The Galapagos performance space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last night played host to two hours of installations, video shorts and music performances. I caught the L Line out from Manhattan with a friend. We went for the music (Bit Shifter on software-controlled Game Boys; Jamie Allen, pictured below, on a home-made noise-box), but happily stayed for […]
Quote of the Week: “It is hard to leave the subject of Minimalism without mention of Count Basie, master of the art of leaving out.” That’s Bernard Holland in his entry as part of a roundup, last week, of the New York Times’ classical-music critics’ take on recorded milestones in minimalism (nytimes.com). The list of […]
Quote of the Week: Osamu Tezuka is the subject of a retrospective exhibit, Marvel of Manga, at the Asia Art Museum (asianart.org) in San Francisco. (Full disclosure: I am employed by one of the exhibit’s corporate sponsors.) Of a Beethoven manga by Tezuka, titled Ludwig B, the exhibit notes state, “Possibly because of […]
Many new readers have come through thanks to the Buddha Machine article in Rob Walker’s “Consumed” column in this past Sunday’s magazine section of the New York Times (nytimes.com).
Here’s a quick rundown of Buddha-related material on Disquiet.com: (1) A December 2005 interview with Christiaan Virant of the duo FM3, who made the Buddha Machine (”I’m […]
Quote of the Week: The eminent comics artist Ben Katchor writes and draws a single-page comic for the last page of each issue of the magazine Metropolis. The July/August 2007 entry, “Peabald’s Field Guide to the Air-Conditioners of North America,” imagines a couple whose hunt is disturbed by birds: “Damn those cerulean warblers! I can’t […]
Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) One promising aspect of the new service iJigg, where musicians are invited to post their tracks and await rating by their eager public, is that among its 21 initial genres is “beats/instrumentals,” right up there with folk and hip-hop (ijigg.com). … (2) That sound-art disguised as a cheap […]
“What makes the thing play?” That’s the simple question asked by Charles Amirkhanian early in the first of two hours of interviews he and Bill Schechner did with player-piano enthusiasts back in the early 1970s. They’re now available as a pair of MP3s from archive.org (MP3, MP3). A few sentences into the answer from a […]
The uploads to the Other Minds collection at the archive.org has a stellar new item. Well, new to the archive. Back in early 1973, Other Minds guru Charles Amirkhanian visited the Oakland Museum and recorded a walking tour of its exhibition, “When Music Was Mechanical,” curated by Gretchen Schneider. The hour-plus recording (MP3) features numerous […]
I was invited by newmusicbox.org to write an overview of “laptop music.” My intial instinct was that this would be less an introduction than a requiem. Isn’t the phrase “laptop music” sorta “over”? Well, as it turns out, no. Quite the contrary, more people are making more music with more software than ever on laptops. […]
Mark Rushton has posted a half-hour live recording of him with bassist Jon Harnish. Between Rushton’s overdubbed intros and outros, he and Harnish, playing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, perform two pieces: one a rush of rustling wind chimes and gauzy effects, the other a grungily processed drone with more telltale evidence of Harnish’s bass (MP3). […]