aesthetics
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Resonant Thoughts: Christopher Alexander’s “The Nature of Order” (2002)
“What is order? We know that everything in the world around us is covered by an immense orderliness. We experience order every time we take a walk. The grass, the sky, the leaves on the trees, the flowing water in the river, the windows in the houses along the street–all of it is immensely orderly. Continue reading
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On The Ambiguous Appeal Of The Musically Worn
As I produce a track I’m constantly looking for ways alter its sounds so that they’re damaged and unclear, and some of my favorite effects processing plug-ins are those that destroy or roughen what is pristine and soft to make it more textured and fascinating to listen to. An analogy of the radio dial comes Continue reading
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On Pacing, Saying Something, And Music
I’ve been thinking about pacing. In running, pacing is a matter of speed: take the wrong pace–a pace that’s too fast or too slow–and you’ll soon be in trouble. Good pacing is a matter of listening to your energy level and adjusting accordingly. As you warm up, your pace can increase considerably, as if in Continue reading
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David Hockney On Perspective
I’ve been reading more Lawrence Weschler lately, this time his engaging study of the painter David Hockney, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (University of California Press, 2009). I first encountered Hockney’s work in the mid-1990s at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibit was a show of Hockney’s English Continue reading
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Richard Powers On Divisions In Music
“Music doesn’t mean things. It is things.” – Richard Powers In a recent interview on Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon, novelist Richard Powers spoke about his new music-saturated novel, Orfeo. Powers makes a probing–and somewhat problematic–observation about the source of what he calls “the real division in music.” What he’s referring to, I think, Continue reading
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On The Musicality Of Architecture
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” – Martin Mull Walking across a recently re-designed section of Times Square last week I had a pleasant sensation that the design was working on me, on us pedestrians, guiding us along certain paths and shaping our sense of space. Sometime last year I read a New Continue reading
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Notes On What Makes A Piece Of Music Work: Boards Of Canada’s “Tomorrow’s Harvest”
“So it was becoming clear to me that texture deserved as great a place as process in the theory of how music involves people and draws you into deep identification, total participation, past the logical contradictions of separation from the Other.” — Charles Keil, Music Grooves, p. 169 *** As I listened to Boards Of Continue reading
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Notes On A Talk By Robert Fripp
On a whim I searched Spotify for music by Robert Fripp but found none. Instead there was a recording of him speaking to a crowd about various musical things. And it was good. “Music never goes away” he said, “It’s always available, but we are not always available to music.” And when pushed to say Continue reading
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On Negative Achievement: The XX Perform In New York
“The creation of a style often begins with a negative achievement.” – Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, Good Prose If you are a fan of musical minimalisms, atmospheric indie rock, and electronic beats, there was a lot to like about the xx’s poised and elegantly understated performance at Hammerstein Ballroom last week. The young Mercury Continue reading
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On The Rhythms Of Soccer And The Game Of Music
At home my wife and I watch a prodigious amount of English Premiere League soccer–that’s real football to the rest of the non-North American world. In earlier posts on this blog I have written about watching soccer and golf for their ambient sound potentials–the roar of the soccer fans, or the hushed-reverent tones of the Continue reading
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