criticism
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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 Small Things And Big Pleasures: David Guetta’s “Titanium”
I get excited by small things. The other day I bought a mechanical pencil to highlight books with as I read. While holding the pencil that evening and underlining, I was struck by the pleasure this $2.19 purchase had brought. It’s precise, light, and helps do a job, with the added grace of having an Continue reading
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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
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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
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From Geoff Dyer’s Criticism To Keith Jarrett’s Pianism
In his recent collection of essays, Otherwise Known As The Human Condition, novelist and critic Geoff Dyer writes beautifully and incisively about photography in a way that I wish more writers would (or could) write about music. Here is Dyer writing on Idris Khan’s work (pictured below) that digitally blends hundreds of photographs into a single composite image: “Each art Continue reading
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