December 2011
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On Less Is More: El Fog’s Rebuilding Vibes
I don’t quickly absorb music that’s new to me. As a listener I’m inherently suspicious of what I’ve not yet come to know (and this includes my own works in progress!) It takes me a while to get–let alone trust–a music. Because of my tendencies, there’s not a ton of sound on my iPhone. In… Continue reading
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On The Trickle Down Of Electronic Dance Music Aesthetics II: Maroon 5’s “Move Like Jagger”
Almost everywhere you listen in mainstream American popular music today you hear bands coming to terms with electronic dance music’s most thumping contribution to 21st-century sonic entertainment: the “four-on-the-floor” bass drum pulse. This is the pulse that drove (and still drives) disco, electro, techno and house, as well as all kinds of derivatives of these… Continue reading
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On Evanescent Materials In Solid Containers: The Flaming Lips’ “7 Skies H3”
The Flaming Lips recently released a 24 hour-long song called “7 Skies H3.” I’m actually listening to a stream of it right now on a website (http://flaminglipstwentyfourhoursong.com/) as I write these words. I like this music. So far–30 minutes in–it’s been a lot of long feedbacking tones on guitars, washes of cymbals, and vocal wails… Continue reading
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I’m Yours: On Jason Mraz’s Reggae And Cultural Tourism
In my experience the best time to write about something is the moment you notice that you’ve been noticing it. Take for example those ever proliferating rickshaw/bicycle taxis in that congregate outside Broadway theaters in Times Square awaiting tourists actually crazy enough pay money for a ride in them. Predator-like, one way the rickshaw drivers… Continue reading
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Stewie Griffin On Music Theory
There are as many reasons to be a fan of some parts of Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy as there are reasons to be annoyed by it. For me, the best reason to watch is to take in Stewie Griffin’s worldly wisdom. But who knew he knows something about music too? In one clip available on… Continue reading
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On The Nature Of Blogs
Metaphorically speaking, a blog is a garden a laboratory a pulpit a node in a network a diary a moving vehicle a multimedia artwork an x-ray an idealization a set of roots a mixing board a sympathetic vibration a perishable good a consciousness a web of desires a memory for tomorrow a map of a… Continue reading
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On “Going Classical”: Popular Music Played With Orchestras
It seems as if there always comes a time in the life of a rock band or pop artist to team up with a symphony orchestra. Usually this involves re-arranging songs for strings, winds, and percussion. Move over electric guitar, bass and drums: we’re going classical. Recently I saw Peter Gabriel perform with an orchestra… Continue reading
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On Minimalism and Aural Illusions
One of the enduring contributions of the so-called American “minimalist” composers–particularly Steve Reich and Philip Glass–to global music culture was to re-introduce shape-shifting, metamorphosing aural illusions to our listening experience through intense repetition, polyrhythm and additive rhythms. These rhythmic devices are not new in music–you can certainly hear them in some African and Indonesian musics–but they… Continue reading
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On Practicing Wonder: David Abram’s Becoming Animal
“This whole terrain is talking to our animal body; our actions are the steady reply.” – David Abram David Abram is a phenomenologist and ecologist who is interested in “the qualitative language of direct experience” (289). And since his 1996 book The Spell Of The Sensuous, he’s been on a mission to get his readers… Continue reading
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On Matthew Herbert’s One Pig
Several years ago I read an interview with the English experimental electronic musician Matthew Herbert in Tape Op magazine and I remember him going on about the importance of his audio samples. Herbert didn’t want to use just any old sound sample. He wanted to use sounds that had some meaning for him–sounds that had… Continue reading
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