Featured Posts:
Submission Guidelines for Music (& Apps) •
DeLillo's Manhattan Ear •
Lurie's Acoustemology •
Bieber, Inception, and the Sudden Popularity of Glacial Sound •
Key Topics: #audio-games #copyleft #comics
No one told me Red was a comedy. I caught the play-about-Mark-Rothko yesterday on Broadway, the matinee performance. It’s a two-person show. There’s Rothko, performed with late-1950s urbanite-Manhattan sturm’n’drang self-hating self-aggrandizing ebullience by the irrepressible Alfred Molina, and there is his studio assistant, Ken, played by Eddie Redmayne with just the right amount of ingenue [...]
Excising a few lines from a longer poem can be as invasive an act as displaying a detail of a larger piece of visual art. Free of (though not entirely free from) its original context, the segment can take on an abstraction, a peculiarity, that is entirely unintended by its author. With that warning, and [...]
The more I think about George Prochnik‘s new book In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (out this coming week from Doubleday), the more he comes across as an abolitionist, rather than as a seeker. He’s running from noise, not making his way to silence. His related blog, inpursuitofsilence.com, is [...]
Seven of the top-10-most read entries of the past month were from the Downstream department, collecting legally free downloads of recommended music. These included (1) broken folk music by Scott Tuma (cover art pictured here), (2) remixed African recordings by Madlib, (3) a brief excursion into atmospherics by King Crimson, (4) slowed-down pygmy recordings by [...]
I’m about half of the way through the book In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise by George Prochnik. Due out in early April from Doubleday, it’s a series of essays that collect related anecdotes, trivia, historical references, interview segments, and personal reflections tied to particular themes, such as the [...]
New Yorker critic and The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross visits the John Cage exhibit currently at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and writes, in part: The great oddity of twentieth-century art history is that while Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, and other radical postwar painters are almost universally hailed as masters, their works drawing [...]
Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere: ● On the Making of Brian Eno/Peter Chilvers iPhone/Touch Apps Bloom & Trope (usoproject.blogspot.com): Interview with Peter Chilvers on his development, with Brian Eno, of the iPhone apps Trope and Bloom, and the app Air: “It was something of a two way process,” he says of the development [...]