It was billed as “Philip Glass — In Conversation with Robert Osserman,” but as they say in the late-night TV commercials, “Wait, that’s not all!”
Glass was in San Francisco this past weekend with his ensemble for live performances on three consecutive nights of what’s come to be known as the “Qatsi Trilogy”: the three movies [...]
The sixth issue of e/i magazine is out. In it I interview dub figure Raz Mesinai (aka Badawi and one half of Sub Dub) about working with downtown Manhattan out-jazz elite, branching into film music and facing the self-fulfilling prophecy of paying musical tribute to Franz Kafka.
I also review the following albums: Alarm Will Sound’s [...]
Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) Apparently this (link) is a half-hour video of the duo FM3 (Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian) playing chess with their Buddha Machines at the De Appel museum of contemporary art in Amsterdam, November 2005 (via chaile.org). The sound quality isn’t great, but eventually people shush and the music [...]
Quick Links and News: (1) Perhaps inevitably, a podcast of silence, for John Cage’s MP3 player (silentpodcast.com). … (2) Among Time magazine’s list of the best inventions of 2005: the Turtle Dance, a little plastic toy that, among other things, bleeps out a bit of Mozart and, more of interest, “can remember and mimic a [...]
Quick Links and News: (1) The MacArthur (so-called “genius”) grants were awarded this past week, among the recipients UC San Diego history professor Emily Thompson, “an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on the often-overlooked subject of sound and fills an important gap in contemporary American history, reaching into domains as diverse as urban design and [...]
Quick Links and News: (1) At this year’s Fringe Festival, the Scottish Ballet presented Acrid Avid Jam, revisiting the 2001 work set to music by Aphex Twin (link). The company returned to Aphex’s music this year in a new work, The Pump Room, choreographed by Scottish Ballet director Ashley Page; the piece was a remix [...]
Quick Links and News: (1) The University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum will exhibit AudioFiles, with work by Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, Christian Marclay and Stephen Vitiello from September 9 through October 21 (usfcam.usf.edu). … (2) A woodpecker has been tentatively removed from the extinction list, thanks to analysis of field recordings taken in Arkansas (link, [...]
Quick Links and News: (1) The Hirshhorn Museum has posted a website to complement its current Visual Music exhibit (link), with soundclips from Olivier Messiaen and Alexander Scriabin, and images representing abstract painting, color organs, film, light shows and installation art. … (2) Work by Bainbridge Bishop is not included in the Visual Music exhibit, [...]
Quick Links: (1) Instructions (link) on how to download “any multimedia file from the web to your hard drive” (via downloadsquad.com). … (2) A guitar-playing robot (link) and (3) a drum machine for the PlayStation Portable (link), both via engadget.com. … (4) Make your own microphones (link), via makezine.com.
… Good Reads: (1) The July issue [...]
This is a household where DVDs are rented, on occasion, based not on the director, or actors, but the score’s composer. Usually it’s just to see the music in action, as it were — to witness, say, how Cliff Martinez’s contribution to the lesser thriller Wicker Park functioned (it abetted the stylized visuals, but certainly [...]