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Late last year, the musician Lesley Flanigan performed in San Francisco at the new art space Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, or GAFFTA. She moved with an austere grace among instruments of her own making, each a mix of plain wood and modest electronics. The objects suggested some intersection of Muji, the Japanese masters [...]
Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere: To Tape or Not to Tape: In a nytimes.com review of the June in Buffalo Festival (as in Buffalo, New York), Allan Kozinn comments on an ensemble, Signal, that opts to perform Steve Reich‘s “Double Sextet” with 12 instruments, rather than as six instruments played against a prerecorded [...]
Two of the 10 most popular posts on this site during the month of may relate to Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album (cover shown at left), the recent free album download I compiled. Each track on the album is a response-in-music to a misinformed article (“The Freeloaders”) about copyright and creativity in the May [...]
Teaming up So Percussion and Matmos is a match made in contrapuntal heaven. The percussion quartet has made a career of recording and performing demanding contemporary music, including a highly regarded album of work by Steve Reich, and the duo Matmos has been eliciting unusual sounds from the familiar yet peculiar (famously including rodents and [...]
Three new and substantial articles covering Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album have been published this week. Despite the Downturn is the various-artists collection (housed at archive.org) that I put together in response to an article written by Megan McArdle in the May 2010 issue of The Atlantic (“The Freeloaders,” at theatlantic.com) about the current [...]
When field recordings mix with noise, the result yields questions — is the noise the result of the recording, a matter of transformation, or is the noise a separate component, a matter of contrast? In the case of Paulo Chagas‘s Centopeia, which adds a third component, that of chamber instrumentation, the answers might may take [...]
About Disquiet.com’s “Listen?”: This is Disquiet.com’s streaming-audio service. The interface immediately below will stream in sequence a series of tracks that I commissioned from the musicians. What they all have in common is that each is a response to — a non-verbal answer to — an article from the May 2010 issue of The Atlantic. [...]