New Yorker critic and The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross visits the John Cage exhibit currently at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and writes, in part:
The great oddity of twentieth-century art history is that while Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, and other radical postwar painters are almost universally hailed as masters, their works drawing huge crowds in museums, Cage is still often treated as a freak or a charlatan. The distinction makes no intellectual sense, but there it is.
The conclusion that Ross draws has its parallel in the argument that is the substance of David Stubbs‘s recent book, Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen. The photo of Cage, above, circa 1958, by Aram Avakian, is taken from the free downloadable brochure for the exhibit (PDF). Cage had his own battery of defenses, and one such axiomatic comment opens the PDF: “If this word, music, is sacred ”¦ we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.”
Full Ross post: newyorker.com. More on the exhibit at the museum’s website: macba.cat.
There’s nothing that unusual about synth washes that sound like scores to late-20th-century Italian science-fiction films, all artificial winds and overly cool, domesticated breezes. Nor is there anything special about rough, urban soundscapes that emphasize water-drop textures and other little noises that suggest the audio equivalent of an old, damaged film strip. What is unusual is when those two sounds are combined, as they are on the Kurland album, recently released by the Latvian act Astrowind on the Resting Bell netlabel. There are 15 tracks on the album, and given the ever expanding zone of freely legally downloadable music, a little guidance might be in order. To wit, the recommendation goes to the track “Buran,” which grounds the wavering synthesized tones in a dank midtemo slurry of blipping, dripping effects (
The 
“Exhibit K” in the ongoing Exhibits A-Z project by WHY?Arcka is the Philly producer’s most stripped-down recording yet. Titles to his tracks usually hint at their source material, which generally consists of lesser-known moments by r&b greats — the latest, “Kalimba Medley”‹ (Sly),” is therefore probably derived from some split second of a Sly and the Family Stone song (