label released Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday and Today 1966-2006, a two-CD collection that focused on Mashayekhi’s recordings and those of Ata […]
To close the week out, a recently uploaded interview with softspoken minimalist composer Terry Riley, dating from 1969. The interview is by Charles Amirkhanian, founder of Other Minds, the catalog of which (at archive.org) houses the file. Also interviewed are Robert Ashley and William Maraldo, then co-directors of the Mills Center for Contemporary Music in […]
This is what I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:
(1) If it’s possible to imagine a merging of Charles Mingus’s muddy, deeply felt jazz and Morton Feldman’s proto-ambient classical arrangements, this may be it: The track “Itsuki no Komoriuta” off the Fujin Raijin album by the Sakoto Fujii Min-Yoh Ensemble (Les Disques Victo, […]
Re-uploaded another batch of past “essays/reports” I wrote, plus one interview I did, dating back to 1994. Here they are, in roughly chronological order:
“Good Neighbors” (1994): How rock music and classical music face similar creative obstacles — and how so-called “crossover” projects aim for a mirage of a middle ground. What, for example, does […]
The website ubu.com is one of the deepest publicly available archives of writing, visuals and, most importantly for this site’s purposes, sound. Each month a new temporary Virgil arrives in the form of a guest curator, who selects 10 items from its murky, avant-garde depths. January 2008 belongs to Alex Ross, music critic and author […]
Cut to the chase, the clock’s ticking on 2007 as I type this. That previous sentence is intended to provide an alibi: making note of the circumstances under which a “best of” list is produced gives me an out down the road, when I might change my mind. In any case, this year’s “best of” […]
Quick News, Links, Bits: (1) Ike Turner, the rock’n’soul legend who will forever be remembered as Tina Turner’s abusive husband, passed away earlier this week (November 5, 1931 – December 12, 2007). I’ll never forget standing in the refurbished Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, and being told the story of the chance damage to a […]
This site was upgraded expertly by Nathan Swartz of clicknathan.com from my decade-old handcoded HTML to a proper WordPress install on July 26, 2007. Left lingering for me to take care of was a relatively small proportion of back articles, mostly from the “interviews” and “reports/essays” sections.
Just today I’ve uploaded five more of the backdated […]