For four sweaty years, beginning in the summer of 1999, I wrote about music from New Orleans. That sounds like a dream nexus — though probably less of one when your area of interest is abstract electronic music, as is mine. New Orleans is not exactly a center of such plugged-in activity. It is, however, […]
Quick Links and News: (1) The Metropolitan Museum of Art has an exhibit up through the end of the year titled The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (metmuseum.org), which provides a good parallel to the fascination of early sound-recording experimenters, such as Thomas Watson, in technology as a window into the paranormal. If you’re […]
“Swamp Road” (MP3) is an elemental track from two musical evangelists: keyboardist John Medeski (Medeski Martin and Wood), an ambassador for jazz in the world of jam bands, and DJ Logic (Eye and I, Yohimbe Brothers), an ambassador for turntablism in the world outside of hip-hop. It’s a fine slice of groove-based turntable-organ funk, with […]
Quick Links: (1) CommonTunes.org is “a community directory of freely available music”; among its most popular tags (akin to genres) are electronic and laptop. … (2) Two video-game composers, Tommy Tallarico (Advent Rising, Tony Hawk Pro Skater) and Jack Wall (Jade Empire, Splinter Cell), are going on tour (link). … (3) A student at the […]
Still (aka Hsi-Chang Lin) is the turntablist for Dalek, who is perhaps most concisely described as the rare hip-hop MC on Ipecac, the record label run by noise-meister Mike Patton (Fantomas, Faith No More, Mr. Bungle). Remains is an EP-length (35-minute) solo album that Still is about to release on the Public Guilt label. And […]
If digital dub is your thing, you likely already possess tracks by a handful of the musicians featured on Grow, a 15-song compilation of material drawn from the Agriculture Records catalog, featured currently on the home page of smart-music.net, which, like the Disquiet Downstream, focuses on “free & legal” downloadable music. If digital dub isn’t […]
The vast depths of archive.org’s holdings are difficult to come to grips with. Even putting the public-domain text and video material aside, there seems to be enough music by the Grateful Dead alone to play for a good year straight, and there’s more like the Dead in that corridor of the archive than anything else […]
Who can take a Grateful Dead raga, sprinkle it with a Steely Dan jam, cover it with a Snoop Dogg soundbite, and a miracle or two? DJ Jazzy Jeff can — yes, he of Fresh Prince fame. And he does just that — and much more — on two free hour-long MP3 files of live […]
If the 17-minute A-side of Colin Andrew Sheffield and James Eck Rippie’s Variations (Elevator Bath, 2003) seems to shimmer, credit that scintillation at least in part to the source material: this lengthy ambient piece is apparently built from the sounds of a harp, once the mood-setting instrument of courts and kings. Likewise, the vinyl LP’s […]
By no means an “electronic” album, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s forthcoming Medicated Music (Ropeadope Records), due out April 23, features the New Orleans-based horn ensemble with a host of guests, including, on two tracks, DJ Logic. Logic (born Jason Kibler) may be the most in-demand session DJ around, especially in the jazz- and jam-band […]