Thomas Brett
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Art About Music: Ed Ruscha’s “Thick Blocks Of Musical Fudge” (1976), “The Music From the Balconies” (1984), “Silence With Wrinkles” (2016), “Note” (2018)
“Thick Blocks of Musical Fudge” (1976) “The Music from the Balconies” (1984) “Silence with Wrinkles” (2016) “Note” (2018) Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Burial, “Night Bus” (2006). The music of producer Burial (William Bevan) is a class in ambiance, aura, texture, and pacing. As famous for his anonymity as for using the bare bones audio editor Sound Forge, Burial makes emotionally heavy music. “Night Bus” achieves the feat of compressing a film’s worth of mood into two minutes.… Continue reading
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Database: Malibu On New Music And Reinventing Codes
“Unless you invent a completely different way to make music, you’re not making new music. The only way that music today can be new is just in the way that late eighties and nineties babies reinvent[ed] all these pop codes that we grew up with and that we make our own.” Malibu database Continue reading
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Keywords: Music’s Lacunae
Consider the unfilled spaces of musical practice, its lacunae. Like the speech balloon emoji, which symbolizes someone speaking, music’s lacunae evoke the not-yet-said, its three dots proxies for in-progress, anticipation and mystery, and the spaces in which the musician/composer/producer works something out through sound, represents the ineffable,make sense out of style and style out of… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Peter Schjeldahl On Outsider Artists And Critics
“Every good artist is an outsider artist, in a way that counts; and every good critic is an outsider critic, in a way that counts. Good art and good criticism are not ‘practices’—that horrible word, so prevalent in art babble lately. Practices are professional specialties. Associated with art, the word assumes settled social agreements on… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: David Hockney On Layering Time
“My main argument was that a photograph could not be looked at for a long time. Have you noticed that? You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter. I first noticed this with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively: you can’t.… Continue reading
