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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 22, 2008 / bookmark ]
New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis on Boarding Gate, the new film from director Olivier Assayas (Demonlover, Clean, Paris Je T’aime):
I was again struck by how he uses music to amplify reality, almost as if he were inviting you to listen to the songs playing in other people’s heads. His use of Brian Eno […]
[ March 2, 2008 / bookmark ]
Recent Items from the World of Sound Art: Interview with early sound-art figure William Furlong, founder with Michael Archer of the publication Audio Arts, by Ilari Valbonesi (at ecopolis.org): “The tape was also an economic form of production and distribution.” … Interview with Adam Nash, whose sound work has been exhibited within the online simulation […]
[ March 1, 2008 / bookmark ]
On the influence of electronic toys on today’s musicians:
After all, arguably, electronic toys are the midwives and nursemaids of gamers.
Electronic toys were what we played with before we even knew what video games were. In their stilted, stuttering voices they taught us to count, to spell, to recognize shapes. They sat on our bedside tables […]
[ February 23, 2008 / bookmark ]
Some of the most widely publicized news from this past week’s Game Developers Conference (gdconf.com), held in San Francisco at the Moscone Center from February 18 - 22, centered on a sixth-sense device, from Emotiv (emotiv.com), that uses brain waves to trigger game play. Still, the original five senses were in full effect, sound key […]
[ February 9, 2008 / bookmark ]
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu on the absence of music in his recent film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days:
“I don’t create emotion with music or closeups, and I don’t make the rhythm from the editing.”
The film has no score, save for a song that plays during the end credits (npr.org).
[ February 5, 2008 / bookmark ]
In the world of 8bit music there are retro tunes and there are reanimated tunes.
Retro tunes are newly recorded pop melodies that sound like they’d been programmed toward the end of the Carter administration to provide background music to simple video games.
Reanimated tunes are punk-damaged efforts in noisy hindsight. Numerous musicians today infuse the rudimentary […]
[ February 3, 2008 / bookmark ]
What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:
(1) White Noise, Yoga Heat: The CD showed up in the mail late last year, and on first appearance it seemed like a prank: a collection of four lengthy, meditative drones attributed to Lou Reed, of the Velvet Underground, and released on a small record label. […]
[ January 19, 2008 / bookmark ]
From composer Edward Artemiev’s notebook as he worked on the score to director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, released in 1972:
The characters of the film hear (or are trying to hear) sounds either similar to terrestrial ones, or sounds which are kinds of little cells or islands remaining from the Earth which they manage to identify […]