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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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” […]
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 on Quiet, Minimal and Otherwise Atmospheric Music on the Big and Small Screens: (1) It isn’t yet listed in imdb.com, but according to Movies That Rock (Condé Nast magazine supplement this winter), Gustavo Santaolalla (Babel, The Motorcycle Diaries) is scoring I Come with the Rain by Scent of Green Papaya director Anh Hung Tran. […]
Everything about No Country for Old Men, the new Joel and Ethan Coen movie, is, in a word, stark: the landscape, the atmosphere, the violence, the faces, the performances. It’s not that the film has shed any vestige of filigree; it’s that there was no filigree to begin with.
Key among the movie’s spartan pleasures […]
News on Quiet, Minimal and Otherwise Atmospheric Music on the Big and Small Screens: (1) As of my first viewing, I can’t say if there’s enough of a proper score in No Country for Old Men to fill a 7″ single, but what there is is evocative, as blissfully mundane and forebodingly arid as the […]
The title to Douglas Gordon’s exhibit currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now — could mistakenly give the impression that it’s a single compression, a montage, of elements of various moving-image works by various creators from the past five years.
In […]
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 […]