Cut to the chase, the clock’s ticking on 2007 as I type this. That previous sentence is intended to provide an alibi: making note of the circumstances under which a “best of” list is produced gives me an out down the road, when I might change my mind. In any case, this year’s “best of” […]
Looking for something seasonal yet electronically mediated to fill your holiday playlist? Sort of like a yule log, but musical? Try the new compilation, A Candle’s Golden Glow, from the Dark Winter netlabel (darkwinter.com). Its 15 tracks are ambient, droning,
and entirely season-appropriate. Much of it would fit in well with Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night, the […]
Nothing like waiting for a nearly 40-megabyte MP3 to download, only to find little of interest inside. Earlier this year, a podcast popped up in the Red Bull Music Academy that included interviews with three producers: Martin Ware, Rob Bowman and, foremost, the great beatmaker and turntablist DJ Premier. But Premier’s segment was brief, and […]
“Confused but enjoyed it.” That’s how sound artist and musician Janek Schaefer characterizes the comments often left in the guest book at galleries where he shows/performs his work.
Sound Space was the name given a sound-art symposium that occurred earlier this year in England, and the webpage of the event (sound-space.info) contains audio documentation of much […]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) One of the most formidable figures in 20th-century music has died. Karlheinz Stockkhausen, born August 22, 1928, passed away on December 5, 2007 (washingtonpost.com, washingtonpost.com, therestisnoise.com, nytimes.com, guardian.co.uk, guardian.co.uk). The obituary from the news service bloomberg.com seems particularly unfriendly. It poses the following as a kind of question, though […]
From African Feedback (Errant Bodies), the new book by Alessandro Bosetti:
For example, there are old men who have guns, weapons that they killed animals with. Then you put the sound of these guns into the computer and they can talk about the animals they killed.
That’s the recorded statement from an unidentified man in the African […]
The sound artist Christian Marclay, the creator of such landmark works as “Video Quartet” and “Guitar Drag,” doesn’t listen to much music. He’s a big Marcel Duchamp fan — not a big surprise for one of the most prominent utilizers of “readymades,” like found records and record covers. He’s not a philosopher. He thinks nostalgia […]
There are at least seven “laptop orchestras” around the world, according to the list up at Tom Whitewell’s excellent and obsessive music-tech website, musicthing.blogspot.com. Among them is the Tokyo Laptop Orchestra, which has an international membership and which frequently opts to work with percussionists and singers.
There are eight MP3s of the group’s performances between 2002 […]
The Other Minds foundation continues to upload to archive.org, the Internet Archive, an incredible recorded history of contemporary music, most recent among the uploads an interview, along with musical examples, with Bill Fontana, one of the original sound artists. The sounds in the pieces he discusses were sourced from, among other natural and man-made resources, […]
I visited the “Listening Post” installation one last time before it closed on November 1 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. This was the eighth or thereabouts occasion I’d sat in a darkened room and watched the massive grid of tiny screens swirl a slurry of data pulled from the […]