November 2011
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On Bjork’s Biophilia: Music, Technology And Enchantment
There are a lot of ways to characterize the music of the Icelandic singer/composer/instrumentalist/imagineer Bjork, and certainly the labels “adventurously creative”, “experimental”, and “electronic” come to mind. But these labels inevitably come up short since it’s hard to categorize Bjork’s sonic output; moreover, artistically she achieves the ideal of being an idiom unto herself. If… Continue reading
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On Sonic Persuasion: The Music Of Oneohtrix Point Never
Over the past few months I heard about Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin)’s electronic music in at least two disparate places–in Simon Reynolds’ fine book Retromania and in a recent article by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker–so I decided to buy his most recent recording Replica and check it out. Compelling music sometimes… Continue reading
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On Musical Taste: Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love
Musical taste is a funny thing in that we usually know what we like, but we can’t always say why. Instead, we often delineate the boundaries of our tastes by knowing what we don’t like. So, for instance, we might insist that we never listen to country songs, or that Romantic classical music is an… Continue reading
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On Imitation, Oral Tradition And Pleasure: Nicki Minaj’s Super Bass Travels
“That self-organizing living force is what we’re having to ride. What we’re doing with the web is making a very large-scale global organism that in a few decades or so we will be able to identify as an organism in every sense of the word.” – Kevin Kelly on the Technium One of the most… Continue reading
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From The Archives: Chords And Beats
Five years ago I wrote a series of pieces for piano and electronic sounds (percussion, bells, sub bass, pads, etc.) called Chords And Beats. The “chords” were improvised on piano, the “beats” and other sounds played on the keyboard to trigger non-piano sounds. Sometimes the chords came first, sometimes the beats came first. Whatever the… Continue reading
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On The Soundscapes Of Le Quattro Volte
Le Quattro Volte (2011) is a riveting, faux documentary-style meditation on death, (re)birth, the relationship between humans and the natural world, sound and time. Directed by Michelangelo Frammartino, the film follows the repetitive daily life of an elderly goat herder as he goes about his work in a small rural Italian town. The man doesn’t… Continue reading
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On Damon Albarn’s DRC Music Collaboration
It wasn’t all that long ago that indigenous, folk, popular, and art musics from Africa, Asia, South America, the South Pacific, the Caribbean–heck from most anywhere outside of North America and Western Europe–were hard to come by, relegated to the “international” or “world music” bins at your local record store. Then, in the late 1980s,… Continue reading
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