Month: July 2017

• A rare interview with Harold Budd, one of my favorite musicians.

“I had this job, a very nice appearance at Oxford University. Halfway through this performance – large audience, really nice lovely people, as English people are – I decided, ‘This is boring the shit out of me. I cannot stand this another second.’ Somehow I got through it without letting on that I hated being here, and I never did it again, that was the ending. It wasn’t enough. I was going onto something else. I didn’t know what it was, still don’t.”

• An article on microdosing nature through “forest bathing” to reduce stress.

“In the woods, the sounds of our wandering were deafening. Each step we took brought an orchestra to life.”

• An article on the pianist Craig Taborn.

“His final form of preparation was listening to his iPod in the rental car he drove to Cambridge. It contains about 45,000 tracks, and Taborn prefers to listen to it on shuffle. ‘Moving from Xenakis to some metal thing creates a space where you don’t know what you’re listening to anymore,’ he told me in his dressing room. ‘You’re making inferences and connections, and that’s really what composition is. So I don’t worry what I’m listening to. I just like the experience, the change in moods, the feeling of going from a 20-minute composed track to a 30-second blast of metal. Even the discontinuity creates its own logic.’”