The latest release on the netlabel called term, a subsidiary of Taylor Deupree’s 12k label, is a live performance recorded back in November of last year, featuring three eminent electronicists: Sawako (computer and voice), Richard Chartier (computer), and Shinjiro Yamaguchi (mixing board, feedback loops, sampling). The concert was part of the festival Atlantic Waves, held [...]
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, [...]
Re-uploaded another batch of past “essays/reports” I wrote, plus one interview I did, dating back to 1994. Here they are, in roughly chronological order:
“Good Neighbors” (1994): How rock music and classical music face similar creative obstacles — and how so-called “crossover” projects aim for a mirage of a middle ground. What, for example, does [...]
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 [...]
“Bob Dylan is by no means a key participant in the history of electronic music. But as rock figures go, none may be more closely affiliated with the consequences of electricity.”
That’s how a new essay I’ve published at newmusicbox.org begins. The essay went up today.
In the piece, “Juiced In It: Bob Dylan and the Consequences [...]
Each year as Christmas approaches, strangers gather after dark in an ever-growing number of cities, lift high their old boomboxes and MP3 players, battery-powered radios and other sound sources, and participate in composer Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night. There are four different audio-track components to the work (available for download at unsilentnight.com), all seasonally appropriate [...]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) One of the most formidable figures in 20th-century music has died. Karlheinz Stockkhausen, born August 22, 1928, passed away on December 5, 2007 (washingtonpost.com, washingtonpost.com, therestisnoise.com, nytimes.com, guardian.co.uk, guardian.co.uk). The obituary from the news service bloomberg.com seems particularly unfriendly. It poses the following as a kind of question, though [...]
At exactly 6:02 pm on Saturday, November 17, the ghosts entered the White Box gallery. This is a few weeks back, when Kabir Carter performed at White Box, a basement exhibit space deep in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.
The ghosts were sounds, and those sounds were of the room but not presently evident in the room. The [...]
There are at least seven “laptop orchestras” around the world, according to the list up at Tom Whitewell’s excellent and obsessive music-tech website, musicthing.blogspot.com. Among them is the Tokyo Laptop Orchestra, which has an international membership and which frequently opts to work with percussionists and singers.
There are eight MP3s of the group’s performances between 2002 [...]
Last month, Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) pointed from his website, scannerdot.com, to a live set available for free download. His performance is, in fact, one of seven by different artists packed into a massive (nearly 100-megabyte) collection recorded as part of the Störung Festival 2.0, held in May of this year (download). The festival’s website, [...]