Thomas Brett
-
On Sounds And Humor
It took all of three minutes, but the guy on the subway was making all kinds sounds with his voice and as I listened to him I couldn’t stop giggling. Verbal Ace is his name and he’s a vocal artist, a human beatboxer, a singer, a sound effects machine, and mimic extraordinaire. Armed with just… Continue reading
-
On Four Tet’s Good Taste
“It’s very rare for me to use instruments or synths or anything like that.” – Kieran Hebden I have long felt that the electronic musician Four Tet (aka Kieran Hebden) has good taste. He makes what critics once labelled “folktronica” music, a term that probably came about in an effort to describe how Hebden deftly… Continue reading
-
On Musical Texts: T.M. Wolf’s “Sound”
T.M. Wolf’s Sound is a novel that merges writerly form and narrative content to approximate the ambiguities and instabilities of how we think and talk–not in books but in the real world. Content-wise, Sound‘s story is simple enough: Cincy Stiles, a disaffected philosophy graduate school drop out, returns to his hometown on the Jersey shore… Continue reading
-
Peter Coviello On Musical Talk That Does Something
sympathetic resonance –a harmonic phenomenon wherein a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness (Wikipedia). In his article “The Talk That Does Not Do Nothing” in the July/August 2012 issue of The Believer (The Music Issue), Peter Coviello writes about fighting with a friend over the… Continue reading
-
On Capturing Thoughts In Formation: Notes On Listening
It would be a blog post about listening. *** It would be about the relationship between what we listen to and what we create as musicians. About the tension between wanting to listen to many (new) musics briefly and listening to one (older, familiar) music repeatedly. Is one approach “better” than the other? Or–as it’s… Continue reading
-
On Leanne Shapton’s “Swimming Studies”
“Swimming is my disembodied youth, yet I am rapidly becoming the embodied present.” — Swimming Studies, (187) Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton is one of the more poetically precise and evocative non-fiction books I’ve read in a while. It’s a meditative memoir consisting of a series of autobiographical vignettes, illustrations, and photographs that explore the author’s experience… Continue reading
-
On The Sounds Of Finance
I had been meaning to make a field recording of an ATM for a while, so last week, mid-transaction and realizing that I had forgotten yet again to hit record on my phone/recorder, I set a reminder for this week. When this week arrived I was ready to go! On this recording you hear me… Continue reading
-
On Our Din And Roar II: How Noise Is Not Always Bad And Quiet Not Always Good
On my last blog post, I may have inadvertently given readers the impression that I wear earplugs wherever I go, so intent I am in the pursuit of some kind of urban quiet. (One worried family member even weighed in: “When you wear the earplugs, do you miss any cautionary sounds–like the sound of an… Continue reading
-
On Our Din And Roar: Thinking About Loud Sounds
I’ve been a wearer of earplugs for about fifteen years now. The reason? I work regularly in a loud orchestra pit and live in a loud city and ironically enough, I have never really liked loud sounds. (Which is perversely a big part of the reason I became a percussionist: either to become a victim… Continue reading
-
On Philosophy’s Western Bias: Thinking Through “Non-Western” Music
The concept of “non-Western” music has long been both a cornerstone and a sticky issue for the field of ethnomusicology. Formed in the mid-1950s, the Society For Ethnomusicology was from its inception interested in the study of musical traditions from outside the Western classical music canon. Early on, its approach was musicological–studying music as an… Continue reading
You must be logged in to post a comment.