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 […]
I’ve uploaded five more of the backdated interviews, from 2002 through 2003: Canadian composer Benoît Charest, on his score for the film Les Triplettes de Belleville; composer Elise Kermani, on revisiting “retro” multimedia performance and remixing Vivaldi; London-based Thorsten Sideboard, online-music mogul; Japan’s premiere turntablist, DJ Krush, on his seventh full-length album, The Message at […]
News on Quiet, Minimal and Otherwise Atmospheric Music on the Big and Small Screens: (1) It isn’t yet listed in imdb.com, but according to Movies That Rock (Condé Nast magazine supplement this winter), Gustavo Santaolalla (Babel, The Motorcycle Diaries) is scoring I Come with the Rain by Scent of Green Papaya director Anh Hung Tran. […]
Everything about No Country for Old Men, the new Joel and Ethan Coen movie, is, in a word, stark: the landscape, the atmosphere, the violence, the faces, the performances. It’s not that the film has shed any vestige of filigree; it’s that there was no filigree to begin with.
Key among the movie’s spartan pleasures […]
News on Quiet, Minimal and Otherwise Atmospheric Music on the Big and Small Screens: (1) As of my first viewing, I can’t say if there’s enough of a proper score in No Country for Old Men to fill a 7″ single, but what there is is evocative, as blissfully mundane and forebodingly arid as the […]
The title to Douglas Gordon’s exhibit currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now — could mistakenly give the impression that it’s a single compression, a montage, of elements of various moving-image works by various creators from the past five years.
In […]
John Cage loved his toy pianos for good reason. Those instruments, with their simple construction and even simpler range, invite chance with every plink — sour notes, rusty mechanics, and so on. And the one-man toy-piano band known as Twink (born Mike Langlie) milks those industrial-design eccentricities for all their textural value.
Just check out his […]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Art by Orb/KLF member James Cauty was removed by municipal workers in Brighton, England, when it was mistaken for graffiti (nytimes.com, ink-d.co.uk). … (2) The Guardian on noise abatement and urban soundscapes: “Visual aesthetics are a major part of the planning system with strong guidelines determining what is acceptable […]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) An illustrator has taken the concept behind Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” and applied it to his daily self-portraits (snooks.livejournal.com). … (2) The Wild Beast is the name of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) new music pavilion. It was designed by the Los Angeles-based […]