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[ March 30, 2008 / bookmark ]
A selection of recent freely viewable videos of note:
Spoken Word: Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee interviewed (vimeo.com, via createdigitalmusic.com). … Minimal techno figure Robert Henke (aka Monolake) presentation (video.google.com, via createdigitalmusic.com). … Laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits lecture on his process (xlr8r.com). … Soundtrack composer Tyler Bates on the film Doomsday (soundtrack.net). … Alex Ross, author […]
[ March 30, 2008 / bookmark ]
Quick News, Links, Bits, Reads: The avant-garde rises to the surface in Internet sales of classical music, reports Justin Davidson, guest-blogging for Alex Ross at therestisnoise.com. He’s discussing the charts at emusic.com:
No. 2 is Gavin Bryars‘ The Sinking of the Titanic, a minimalist portrayal of slow-motion calamity that caused one Floridian subscriber’s spouse to ask: […]
[ March 11, 2008 / bookmark ]
The turntable crew called the X-ecutioners were the Mills Brothers of hip-hop and the Harlem Globetrotters of hip-hop, all wrapped up in one multi-LP ensemble of intensely calisthenic musicality. Key among them was member Rob Swift, who has surfaced with a new group effort, a trio named Ill Insanity, which teams him with two other […]
[ March 4, 2008 / bookmark ]
With its sing-songy beats and layers of simple sampled percussion, “Easily Distracted” by DJ Mayonnaise (aka Chris Greer), off his Still Alive collection from last year, is a perfect example of the space where instrumental hip-hop and bedroom electronica meet up and make beautiful lullabyes together. The tone is all early Aphex Twin, thanks to […]
[ February 23, 2008 / bookmark ]
From an interview with Autechre’s Rob Brown at pitchforkmedia.com on the occasion of the new album Quaristice:
But there is a kind of yearning for a big musical movement to blow everything else away, and I guess r&b is kind of holding everything back in that regard. The only developments you get are like Timbaland might […]
[ January 22, 2008 / bookmark ]
The seven-song EP Senses Overloaded, from the instrumental hip-hop DJ team of Lamont and 2tall, opens with the exotic: a slinky track that uses as its base a romantic bit of koto, the string instrument of Asian antiquity. The cut is titled “Perpetual Patterns” (MP3) and it’s one of the few here to include a […]
[ January 6, 2008 / bookmark ]
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, […]
[ December 29, 2007 / bookmark ]
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” […]
[ December 19, 2007 / bookmark ]
Nothing like waiting for a nearly 40-megabyte MP3 to download, only to find little of interest inside. Earlier this year, a podcast popped up in the Red Bull Music Academy that included interviews with three producers: Martin Ware, Rob Bowman and, foremost, the great beatmaker and turntablist DJ Premier. But Premier’s segment was brief, and […]
[ December 17, 2007 / bookmark ]
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 […]