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 […]
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, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Generative music-maker Kenneth Kirschner is the subject of a new interview up at tokafi.com: “[Q:] Your music is electronically processed to a large extent. Why then, are you still interested in the piano as a basis? [A:] I think piano is often for me the clearest and most direct […]
Want a crash course in Japanese turntablism? Set your dial to turntableradio.com, which is hosting an excellent hour-and-a-half-long mix of material performed by a variety of Japan-based turntable musicians. The file is whittled down from a six-hour mini-fest hosted in the Kami-Kitazawa, Tokyo, studio of Human Rhythm Group (humanrhythm.jp). The work here is minimalist, with […]
The Crate Kings website (cratekings.com) has been holding hip-hop Beat Battles online. If you’ve been following the often whimsical Iron Chef of Music competition series held over at kracfive.com, this is similar, but the Beat Battles participants have a more firmly shared understanding of the parameters for the end product. And where the Iron Chef […]
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 […]
The song “Tryplmeade Gorsmatch” comes close to the end of the self-titled album by Bumps, released a few months back earlier on Stones Throw. That’s a record label properly known best for hip-hop, especially of the producer-heavy, soul-inflected, headphone-pleasing vibe that usually gets filed under the phrase “old school.”
Well, the scholars who comprise Bumps are […]
Quote of the Week: “They do not need to be correct because they are symbols; they stand for the essence of music, not specific notes. Their unconventionality also reminds me of the graphic scores of experimental music; they are their kitschy cousins.” That’s Christian Marclay, as quoted on the back of his new box-as-book collection, […]
Esteemed and prolific hip-hop producer Madlib’s string of releases continues with the full-length collection Beat Konducta in India, a percussion-heavy mash of Bollywood score snippets. Think of it as rap exotica. To promote the album, its label, Stones Throw, has posted for free download a piece titled “Masala” — at eight seconds over a minute, […]