Japan isn’t just the home to some of the world’s best turntables. It is also, by no small coincidence, home to some of the best turntablists. The great website turntableradio.com has been celebrating this natural national direct-drive resource with a series of live performances, most recently a massive jam session featuring a who’s who of [...]
Class distinctions and cultural assumptions aside, classical music isn’t foreign to hip-hop. Violins are a common emotional cue for producers, and enough hip-hop hits — from Coolio to Nas to the Beastie Boys, just to name a few — have sampled classical music to register it a common if not everyday occurrence. Hip-hop is often [...]
Part 3/3: These are — to my ears, eyes, and fingers — the 10 best iPhone/iPod Touch apps of 2009 for sound and music manipulation.
This is a new category for Disquiet.com, and likely a short-lived one. Not because the iPod (or, for that matter, the iPhone or iPod Touch, the latter of which is currently [...]
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 process. [...]
The past month’s visits to Disquiet.com were the most heavily dominated by MP3s in recent memory, eight of the top 10 being entries in the site’s Disquiet Downstream series of freely downloadable music.
The two exceptions were images, (1) one of Ron Arad’s artwork “Concrete Stereo” (1983), from an exhibit at MOMA in Manhattan, and [...]
Closing the month’s Disquiet Downstream entries on a particularly high note: Raz Mesinai’s technologically mediated chamber music. Titled “String Quartet for Four Turntables,” it’s a shifting, elegiac piece that plays with the textures and tenets of classical music. The instrumentation is the standard: two violins, one viola, one cello. But if the individual parts appear [...]
The relative popularity of the top 10 posts of May 2009 was fairly close, but it’s fascinating (at least to me) that tied for the most popular was (1) a list of recent Twitter posts from my twitter.com/disquiet account. They’re collected automatically each Saturday afternoon, and I set up the system purely for the sake [...]