The wayback machine that is the Other Minds catalog at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org) has set its dial to May 14, 1977, when a concert at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, celebrated the 60th birthday of composer Lou Harrison, who would have turned 90 this year (MP3). The recording was originally broadcast [...]
The event xxxxx23 held at Limehouse Town Hall, London, on March 23, 2006, brought together various speakers on esoteric subjects broadly associated with “the rich consequences of expanded software.” Among them was Swedish sound artist Leif Elggren, who opened his 20-minute performance with a simple but strange pronouncement: “This basic sound material was recorded in [...]
Hmm, this sounds unfortunate. The latest release by the trenchant netlabel Noise Jihad (noisejihad.dk/netlabel) includes the following, less than promising statement: “These are the surviving recordings from the Noisejihad Festival, which marked some sort of end or break for Noisejihad.” Let’s hope it’s just a respite. In addition to a video of MaaletHelligerMidlet666 playing live [...]
The Other Minds organization has posted a second evening’s worth of MP3s from its December 2005 “New Music Seance,” seven tracks in all collecting mostly solo piano work, performed by Sarah Cahill and composed by Ruth Crawford Seeger, Alvin Curran, Kyle Gann and others. One highlight is a gentle, lulling piece by Terry Riley, “The [...]
In late December 2005, as the holiday season was getting under way, the Other Minds organization in San Francisco hosted a New Music Seance. The concert summoned up the spirits of long gone composers by pairing their works with more contemporary material. Sarah Cahill, the respected pianist, opened with Dane Rudhyar’s cluster-chorded “Third Pentagram” (1926, [...]
People rush the stage at a Matmos concert. They just wait until the concert is over. Then they head studiously to the front of the room, as they did after the duo’s set on Wednesday, June 21, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to see what, exactly, had occurred. Matmos has developed a [...]
The Echo de Pensees Sound Series, an ongoing series of events and installations at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, hosted two performances on Friday, June 23, that provided an interesting study in contrasts. Aaron Ximm’s “Guantanamo Express,” which came first, is a tape work. He dimmed the lights, lit two lamps [...]
What does it take to invent your own instrument? How has pervasive computing technology altered the way musicians compose? When you design your own instrument, does that change how you write music?
These are just some of the questions we’ll be discussing when I moderate a panel (one that should bleed into an ensemble performance) this [...]
When abstract music is performed live in an art gallery, the art can’t help but lend form to what is heard. When the trio French Radio played at the Luggage Store Gallery on November 10, the art didn’t just lend form; it provided commentary. The current exhibit at the gallery is all text-based: words scrawled [...]
My review of a performance of Philip Glass‘ opera La Belle et la Bete, by the Oakland Opera Theater, is just up at classicstoday.com. For La Belle et a la Bete, Glass, who’s done as much to bring synthesizers into the world of classical music as any other living composer, achieved a different kind of [...]