News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Art by Orb/KLF member James Cauty was removed by municipal workers in Brighton, England, when it was mistaken for graffiti (nytimes.com, ink-d.co.uk). … (2) The Guardian on noise abatement and urban soundscapes: “Visual aesthetics are a major part of the planning system with strong guidelines determining what is acceptable […]
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 […]
If you didn’t snag a flyer on your way into the New Work space at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you’d think a plane had crashed through the wall, and somehow the external shell of the building had healed itself.
The artist Felix Schramm, working with a set of constraints imposed by SFMOMA, has […]
Quote of the Week: “They do not need to be correct because they are symbols; they stand for the essence of music, not specific notes. Their unconventionality also reminds me of the graphic scores of experimental music; they are their kitschy cousins.” That’s Christian Marclay, as quoted on the back of his new box-as-book collection, […]
In the photograph up at the website of the Four Directional Doubt netlabel (fourdirectionaldoubt.free.fr), the three men look more like keyboard players than turntablists. To many ears, they may sound like something other than turntablists as well. But turntablists they are: Jonas Olesen, ErikM and, by far the best-known, Christian Marclay — caught playing together […]
Another good Red Bull Academy Lecture, this one from ace turntablist and producer Cut Chemist, aka Lucas Macfadden, Jurassic 5 cohort and DJ Shadow collaborator. He talks about the difficulty (well, more the expense) in sampling rock stars, the downside of having a sample-laden track become a hit, potentially mythical court-ordered sound-file analysis, the influence […]
A 30-minute segment of a piece that Janek Schaefer performed one month ago, on January 20, as part of the Sound:Space sonic arts symposium in England, has been uploaded as the latest entry in the Gene Pool Podcast series of the Digital Media Centre. It achieves its meta state through simple means. A man’s voice […]
Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) One promising aspect of the new service iJigg, where musicians are invited to post their tracks and await rating by their eager public, is that among its 21 initial genres is “beats/instrumentals,” right up there with folk and hip-hop (ijigg.com). … (2) That sound-art disguised as a cheap […]
Call it post-rap, call it i-hop (or instrumental hip-hop). At just 45 seconds, “A Stroll Down Sutter Ave” (MP3) is less a track than a teaser, but this collaboration between DJs Wally and Willie Ross, off their recent Mrs Millers House album, is tasty as can be, a groovy collage trinket of turntablist beats, found […]
The Other Minds organization announced an upcoming performance in San Francisco of composer Daniel Bernard Roumain’s A Civil Rights Reader, in which Roumain is to perform his work on electric violin along with the Del Sol String Quartet and turntablist DJ Scientific. Scientific’s role is to drop in beats and sampled recordings by four civil-rights […]