The masterminds behind the remix contest focused on famed Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen (best known as the backbeat of legend Fela’s band) want us to download the 15 constituent parts of the single “Secret Agent,” the title track off his new album on World Circuit label. And no doubt the promise inherent in those tracks [...]
No better way to close the week than with some 8-bit renditions of hits by suddenly deceased, long troubled pop legend Michael Jackson, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 50. There’s a handful of such covers floating around, and no doubt more will surface in the coming weeks and months. 8bit versions [...]
The group Soft Cell is best remembered for its languorous, metronomic pop, a precursor not only to minimal techno, but more broadly to the giddily presumptuous nonchalance that infuses much of the Internet’s amateur musicianship. There was always something in the musical rudimentaries of Soft Cell songs that suggested a flouting of traditional pop categories [...]
The sound designer and musician Kent Sparling may make some of the best music about which I have the opportunity to read the least often. Albums like Route Canal Diary and Under New Manna, their punny titles aside, are some of the richest contemporary explorations of electro-environmental ambience, close in spirit to Brian Eno’s Thursday [...]
An excerpt of a recent journal entry by David Byrne:
I’d read in a new book about recorded sound (Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner) that [Thomas] Edison arranged demonstrations of his “perfected” wax cylinder recorders at various theaters around the continent. He’d have a known singer sing along with [...]
Junior Kimbrough remixed by Grassy Knoll? Now, that’s my idea of a sonic Reese’s Pieces, my mix of musical chocolate and peanut butter — two wonderful things that are even better in combination. Kimbrough was one of the great late-generation bluesmen (hard to believe he passed on over a decade ago), a major presence on [...]
Thinking of radio, Durán Vázquez seems to have thought of the uninvited — the sounds, news, noise, and thoughts that enter our lives. For a 2008 work for the RadiaLX radio festival, he took as his source, film and news souces, including Zeitgeist by Peter Joseph (2007), Imprint by Takashi Miike (2006), Le Monde Selon [...]